Notebook Outside the Window: The Weight of the Word 'Confirmed'

This morning, listening to the radio read out "Genshu confirms recurring Yuragi," I found myself trying to recall the word "confirmed" somewhere among my 214 (or maybe 215) notebooks. After nearly thirty years in this trade, I still tense up slightly every time I write that word. "Confirmed" is supposed to be a far more modest word than "understood," and yet the moment it lands in a newspaper headline, it grows heavy.

In the afternoon, I reread the manuscript for my next book. In the section on the Kyumu interviews, I had used the word "confirmed" seven times. Three referred to "the number of missing persons was confirmed," two to "the observation record was confirmed," and the remaining two were, honestly, places where I had written as though something were confirmed when it hadn't been. I found them and struck them out.

I have no intention of criticizing Genshu's announcement. If anything, imagining how much lies behind that short statement — how much was left unconfirmed, unsaid — is dizzying. Someone decided to call an announcement "confirmed" while disclosing neither scale, nor lineage, nor plans. I make the same kind of decision myself, on a much smaller scale, every week.

I still haven't gone to see interview subject number 62 this week either. I have a feeling that if I go, I won't be able to stop myself from writing the word "confirmed" again. Perhaps all I'm really doing is granting myself time to hold something without confirming it. Some would call that laziness, but where the story of the Nine-Day Fog is concerned, I've come to think laziness is closer to honesty.

Today, too, the 214 (or maybe 215) notebooks stayed stacked, and I did not go to see number 62. Instead, I cut my seven "confirmed"s down to six. I've decided that counts as enough for this week.