What a wonderful pet you have on your iPad.

With the advent of e-books and e-book readers (right now I am an avid user of the kindle reader on iPad), my childhood habit of being turned into a bookworm without warning has returned with a vengeance. I am reading several books at the same time, flipping between them as my whim seems to dictate.

The list right right now are: “Cycles of time” by Roger Penrse, “Linked” by Albert-laszio Barabasi, “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin (reading for a third time!) and “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv. Last week, I finished “the Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley for the third or Fourth time.

Although we have an abundance of texts scattered all over the cyberspace now, looking back on my own experience, books remain the significant and perhaps sole life-changer. The duration, concentration, and the sheer synthesis involved in the experience of book reading seems to be an indispensable ingredient of a dramatic change in one’s world views.

For example, “Free to choose” by Milton Friedman that I read when I was about 20 changed my idea about competition and market. I confess probably I am still under the influence of this book. An Albert Einstein biography that I came across at the tender age of 10 (I read the Japanese version as I did not speak English at all at that time) inspired me so much, that I found myself wanting to be a scientist and revolutionize the world conceptually.

Thus, although I do find the timely arrivals of latest news and comments on the web now an essential part of my reading experience (powered, nowadays, by Flipboard), I do keep my insatiable hunger for more books, from all genres.

It is my view that you can look around the world from the vantage height in proportion to all the books that you have read in your life, with all the books stuck on top of each other. Thus, reading a book is an act of building that famous Newtonian giant. You can nurture your own giant by reading books. What a wonderful pet you have on your iPad.

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

(Isaac Newton in his letter to his Robert Hooke on February 5, 1676)

The Flipboard user experience.

I have been using the Flipboard on iPad for a week. Yes, I am VERY late to arrive on this. I am like that sometimes, failing to register an important technical trend. I am still unable to appreciate the usefulness of Facebook, for example, although I have been a registered user for over a year now.

I must say that I find Flipboard extraordinarily interesting and useful. It has changed the way I read texts of interest. I mainly browse through the news and tech sections. The way relevant sources are curated and brought to my fingertips provides an interesting insight into how the meshed up web will evolve in the future.

I read somewhere that “every millisecond counts” was the hidden ethos among engineers at Google. When you search something, it is important to return the results as quickly as possible. It is not computation, it is also about the user experience. If you extend that logic to modes of sensorimotor interaction on the web in general, you begin to see why and how an application like Flipboard is a substantial innovation.

Even if you could have arrived at more or less a similar list of information sources through traditional search engines, the ebb and flow of the pages curated through Flipboard provides a completely different user experience.

Traditional ways of “gathering” information on the web begin to pale and fade in the face of Flipboard. It is interesting to witness the latest innovations happening on the web in the direction of enriching user experiences in general. A company which does not regard user experience as an integral part of its business is prone to fail in the coming era. A few names come across one’s mind.

The cloud has finally arrived, and it is here to stay.

I used to have the notion that natural language processing was lousy and unreliable by default. And it was not simply a Luddite sentiment. With the sort of new technologies like Siri, however, the times they are-a-changin’. The artificial processing of natural language seems to have finally arrived. And it is here to stay.

Although from the strictly theoretical point of view the juries are still out, it appears that the cloud is definitely a crucial element in the remarkable innovations. The computations are distributed, and the resources are on the web. A self-contained system on the client device would not have succeeded so much. One element is the computational capacity, but the very nature of the network is also a defining factor.

And when you think about it, language has always been about the cloud. When we humans comprehend a word or a sentence, a whole network of knowledge and memories is invoked. The pattern of activation is likely to follow the famous power law. In such a distributed environment, there is no strict central control. The scattered and haphazard nature of processing has always been the defining factor of the conversations that we carry every day. And the chain of causality does not end with an individual brain. Words have been passed on from people to people, over the years, mediated by spoken words, written records, on the air, and through accidental encounters.

In the technology world the cloud has just arrived. Among our brains, the cloud has always been here. The cloud has finally arrived, and it is here to stay.

To build or not to build, that is the question.

I have made several visits to the tsunami devastated areas in Tohoku. The damages have been tremendous and heartbreaking. Now that the sorrow of lost lives and memories start to sink deep into the psyche, a hard question emerges.

To build or not to build, that is the question.

