Genzaburo Yoshino - How Do You Live?

Genzaburo Yoshino (1899-1981) was a writer, editor and journalist. In 1935, the writer Yamamoto appointed him editor-in-chief of the 16-book series: A Library for Young Japanese Nationals. How Do You Live? is the final book in this series, bringing in themes of Marxism, antimilitarism and Buddhism.

This is such a strange book, and such a wise book. I wish I had been given it as a small boy, but I suspect I would have found it puzzling or even dull: a book-length essay about how we live our lives, interrupted by the story of a pre-war schoolboy in Japan dealing with friendship and bullying; or a story about growing up, bravery, cowardice, social class and finding out who you are, interrupted by essays about scientific thought and personal ethics. Sometimes the joy of books that seem to contain opposing elements is realising that without both things, you would have a lesser book. (Theres a book called Moby-Dick by Herman Melville that contains a story about a doomed hunt for a white whale and also contains essays about whales and whale hunting. Some people like one part of the story, and some like the other. For me, the joy is that the book contains both parts, pulling at each other, each informing the other side, and that if you removed either part you would have a less interesting book.)

I read How Do You Live? now, in this sparkling new translation, because Hayao Miyazaki is basing his next film on it. Its a film he has said that he is making for his grandson, as a gift to the future.

The finest time I spent with Mr Miyazaki was in the building he was making for the children of the neighborhood around Studio Ghibli, where he makes his cartoons. It was built of wood, and there was a bridge across it, inside, too small for adults to cross, but the perfect size for children to go exploring. It was a space for the whole person.

Miyazaki makes films for whole people and makes films about consequences. When I worked on the English-language script of his film Princess Mononoke, I was astonished when I finally realised that everything in the film was about consequences of acts and actions: seemingly unrelated events are actually the consequences of other events or actions, and everyone in the film is acting according to what they believe to be their best interests without realising that what they do affects everyone else.

In How Do You Live?, Copper, our hero, and his uncle are our guides in science, in ethics, in thinking. And on the way they take us, through a school story set in Japan in 1937, to the heart of the questions we need to ask ourselves about the way we live our lives. We will experience betrayal and learn about how to make tofu. We will examine fear, and how we cannot always live up to who we think we are, and we learn about shame, and how to deal with it. We will learn about gravity and about cities, and most of all, we will learn to think about thingsto, as the writer Theodore Sturgeon put it, ask the next question.

Books like this are important. Im so glad Mr Miyazaki is making his film, not least because it means that, eighty-four years after it was written, Genzabur Yoshinos novel can be read in English, in Bruno Navaskys gentle and winning translation, and that I got to read it.

Neil Gaiman

Copper is in his second year of junior high school.

His real name is Honda Junichi. Copper is his nickname. Hes fifteen, but on the small side for fifteen, and to be honest, Copper himself is pretty sensitive about that.

At the beginning of each term, the gym teacher has the class form a line, remove their hats, and arrange themselves by height. Copper quietly slips the heel of his shoe onto a stone and cranes his neck in a painful effort to move ahead in the order somehow, but he never does. Instead he always ends up wrestling with his classmate Kitaminicknamed Gatchinin a fierce contest for second or third place. Of course, thats from the back end of the line.

But when it comes to grades, its the other way around. Copper is generally first or second in the class and has hardly ever dropped to third. That said, Copper is no grade-grubber, but rather somebody who likes to play more than most. In baseball hes considered the class athlete. Its charming to see little Copper with his big glove, guarding second base. Small as he is, hes no power hitter, but he knows how to bunt, so hes always picked to bat second in the lineup.

Although hes first or second in grades, Copper has never been the class leader. Its not because hes not well liked, but rather that he can be a bit too mischievous. It wouldnt be right to make Copper the class leader, would it, when he seems happy to spend ethics class hidden from the teacher, making two rhinoceros beetles play tug-of-war, tied together by a thread? When the time comes for a parent-teacher conference, the words that his homeroom teacher says to his mother are always the same: Theres not much to be said about his studies. His test scores are exceptionally good, and as usual it seemed he would be chosen as the class leader. But

When this But comes out, his mother thinks, Again? Because what comes next, invariably, is a story of Coppers mischief landing him in trouble.

Actually, Coppers mother may be partially responsible for this. When she comes home from the parent-teacher conference, she often tells him, We had another warning from your teacher, you know, but shes not particularly severe about it. To tell the truth, his mother cant give him a hard time about this sort of thing.

The reason she cant is mostly because Coppers mischief is rarely irritating or troublesome to anyone, and hes not bad-spirited, but simply an innocent soul who makes people laugh and amuses them. But besides that, theres one more big reason: Copper has no father.

Coppers father passed away just about two years ago. He was a director at a big bank, and after he died, Coppers family moved from their mansion in the old city to a modest house in the suburbs. They let go of a number of people who worked for them, too, so aside from Copper and his mother, there were just the nanny and one maid, and it became a household of four in all. Unlike the days when his father was alive, they received few visitors, and it suddenly began to feel lonely inside the house. His mothers primary concern at that time was to preserve Coppers natural high spirits, so she found herself unable to reprimand Copper very harshly for small matters.

After they moved to the suburbs, an uncle who lived in the neighborhood would come to visit now and again. That uncle was Coppers mothers little brother, fresh out of the university with a law degree. Copper would often go to his uncles house to play as well. The two of them were terribly close. People in the neighborhood would often see little Copper and his taller-than-average uncle walking side by side, or in the fields together playing catch, just the two of them.

Coppers nickname was first coined by this uncle. Then one Sunday, just when a schoolmate, Mizutani, had come to the house to play, the uncle dropped by as well. Copper, Copper was thrown about, and after that the name quickly spread to school.