Pain, Pain, Go Away

Afterword

There are a lot of holes to fall into around here. That was the way I, at least, came to see the world.

Small holes, big holes, shallow holes, deep holes, easily-seen holes, hard-to-see holes, holes no one had yet fallen in, holes many had fallen in.

Truly, a wide variety. Thinking about each and every one of them made me too uneasy to take a single step.

When I was young, I liked stories that let me forget about the holes. And not just I, but everyone seemed to like writing stories that described a safe world, where all the holes had covers put over them. We might call them “sterilized stories.” n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

Of course, the protagonists don’t have only good things happening to them, and in fact experience an above-average amount of suffering and hardship.

But ultimately, it all helps them to mature, and give them a reassuring feeling that “people can accept anything and live.” That’s the way of those stories.

I think that we don’t wish to induce sadness in our fiction as well.

But one day, I suddenly realized I was in a dark hole. I fell in most irrationally, without any prior warning. It was an extremely small and hard-to-see hole, so I couldn’t hope for others’ help.

Yet luckily, the hole was not deep enough that I couldn’t crawl out, so over a long period of time, I made it out by my own power.

Once back on the surface, basking in the warm sun and clean wind again, I thought. No matter how careful people are, they never know when they’ll run into a pitfall. That’s the way of our world.

And perhaps the next hole I fall into could be a deeper one. Deep enough that I’d never make it back here again. What, in that case, am I to do?

Following that, I stopped earnestly reading those “stories that plug up the holes” I described previously. Instead, I came to prefer stories that portrayed “people getting along happily in holes.” Because I thought, I want to hear the story of the person who, in a dark, deep, narrow, cold hole, can smile without it being a bluff. To me, there might not be anything more consoling than that.

“Pain, Pain, Go Away” was the story of people who fell into a hole they could never again escape. Yet I wrote it intending it not to be purely a gloomy story, but a cheerful one too.

It really may not appear that way, but it is. It is.

- Sugaru Miaki