Historical records show that the area has been hit repeatedly by massive tsunamis in the past. Measures have been taken, including towering concrete walls to fend off the waves. While these precautions have helped to diminish and delay the effect of tsunami in some places, the size of the massive waves caused by the earthquake on 11th March meant many such walls were destroyed and/or overcome, with the water coming into the land with a brutal force.

The hardest choice to make now is whether to go ahead with rebuilding in the tsunami devastated areas. If it were not for the risk of tsunami, the seaside areas provide the most beautiful and comfortable living opportunities, with a convenient access to the sea for those people involved in fishery and related industries. On the other hand, the probabilities of future tsunami damages are understandably very real in people’s minds.

To complicate matters, no coastal area in Japan can be said to be safe from the threats of tsunami. Although the Tohoku area might stand out because of recent events, the possibility of a tsunami attack exist, both in theory and practice, throughout the land of Japan. Thus, making the choice of building and not building poses a hard question not only for people in Tohoku, but also for the rest of us all over Japan. It is a case where one’s philosophy of life is tested, on top of the probability estimates by seismology experts.

Facebook and twitter.

I still cannot find a useful angle to come to terms with Facebook. I am not a heavy user. I should say I am perhaps not an active user at all, although certainly registered. Given the reported popularity of the service, it is a strange enigma, as I tend to embrace new web services.

It is not the problem of Facebook specifically. It is a common defect, in my view, of Social Network Services. Perhaps the problem is not for everyone. It is a problem just for me, and the likes of me.

There is too much cognitive load compared to the benefits. I don’t so much like to see my friends’ candid photos or their casual observations. Surely these things are nice, but there are other interesting matters in this world too.

The thing is, I much prefer the brutal and swift way that people (or rather, issues) are connected in twitter. There, you don’t have to submit or respond to a friend request. The connections and comments are made without the embarrassing diplomacy and niceties. It is all about memes, not personal relationships per se.

Thus, I find myself in the domain of minorities, while the rest of the world is apparently head over heals on Facebook.

Meeting with Mr. Clive Williams Nicol.

On a day when a cold rain started to fall, I met with the famed writer Clive Williams Nicol. The severe weather was fitting, as Mr. Nicol is a man who has traveled in wilderness, one trip taking him to the North Pole.

Mr. Nicol is one of these rare people who can combine the fire of passion with the coolness of intelligence. He has written extensively and deeply about nature. It is all about experience, and you need to reflect on your own mind in order to write well in this genre.

Listening to Mr. Nicol is like hearking to an old oak tree. You feel the flow of time embodied in the shape of a man, and you have the desire to attain that maturity when you are old. That becomes your inspired ambition.


With Mr. Clive Williams Nicol

The absolute nature of separation.

There is nothing more interesting than the enigma of time. The future becomes the present, and the present turns into the past. Once the transformation is over, there is no going back.

In psychology, people talk about the specious moment, and there is a fundamental asymmetry to that. The duration of the present is usually described in milliseconds, but that is strangely insufficient. The essence of transformation would not be captured in milliseconds. We need other ways to describe the specious moment.

The key question here is to deal with the transformation in an explicit manner. The transformation is happening all the time, even as I write these sentences.

This morning I find myself in Washington DC. I just finished my breakfast. Some moments ago, I was waiting for the breakfast to arrive, and there is no going back to that recent past. The absolute nature of separation is one of the fundamental aspects of our experience, and yet we have not successfully described it.

The no-show of iPhone 5 was only a minor disappointment compared to the absence of the wizard.

This morning, I woke up to find a world without iPhone 5.

The revision to iPhone 4S was a good and sensible one, although my enthusiasm at this moment is not strong enough to make me rush to update my iPhone 4 straight away. The delivery by Tim Cook was impressive. The Apple stock will surely recover in due time. But there was something deeper and disturbing last night (JST).

The wizard is gone. There would be no more “one more thing”. Our hearts would not be throbbing in anticipation of a world-changing gadget. There would be no more Steve Jobs on stage, and the world would forever be a place minus that particular enchantment.

When we were kids, we looked up at our parents as if they were wizards. Nothing was impossible for dad. Mom would give me the most incredible present on my birthday. As we grow up, these expectations waned. We inevitably realized that mom and dad were ordinary human beings, with their own limits and shortcomings. We found ourselves independent and grownup when there were no more “wizard elements” in our parents.

It seemed that we never grew out of Steve Jobs. Steve was always a wizard, smiling rather mischievously, coming back to stage, with the now immortal “one more thing”. These days are gone forever, much to our regret.

