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.

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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.”

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