there's just so much in these pages that it feels like an honest disservice to put my immediate reaction to it into words, but suffice to say that there's a well present in every human being: a kind of essence of sadness—not the reality of it, although it does include that, but the mere possibility of it—and sometimes such a wellspring of tragedy becomes unending.

yet, despite that (or perhaps because of that), such a fount of tragedy becomes comic, exemplified wonderfully in the scene where yozo oba talks about the tragic and the comic with his good-for-nothing layabout friend. it's such a wonderful summation of human life as a whole that it still makes me take a pause, no matter how many times i read said scene. such repeated tragedy is almost comic in a single person's life, and yet tragic incidents (in and of themselves) are still tragic, no matter their quantity.

there is much within me that yearns to talk more about this book, but suffice to say that this is a wonderful meditative work on the essence of tragedy. sometimes, one is born wrong and then one is made wrong and then one makes wrong decisions. within that idea is all the sadness and despair in the world, which is beautifully exemplified by this work.