Apple fans care about the health of Steve Jobs as dearly as their own greying parents. Long live Steve! Probably it is a good idea for Steve to stay away from the chores of running a company. Somehow, we probably took it for granted for too long that Steve would be wizard for us forever. Perhaps it is time were on our own, however strange it might feel.

Yesterday, observing the stage without the former CEO, we realized that it was now time for the growing pains. The no-show of iPhone 5 was only a minor disappointment compared to the absence of the wizard.

Loosening order, new realities

It is difficult to characterize a particular era, especially when one is living in it. The last couple of decades have been marked by many unexpected events (beautifully argued as "black swans" by Taleb) and newly emerging value systems. To use a musical metaphor, we are listening to many exotic and new pieces, but they are so numerous now that we have almost forgotten that they were once novel. Many things we take for granted today were rarities and oddities only a few decades ago. How fast the human brain adapts to a changing environment! And we keep marching.

I was studying in the United Kingdom in the middle of the 1990s. I remember quite vividly when a BBC anchorman remarked to an IT guy speaking live from the West Coast via satellite that "you do not have to wear a tie and a jacket when you are a millionaire". This idea, that a businessperson with power and wealth does not necessarily have to dress "seriously", is such a cliche nowadays that it is almost not worth mentioning it. We are so accustomed to millionaires and billionaires dressed in T-shirts and jeans, looking like complete nerds (in many cases they actually are in a big way). Indeed, there is no apparent "correlation" between the way one dresses and one's degree of affluence any more. Class is gone, as far as outward looks are concerned. Nowadays a restaurant imposing a strict dress code looks almost moron. "Smart casual" is perhaps the only acceptable dress code, apart from, perhaps, no dress code at all.

Once, attending a conference in Googleplex, I noticed that there was a rather nice looking young fellow. It was none other than Mr. Larry Page himself. Mr. Page must have been worth billions of dollars then, but his outlook did not tell. There were a few admiring girls around Mr. Page, but that could happen to any nice fellow about his age. Judging from how he looked, he could have been a graduate student. Actually, Mr. Page was probably a graduate student in his spirit. Remaining a graduate student in spirit is probably the name of the game and the strength of a company like Google.

There have been several defining moments in the history of information technology. When Jack Kilby conceived the idea to implement circuits on a silicon chip, he was laying down the formula for a whole industry. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin hit upon the idea to analyze the web as a graph structure, they were effectively bootstrapping themselves to super-successful entrepreneurship. When Mark Zuckerberg was dumped by his girlfriend, his unique method of revenge, putting a pair of girl's faces on a webpage asking the visitors to click which was hotter, opened the door to the most successful social network service, the Facebook.

The general trend of the information revolution, combined with the procession of globalization, where people from various cultural backgrounds are brought together to interact, have led to the loosening of the old orders, and emergence of new ones. The evolution/revolution happens in unexpected and haphazard steps, challenging assumptions, upsetting notions.
When put in a state of chaos, we seek order and meanings. A religion, an ideology, a value system, a theory, an empirical evidence, an illusion. We are always in search of life-saving ideas. We are badly in need of one now, in this remarkable era of transitions and redefinitions. Ideas come, ideas go. And some stick and remain, through a mysterious process of evolution of memes.

(Fragment from a book I am writing, codenamed "Malmesbury")

This is entropy!

The novelist Yoshinori Shimizu once wrote a masterpiece titled "Don't talk about entropy on your date". This humorous short story (written in Japanese) depicts how a science student, once he starts talking about entropy, gets carried away and forgets to take care of his lover, only to be dumped. Serves him right, right?

Don't talk about entropy on your date. This is a very valuable piece of advice for certain kinds of people, including myself. The subject of entropy is so fascinating, deep, and engrossing that it is really a danger to start talking about it.

Oh, you don't know what entropy is? Well, in a nutshell, it is a measure of the...wait, don't get me started. I will never stop.
Mr. Masanobu Koike, a long-time editor for the great literary critic Hideo Kobayashi, told me this fascinating story. One evening, Kobayashi drank with his artist friend in Tokyo. On their way back to Kamakura, Kobayashi started talking about entropy.

Kobayashi was a man of incredibly broad and deep learning. He once discussed at length the philosophy of Henri Bergson, in a famous unfinished work titled "Reflections".

They talked all the way on the train, but the artist friend did not understand what entropy was. Getting off the train at Kamakura station, they kept talking, walking along the road that runs parallel to the precincts of Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine.

