Why did he do it lads?
>be a Japanese salaryman in the 90s
>worked in offices for around two decades
>get sick of the rat race
>resign and live in a rooming house with poor dayworkers
>earn minimal pay in construction and other odd-jobs
>only private space is a bunkbed in a room with other men
>write a brief memoir of your time there as a lark and send it to a major competition pseudonymously
>it wins
>refuse to show up to the award ceremony
>inform the judging panel that you have since left that rooming house and now live on the streets
I've not come across a book quite like this.
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Wouldn't two decades of office work result in some savings? Why a rooming house?
I don't think he explains why, thought it has been a while since I read it. As I recall, he dropped out once and lived in a similar position, then tried to return to office work but could not handle it so decided to drop out for good when he was in his 40s.
Japs make a fetish out of existential detachment and dropping out, though they couldn't explain to you any deep philosophical or psychological bases for it, as it's primarily aesthetic like all Jap shit.
All these cultural obsessions and fetishised archetypes come about when a society dimly senses an abstract web of social forces that they aren't able to articulate directly, and so all that social energy instead gets condensed into particular concrete images. That's why they're interesting and that's they have their mysterious power.
Dismissing them is like looking at reformist, industrialising Victorians being obsessed with morbidity, ruins, and, crazed loner aristocrats and saying 'unless you can justify this with a profound-sounding philosopheme then it's all meaningless aesthetics', instead of realising that there's a subterranean historical consciousness being expressed there. Aesthetics expresses the historical residue that existential truisms can't capture.
very well said, anon
And yet this whole post justifies the aesthetic with sociological, philosophical, and psychological 'insights'. You're indulging in the jargon and intellectual framework you claim is unnecessary or unwarranted. You don't even believe what you're trying to convey; you believe in the necessity of complex western intellectual interpretations over basic aesthetic sociological kabuki perhaps more than most (esp. seeing how puffed up you seem by your little rant.)
Before you get worked up because someone disagreed with you on the internet, take the time to discern the object and the subject of the other fellow's post.
That's one way to say you're part of the weeaboo neet avant garde. Very futuristic.
Hyperreal shit
Why are you spamming Youtube links? This isn't IQfy.
Reading this book caused me a small episode of psychosis. Living is so very hard for most and for some feeling is so very full and deep that it is almost intolerable.
The common thread between many of the day laborers described by Oyama in the book seems to be shame. An overpowering and suffocating shame that is either a result of them knowingly choosing to give up on life by walking the path they currently do or is in itself the reason they live as they do unable to suffer under it's weight.
It's been 4 or so months since I read the book but the laborer that goes off to kill himself in the woods and asks for all of his belongings to be burned as he cannot, even in death, bear the thought of someone discovering his end and looking upon the final result of his shame really ruined me. All of these people were broken by something and that psychic split made it so that they could not function. I think a lot of people are like that, they are either just better at coping or are not so sensitive to feeling.
>I think a lot of people are like that, they are either just better at coping or are not so sensitive to feeling.
I agree
reminds me of how I cut off friends due to shame of not having achieved some "thing" or "milestone"
damn, did the same thing
very good post
>I've not come across a book quite like this.
I'd assume this is similar, I've not read it but my dad was raving about it
>The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Not similar at all. The guy in OP’s book doesn’t necessarily leave or reject society, he just chooses to live among the derelicts in abject poverty. It’s more Bukowskian sans the boozing and whoring.
I've read that book also, and it's very different if only for the fact it's in first-person. Also, pretty based to have a dad who appreciates books like that.
In life we live quite a bit by what we should do, easily, comfortably, only at times considering whether it’s what we want. Whether or not in the end it was truly better, his choice to choose a life is brave and inspiring,