Memories from My High School Years

Back in high school, I often realized that I was seeing things a little differently from everyone else.

It was not because I wanted to rebel.
It was not because I was trying to be difficult.
It was simply that, whenever a question was placed in front of me, my mind would move past its surface and drift toward whatever lay underneath.

Because of that, there were times when things went well.
And there were times when I was left with a strangely deep disappointment.

I remember both of those through two classroom scenes from high school.

One of them was in English class.

The assignment was to translate the Kansai phrase meccha suki yanen into English without using the words like or love.

(A Kansai-dialect phrase meaning roughly “I really like you.”)

The classroom atmosphere made it seem like a light exercise.
The sort of thing where you come up with a slightly clever phrasing, everyone laughs a little, and the hour moves on.

But I paused in front of the phrase.

If like was forbidden, what remained?
I'd be in trouble without you felt too weak.
I want to see you was not quite right either.
It had to be something more urgent than that, but not melodramatic.

So I wrote:

I can't live without you.

I thought it was good.
At the very least, it seemed to me that it actually touched the intent of the question.

After that, we were told to exchange papers with the person sitting next to us.

I showed mine.
The other student looked at it with mild uncertainty and said,

"I don't know if that's right."

So I glanced at his answer.

I like you.

I remember thinking: weren't we explicitly told not to use like?
But before I could be annoyed, I found myself slightly worried for him.
I thought: ah, so when a question falls outside the usual track, sometimes people cannot even tell what counts as right.

There I was, being doubted by someone who had simply written the forbidden word.
For a moment, I had thought it was a surprisingly good question for a college-prep classroom.
But that one reaction made the air of it go flat.

Later, the teacher looked over the answers and praised mine.

Nothing dramatic happened.
And yet it felt like a quiet kind of victory.

It taught me that when you dig beneath the surface of words and reach for the feeling underneath, sometimes it lands.
I still remember that small feeling of confirmation.

The other memory is from Japanese literature class.

That one is not funny at all.

There was a passage in the textbook describing someone climbing a snowy mountain alone.
Near the summit, I think.
Almost completely dark.
No safety rope.
And, more importantly, no sound at all.

The teacher asked the class:

"Why did the author find it eerie? What was missing that made it feel that way?"

When I read that passage, the scene rose in my mind immediately.

A black mountain.
Near the summit.
One person alone.
No sound.

If I had been standing there, what would have frightened me?
What would have made it uncanny?

Only one answer came naturally.

Sound.

The teacher called on me, and I said it.

The teacher blinked.

"What?"

So I said it again.

Sound.

But the teacher moved on from me and turned to another student.

"Yamada-kun, what was missing that made it feel eerie?"

Yamada answered:

"The safety rope."

And the teacher said:

"Yes, that's correct."

At that moment, I remember thinking, with considerable force:

No, it isn't.
The lack of a safety rope is dangerous, yes.
But that is not the core of the eeriness.
A world completely stripped of sound does not exist in ordinary life.
If sound disappears from the world, then your connection to the world itself starts to disappear.
That is why it is eerie.

I was genuinely disappointed by that class.

And this was a literature teacher.

At first, I thought perhaps the teacher had intentionally placed the safety rope there as a decoy, just to see whether students would fall for it.
But no.
The longer it went on, the clearer it became that the teacher had fallen for the decoy too, cleanly and completely, and truly believed that was the point.

What rose inside me then was not mere dissatisfaction.

It was disappointment, pure and simple.

Does this person actually read literature at all?
Have they ever really tried to receive the world that exists beyond the words?

These were the kinds of things I was seriously thinking about as a high school student.

Looking back now, those two classes feel almost unnervingly symmetrical.

In the English class, an answer that had gone one layer deeper was properly received.
In the Japanese class, the act of going one layer deeper was treated as though it did not exist in the first place.

In one classroom, you were allowed to move toward the heart of the question.
In the other, if you did that, you became the kid who was saying something incomprehensible.

That difference felt large to me at the time.

But perhaps the largest thing was something else.

I did not abandon my own sense of things.

Even when everyone thought it was the safety rope.
Even when the teacher said so too.
I still thought it was sound.

And even now, I think it was sound.

Danger and eeriness resemble each other, but they are not the same.
The absence of a safety rope is a bodily danger.
The absence of sound points to something more fundamental, a deeper kind of severance.

It is the feeling that your own contact with the world is beginning to thin out.
That was the kind of eeriness in that passage.

I think I had been looking at things that way since childhood.

The difficult texture hidden underneath what others accepted at face value.
The unease that resists easy explanation.
The true shape of things that had somehow already been accepted as correct.

It is not the kind of quality that gets praised easily.
Depending on the situation, it can even be treated as troublesome.

And yet it is also true that there are things I could see only because that sense was there.

When I look back, I think I was less interested in finding the right answer than in staying faithful to the question itself.

What was the question really asking?
What was trembling underneath the words, not on their surface?

Those were the things I kept noticing.

That is why the small recognition I received in English class felt so meaningful.
And that is why the shallowness of the literature class stayed with me as such a lasting disappointment.

Both of them lead directly to the person I am now.

The habit of not stopping at surface-level answers.
The impulse to wonder where words are really coming from.
The tendency to read whatever lies just beneath the atmosphere.
The reflex of stumbling, all by myself, over explanations that everyone else seems prepared to accept.

At the time, I could not yet call any of that a strength.
If anything, it felt more like a habit that made life a little harder.

But now I understand.

It was not mere difficulty.
It was a desire to be as honest as possible with the question itself.

And I suspect that part of me has hardly changed at all.