As the artist friend did not get it, Kobayashi became all the more excited. While explaining entropy, Kobayashi got closer and closer to the artist friend, with the result that the artist was cornered towards the shallow stream along the road, until finally, he lost balance and dropped into the water.

Splash! The artist lay on his back, quite surprised and bewildered, wet all over. He looked up at Kobayashi, who triumphantly said, "now you see? This is entropy!"

We don't know how and if the artist got even.

I sometimes visit the beautiful old residence of Hideo Kobayashi on the mountain. Getting of the train at Kamakura station, and passing the aforementioned road, I tend to remember this great story of a passionate intellect. With entropy even Hideo Kobayashi can be carried away.

Perhaps fireworks are mirrors.

The great Fireworks Festival of Nagaoka started, I learned on my last visit, after the city was burned to ashes during the Second World War. Thus the beauty and splendor are dedicated to the souls of the dead. Most of the onlookers would probably be unaware of the significance of the airy show. That's OK. The fireworks work for our aesthetics even in sheer ignorance.

We were standing on the snow, and were looking at the fireworks above, an annual winter display of the magnificent technology. Although on a smaller scale compared to the summer one, it was still grand. There was an eerie quality of the beautiful, lived and experienced, enshrouded by the cold.

Takumi was standing next to me. He has been my sidekick ever since I met him when I was teaching at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Takumi is a terror to many girls. He is known as "P. Ueda". The prefix comes from the fact that the subject of his oil painting is mainly his private part. He claims that his thing is shaped like the Jaguar emblem.

We were standing on the white field, far from the cheering crowd. All of a sudden, Takumi started to tell me about his mother. She left home when he was six years old, never to return. The next day an aunt came, and made him the first milk coffee of his life. He has not seen his mother ever since.

It is not clear, to this day, what made Takumi tell me the story of the tragedy of his life on that evening, in the show, shivering from cold, looking up at the great display of the fireworks. Maybe it had something to do with the souls. Perhaps fireworks are mirrors.

Cannot go to school.

I recently met a few pupils who had extraordinary characters. And they can't go to school. Chatting with them, looking at their faces, they appear quite normal, lively, and thoughtful. And yet they cannot go to school. Something within them apparently tells them that going to school is not such a good idea. And I must say that, as far as I could trust my intuition facing them, that it was a sensible choice.

In a country where "home schooling" is an exotic idea, if a boy or a girl boycotts school attendance, parents panic and teachers reproach. Because there is such a narrow range of what could be considered to be "normal behavior", once a pupil steps out of the fairway there's a tremendous pressure to go back.

Talking with headmasters and chairman of the educational board, I sometimes feel that the disease is in the system, rather than in the pupils who boycott it. The air of conformity is so thick that it is suffocating, rather than life saving. If you can go to school, that's fine. Myself, I could go to school everyday and rather liked the experience. But if a child finds it difficult to go to school, that's fine and normal, too. The disease is not in the child. The disease is in the society that enforces conformity, where "home schooling" is still an exotic and "illegal" idea, after all these years.

First bitterness.

As can be observed from my earlier blog entry (Red bag was the object of desire), I was fond of coffee flavor as a child. Coffee, however, always meant a sweet drink. I never took black coffee. Actually, properly ground and brewed coffee was not so ubiquitous when I was a child.

It was therefore only at the age of 11 that I had a proper black coffee. I was with my mother's sister in a bar, in the southern city of Kokura. My aunt was a woman of the world. She had a wide knowledge of the pleasant and the adorable. She was a gateway into the grown-up world, at least in the eyes of the child.

On that day, for some reason I did not quite comprehend, the bar was open in the afternoon, and I was there, in the ambience of sophistication and posh. My aunt offered me to buy anything I wanted. I looked at the menu, and was quick to see that the most expensive item in the soft drinks was the "blue mountain" coffee.

"Blue mountain coffee, if you please", I said timidly. My aunt looked at me with her big round eyes. "You're a child, and yet you crave for the best", she said. "All right then, a blue mountain coffee. But listen, since you're taking it, no sugar or milk. You've got to drink it black. OK?"

I said fine. My heart was pounding wild as I took my very first taste of the black coffee. To this day, I remember quite vividly the sensation of the black liquid going into my system. It was the encounter with my life's first bitterness. And I didn't regret it.

My father and the motorbike

Ever since my infancy, I knew one thing for sure. My father was not the type of person who would ride on a motorbike. He might drive a car (he actually did and still does), but he would never ride a motorbike.

