Fact and Fiction

 I celebrated my 65th birthday today, on　 . This marks my official retirement.

I looked into what happened in the year I was born, 1961, and learned that it was the year Anne Napkin—the first modern sanitary pad in Japan—was put on the market. My mother, who passed away last year on June 30th, told me during her lifetime that the product was named "Anne" because Anne Frank mentioned her first menstruation in The Diary of a Young Girl.

Although I haven't read the diary in its entirety, a passage from it was featured in our textbooks back then. I was deeply moved by her fresh, vivid sensitivity, and it became one of the sparks that inspired me to aim to become a novelist. I have written several pieces since then, but I am still far from being able to call myself a true novelist. In the old days, being a writer was seen as an incredibly daunting task—endlessly filling out manuscript grids—and many suffered from lung diseases because of it. When I was in my third year of junior high school, my homeroom teacher asked me what I wanted to be in the future. Since I had always been the top student in my class, they asked if I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. I remember answering "a novelist" without a single moment of hesitation.

It is truly regrettable that her immense talent was lost so early in life. The same goes for Nietzsche; to have things end the way they did for him at the age of 45—right when he was entering his prime—makes me believe that his greatest masterpiece was yet to come.

It is up to those of us who are left behind to carry on that legacy.

The truth is, I am not very fond of pure fiction. While it is obvious that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is based on real historical events, I wonder if the characters themselves are entirely fabricated. If they are complete inventions, it is nothing short of magnificent, but I suspect he modeled them after his own family and the people around him. That seems much more likely.