The Difficulty of Self

In the middle of the Night a professor emeritus calls an associate professor of psychology to help him out with engagement in a hunt for finding a seven-year-old boy left by his parents on the side of a road in the mountains to discipline him, only soon to find him disappear from the place. The local authority has set up an incident center to find the child and have included members from different backgrounds, including psychologists.¹ While the search continues, with often fruitless meetings and progresses, the old professor Momose settles in an inn and dwells upon the causes for the lost boy. After formally attending the search Ishida meets Momose at the inn, and there along with Momose's pupil Okubo they discuss or project the psychology of the child A trying to pinpoint what exactly the boy might have felt at the time of being left by the family car.

1.       Momose: 'They bring in psychologists even when it is ineffectual, probably so they can demonstrate that they've put together a group of experts.'

The weather, terrain and the thicket makes the search difficult. The members of the search team make speculation where the boy might have headed or what might have happened to him. Ishida has no chance of interviewing the family, whose little ignorance of leaving the boy behind as a punishment led to his disappearance. Soon after another Child Psychologist Agawa joins the Momose's evening meeting, and now they muse over the subjects like animalistic virtue of leaving offspring on their own, fighting for survival and resistance that the boy might have posed to be found as a defiance. While the search team grows and keeps its searches alive the psychologists speculate like detectives but also wander off to subjects of historical tales and fairytale narratives of children being left or killed, Japanese upbringing, a Christian priest's visit to Japanese land, and Japanese introversive and unblemished culture².

2.       Momose: 'What goes on inside people, inside a family, within society, even the inner workings of a nation, they are all peculiar things that are difficult to understand, and always bound to be controversial and unexpected.'

After the child is found out, everything becomes normal like before, the family, the police and media, everyone goes quiet, but Ishida, drawing memories from his childhood, still cannot forget the impression of the boy being left alone.

Based upon a real such event, the novella largely deals not with the rescue mission but weaves the cultural making of the understanding of identity and intellectual inefficiency to practically deal with alienation brooding in the society. We take so much time to understand others but do we really understand ourselves? Backlight is a novella on what is lost and what is found while growing up.

Author: Kanji Hanawa

Translator: Richard Nathan

Publisher: Red Circle

Page Count: 66p

Price: $9.50