So strong was my conviction, that I was quite shocked when my father started taking lessons. Soon he got a rather big motorbike. He would put me in the back seat, and ride in the countryside. Apparently, it was the thing to do for man. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis.

One day, I was walking with my friends towards the playground. In the distance, I noticed a policeman questioning a couple of people. My friends started to say "the police has captured someone! The police has captured someone!" I tried not to look in the direction, and suggested, very casually, that we take alternative routes.

Actually, it was none other than my father, with my grandfather. Apparently, the police was questioning them, for not wearing the helmet. Oh, God, that was embarrassing. My friends kept making fun of the unfortunate couple, while I prayed that my father would not look in my direction. Fortunately, none of my friends there recognized the face of my father.

When we were safely in the playground, I sighed a deep sigh of relief. I then apologized, in my heart, for ignoring a family member (actually, two family members) in a socially perilous situation. When I met my father that evening for dinner, I did not say anything about the incident. My father hushed about it too.

Soon after this day of embarrassment, my father had a minor accident on the motorbike and had his collarbone broken. He was hospitalized for one month. After he got out of the hospital, he got rid of the motorbike. I never saw a motorbike again in my house. The midlife crisis of my father was over.

Under the board, there is hell.

One of the things that really surprises and impresses me is the resilience of people who have been afflicted by the tsunami disaster. In particular, fishermen and their families seem to have a philosophical resignation for whatever the ocean inflicts upon them.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting one of the most severely damaged areas. I talked with a boy who escaped up the hill behind his house. From where he was, the ocean could not be seen. His grandfather happened to be standing at a place where the sea could be observed, and yelled out that the tsunami was coming. The boy and grandparents fled, grabbing weeds, treading on rocks and boughs, escaping for their life.

Fortunately, they could make a narrow escape. The water came to up the boy's foot, and the waist of grandpa, as then the tsunami began to recede. They stayed in the mountain overnight, shivering in the cold. The next morning, the rescue and relief came.

When I asked the boy if he wanted to live near the sea again, he said yes. Considering the flight that he had, and the complete destruction of his house, this answer seems surprising. But then the philosophy about the ocean is deeply different. His father is a fisherman. A fisherman's life is in and from the ocean. A fishermen faces the forces of mother nature. That's is the name of the profession. Nature is usually benevolent, but can become quite savage from time to time.

Among the Japanese fisherman, there is a saying "under the board, there is hell". Below the safety of the board of the ship, the vast ocean is lurking, which can become brutal at any moment, and when that happens, there is no resisting the unleashed energy. Humans are at the mercy of the forces of nature, ever since the beginning of time, now, and in the future forever.

Under the board, there is hell. This philosophy of fisherman is probably true for all of us, even in the bright lights of civilization. We sometimes forget that.

We just sat on the river bank, and watched the water flow.

Youth is about wondering, not knowing why or how, and making many mistakes.

As I look back, my college days were full of wonders and mistakes. And the figure of a fat man was always with me.

His name is Ken Shiotani. He is a fat philosopher at large, meaning he has no job. His wife supports him. It is amazing to think that he worked for Japanese government once. That's where he met his wife. Now he has achieved a status of the "Totoro" character in Hayao Miyazaki's film. Nobody knows why he is here, but he is here anyway. And he is incredibly clever. He is too clever to make a living in this vulgar world.

I met Ken Shiotani as I entered college, and have been with him ever since. Once, we were lying on the bank of the Sumida River, with a can of beer each in our hands. We were making confessions about girls, as well as discussing difficult questions in Physics and Mathematics.

It was dusk, and many lovers were strolling the river bank in couples. They saw us, two blokes, drinking beer, speaking nonsense. They took the natural reaction of avoiding us, not coming to within a 10 meter radius of where we were lying. Maybe they thought that we were homeless people. We were dressed quite shabbily. Once I was refused by a restaurant owner when I tried to enter with Ken Shiotani. For some strange reasons, Ken Shiotani is always wearing a pair of sandals. Even in the middle of winter. Maybe that's why he looks like a retired sumo wrestler.

In any case, that evening, when Ken Shiotani and I lay on the bank of the Sumida River, drinking beer, talking about girls, physics, and mathematics, abhorred like pests by the well-meaning couples, stands as an epitome of my bohemian days. We were ignorant, full of hope, and did not know where we were going. We just sat on the river bank, and watched the water flow.

