His smile was ceaselessly bright, and any feeling that I could quit and run off had evaporated completely.

Chapter 05.
A Humbert Humbert for
the Twenty-First Century

Part One

“Take fireflies, for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don’t even last a week.

“Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful. Ah! Fireflies are the best!

"In contrast, please consider the human species this time. You’ll find an extremely complex society before you.

“I believe Freud stated something like ‘Humans are creatures with broken instincts.’ Whenever I deal with any kind of frustration, rage, or sadness in life, I can’t help but to remember those words.

“Modern concepts such as ‘love’ and ‘romance’ have made man, this creature with broken instincts, bury his original nature. It’s all a lie, of course. To cover up the deception, mankind has to create still more entirely new concepts. This is why the world becomes increasingly complex with each new day.

“However, that complexity cannot hide the various contradictions born from our broken instincts. They create hopelessly fundamental oppositions: words and instinct, ideas and the physical self, reason and sexual desire. These opposing concepts are like two snakes biting at each other’s tails. The two snakes constantly are locked in a fierce battle for superiority, so they turn and turn, causing us more and more pain.

“Do you understand? Do you get what I’m explaining? What? You don’t understand the meaning at all? Well, that’s okay.

“What I’m trying to say—”

I threw my pillow at Yamazaki. “Shut up! Die!”

Yamazaki, seated on top of the kotatsu, bent back his upper body to avoid the pillow and quietly continued his speech. “Because of our broken instincts, we are in pain. We continue in pain because our instincts have been twisted by reason. So, what are we supposed to do? Should we abandon knowledge? Throw away reason? In any event, that wouldn’t be possible. For better or worse, we ate the fruit of knowledge long, long ago. This was written in that religious pamphlet ‘Awaken!’ that I got from that woman earlier.”

“What?! What the hell are you thinking, waking me up at two o’clock in the morning, starting an unreasonably obscure speech and drinking in my room?”