Notebook Outside the Window: The Hillside Fourteen Children Saw
Column 'Notebook Outside the Window,' installment 6: reading the report of fourteen Fukagawa North Elementary pupils who dreamed the same scene, the writer recalls a vague, unverified remark from one first-generation Drifter she interviewed for 'The Window of 1975' — that he thought he had dreamed of an unfamiliar landscape in the days right after arriving.
Reading the report that fourteen pupils at Fukagawa North Elementary had dreamed the same scene, the first thing that came to mind was not the window, but my interviews with first-generation Drifters. Of the forty-odd people I spoke with for "The Window of 1975," at least six said that, in the days right after their arrival, they had "dreamed of the same landscape." Some said it was a hillside, others a waterside — the contents never agreed. And yet the phrase "it didn't feel like just my own dream" came up with uncanny consistency.
No scholar has ever taken up this cluster of testimonies, but I still can't bring myself to dismiss it as mere collective suggestion. The TDA's technician in this latest case avoided making a determination too. I've come to think that refusing to decide is, in fact, the most honest method there is for a story like this.
What stayed with me most in the article was the line where all the children agreed: it wasn't scary. Among the first-generation Drifters I interviewed, few described fear either. More often they said it was beautiful, or that it felt, for some reason, like home. That a human being can call a landscape they have never visited and can never return to "like home" strikes me, every time I report on this, as stranger than the Yuragi itself.
It has been years since I started writing a book the academy refuses to take seriously. But every time an article like this comes out, the old pages of my notebook feel useful again, and I'm glad I never threw them away.
