What Kind of Life You Make Is Entirely Up to You
In Takahata, a quiet neighborhood to the southeast of Nara Park, old earthen walls line the lanes. In one corner stands a home that the writer Shiga Naoya planned himself, and it still remains today. Shiga came to Nara from Yamashina in Kyoto in the spring of 1925. At first he rented a home, but in 1928 he acquired land in Takahata, and in April of the following year his new home was finished. The plan was Shiga's own; the man who gave it form was Shimojima Matsunosuke, a master carpenter of the sukiya style from Kyoto.
Among its sukiya-style Japanese rooms is one that is especially bright: a sunroom where light falls from a skylight. Its floor is laid with clay tiles, and it has a small, low doorway like that of a tea room. Next to it is a Western-style dining room where the family gathered around the table together. In the children's room, the floor was laid with cork tiles. Japanese and Western, work and family life, are gently linked by the corridors of this home. Many figures of the cultural world, among them Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Kobayashi Hideo and Umehara Ryuzaburo, came to visit, and the gatherings here came to be called the Takahata Salon.
Over the eighty-eight years of his life, Shiga is said to have changed his place of residence twenty-three times. From Onomichi to Abiko to Kyoto, he would settle in one place, write, and then go on to the next. It was in this home in Takahata that he finished his only full-length novel, A Dark Night's Passing, whose serialization had begun in 1921 and then been interrupted for many years. That was in 1937. In an essay titled 'Nara,' Shiga wrote, 'Nara is a beautiful place.'
If you cannot feel grateful for the circumstances you are in now, and you are lamenting your misfortune, then you are not yet living your own life.
That is a way of life that pushes the responsibility for your life onto others and entrusts your life to them, a terribly wasteful way to spend it.
If you dislike the circumstances you are in, all you have to do is get out of them.
It is also you yourself who, giving all sorts of reasons, stays there in the end.
Whatever anyone may say, your life is your own responsibility, and deciding what kind of life to make of it is entirely your freedom.
That is the rule of this world.
For some, it is a very harsh rule, and for others, a rule full of hope.
Which will you choose?
Tokito Kensaku, the hero of A Dark Night's Passing, carries the burden of a birth he did not choose, and even after marrying meets with unexpected misfortune, as he walks on in search of peace of heart. At the end of the story, Kensaku withdraws to Mount Daisen in Hoki Province and at last arrives at a broad, open state of mind in which he can forgive everything. In the spring of the year after he finished that novel, 1938, Shiga left Nara, where he had made his home for thirteen years. Today, in the garden of the Takahata home, the trees beside the pond quietly wait for the season of autumn colors. And through the skylight of the sunroom, just as in those days, the light of the sky still falls on the tiled floor.