Boy's eye in the keyhole.

Once I was in the restroom of a railway terminal. It was what some people would call "no.2". As I was sitting there, I noticed that there was a footstep outside. Incredibly, an eye looked into my private space through the keyhole. It was a small boy, about 5 years old.

The boy looked into the toilet quite eagerly. His eye showed all the symptoms of earnestness and concentration. Naturally I felt strange, but then understood.

The boy apparently wanted to go to the toilet so desperately. An emergency situation. It was apparently "no.2". If it had been "no.1", the boy would have gone the other way. As the boy was so intent on going to the toilet, he was looking into the otherwise private space, to see who was there, and what he was up to.

Fortunately for the boy, I was just about to finish. So I said, "wait, I will be finished very soon. Just wait!"
After flushing, I opened the door. A cute boy hurried into the toilet, noticeably relieved.

As I went back to the corridors of the terminal building, I could not help smiling. How desperate the boy must have been! To this day, I remember the very intent expression of the boy's eye in the keyhole. It reminded me of a wild rabbit I once encountered out there in Scotland.

The Octopus Woman of Wales

I stayed in England for two years, and have been returning to the country ever since. I found the English true to the reputation world wide. Reserved, masters of understatements.

Therefore it was a shock to learn an alternative culture different from the English. One day I traveled to Wales. I got on the train to reach Cardiff. On the way to St. David's, Britain's smallest city, I dropped off the station and went into a pub.

The pub was fairly crowded at the middle of the day. There was a group of people near the window, making a merry music. A man was playing the guitar, and men and women were singing to the music. As I look back, that scene itself was already a rarity, to an eye accustomed to the English reservedness.

I found a seat at the bar, and sipped a pint of local ale. The music making folks had apparently been drinking quite a few pints of beer themselves, judging from the merriment of their noise.

Suddenly, a woman stood up, and started walking. She came towards me dancing, moving her arms and legs like an octopus. As she passed by me, something incredible happened. She grabbed my private part, squeezed it, and went on walking, dancing like an octopus.

I was naturally shocked and was still aghast, when the woman returned from the restroom. She was still dancing like an octopus. I anticipated a repeat.

My anticipation went unanswered. The victim this time was a gentleman sitting a few stools away. The octopus woman walked dancing, and grabbed the private part of that gentleman, squeezed it, and went back to the music group, dancing like an octopus.

People laughed, the gentleman laughed, and I laughed at last, recovering from repercussions of the unknown. Maybe things were different in Wales. Take it easy, and let things go. After a few pints and a bathing in the sun of a golden afternoon, I began to understand the Welsh way of life.

I have encountered many strange things in my life, but my private part has been squeezed by a woman only once. Here's to the octopus woman of Wales.

Constellations

Once in a lifetime you notice an entirely new universe, and see that stars are shining in a great constellation. In the naive belief that they're near, you try to reach out, only to realize the formidable distance between the sources of light and your good self.

At those moments, you feel so desperate. You feel that the distance is never to be overcome. You can only yearn for the stars, and are forever bound to the earth. You feel so miserable and tiny.

And yet, here's a thought that might make you relax. True, you may never reach the stars. True, you might not become a member of the constellation yourself. However, it remains that you have seen it. There are lives led quite happily without ever knowing the existence of the new universe that you are craving for. People living in blissful ignorance. You, who have looked up at the sky, and noticed the stars shining, are nearer to that space than before.

Even if you cannot reach the stars physically, lights have already started to shine within yourself. You may think that stars shine only in the heavenly space. But one day, you might find a little tiny luminance within your heart, independent of the constellation above, but inspired by, and enlivened through, a subtle resonance between your good self and the unreachable stars.

When this happens, you would smile like you have never smiled before. And I'd love to see that smile. Maybe I would love the smile better than the constellations.

Red bag was the object of desire.

When I was at kindergarten, there were two kinds of bags for milk money. Each morning we would bring 50 yen for the milk provided at lunch. White bag was for the ordinary milk, and red bag was for the coffee-flavored one.

In the morning, we would put the milk money bag into a wooden box, with our names on it. Some were white, others were red. Somehow, my mother got an idea into her head that I was never allowed to bring the red bag to kindergarten. I looked with a painful agony and wishfu longing at the red bags that my friends brought and joyfully put into the wooden box.

Red bag was the dream of my life. Red bag was the object of desire. There was nothing more adorable than the sight of a red bag
in the wooden box. I remember it vividly even now.