The Innocent One: The Dead (Professor SHIMADA Masahiko, Department of Intercultural Communication, Faculty of Intercultural Communication)

In these days of a prolonged dark world with earthquakes, bad government, and the spread of infectious diseases, many people may be suffering mental damage without realizing it. I cannot help but feel that more and more people are letting self-destructive impulses prevail over self-preservation instincts. They choose to be victims rather than enjoy happiness. They choose to hate someone rather than be loved. As soon as we feel loved or appreciated, it becomes a burden to our hearts, and we intentionally become cold and distant from others. Everyone is trapped in their own environment and relationships, and it is difficult to break free from these fetters. The mirror of the mind is distorted and does not reflect the true self. Trapped in a distorted self-image, we are unable to recognize ourselves correctly and are tempted to give up on ourselves, saying, "Who am I anyway? We are more or less victims of ourselves. There is one sulky child in everyone. As we blame and humiliate ourselves in the company of a world that is cold-hearted despite our true feelings, it eventually becomes a habit, and the darkness in our hearts grows deeper.

It is ugly to see oneself in desperation. I would hate to see myself like this if I could, but after a single sigh, I find myself staring at my wretched self with slightly awakened eyes. At that moment, I will listen to my own resentment as if it were someone else's. I will itemize that frustration like a counselor. If you light a candle in the darkness of your heart in this way, you will get tired of being desperate.

How to rebuild one's broken self has always been a universal theme. Literary scholars, in particular, have conducted psychoanalysis based on their own experiences or through dialogue with others or the dead, and have presented the resulting reports to the world in the form of novels. When You Were a Heretic" is a proposal for such therapy for the self, and is intended as a clinical report.

Many real people I once met appear in the novel. Since more than half of them have passed away, this work is also a past book in which I recorded their names and my relationship with them.

The fact that the dead stay in the hearts of the living forever is a sign that they are close to us. When we remember the deceased through rituals and from time to time, we sometimes feel that they are still close to us. The smiles and voices of the past come back to me, and I sometimes wonder if I am only half of me in the other side of the world.

They say, "The dead have no tongue," but is it really possible to silence the dead? We assume that only psychics take the trouble to listen to the voices of the dead, and no one is willing to listen to what the dead have to say. Do the dead rest in peace and do not torment the hearts of the living? Those who do not know why they died, those who were victims of other people's evil or systems, and those who chose suicide because they were trapped by something must still be sending out some message.

We are so afraid of being cursed by the dead that we have made a list of them and made a promise "not to interfere with the living" without the consent of the dead. We did this because wars, earthquakes, and tyranny have brought about such a huge number of deaths that we can no longer deal with them individually.

We are always reminded by the phrase, "The dead do not betray us. During our lives, we lie, lie about ourselves, are jealous, turn a blind eye, or commit some other sin. No one can remain innocent all his or her life. No one can remain innocent all his or her life without causing others, directly or indirectly, to suffer, to make sacrifices, to grieve, or to be offended. One may try to live with compassion for animals, insects, plants, and all that lives, but that in itself is a difficult and painful task. The truly innocent may be those who are as close to the dead as possible.

From the point of view of the dead, all the living would be disloyal and hypocritical. It is hypocrisy in itself to send the dead off to Hades and heaven in good shape and not try to have anything to do with them. Hades and heaven are all just fictions imagined by the naive ancients. They have nowhere to go and remain in the same world as we do. We cannot be unrelated to the dead.

The deceased are temporarily resurrected when we grieve in memory of those who have been striving unnoticed in our corner of the world, and when we remember those whom we respected and loved. When one who has sinned repents of it, he is temporarily freed from sin.

Emotional immobility, then, means rigor mortis of the heart. As long as one grieves, suffers, and repents, the mind does not die. Because I grieve, because I suffer, because I repent, I am. Even if I cannot do anything, I can pray earnestly.

The dead do not have "future time," but they therefore do not age. They are immortal like the cows and horses in the cave murals. We too will become so when we die, so the dead are also our own selves in the not-so-distant future.