Beyond the Window: Why Just Once
The second installment of 'Beyond the Window.' On nearly lecturing a young reporter about a broadcast that left no recording — and stopping himself.
Listening to Kyokai Radio's live broadcast last night, sitting beside Koyanagi as she worked on the story, I opened my mouth once and stopped myself. I nearly said, "They should have just recorded it." Old habits of the newspaper trade — I've always believed a record is something you keep. But catching myself mid-sentence, I realized this was a different kind of thing entirely.
Our own paper keeps a record it hasn't preserved. The edition from just after I joined in 1975 couldn't be reprinted because of a press malfunction, and only a single copy survives in the archive today. Ever since, the company history exhibit has never made a copy of it — it's shown only behind glass. When I once asked the previous editor-in-chief why, he said only, "If you copied it, it stops being that one copy." I didn't understand it then. I think I understand it a little now.
Choosing not to reproduce something reproducible is choosing inconvenience. But that inconvenience itself is what creates a real difference between the people who heard it and the people who didn't. Because of that difference, the ones who heard it try to remember it, and the ones who missed it wait for the next chance. Convenience sometimes dissolves exactly that kind of tension.
On my desk tonight, Yurari is holding its teacup again, antenna dark. I told it about the broadcast, but to this creature, once and a hundred times seem to be the same thing. That's fine. Not everything in this world needs to leave a record.
I always say: don't be startled, check the facts. But it turns out this city holds more things than I'd like to admit that you simply have to carry without ever being able to check. Tonight, I'll allow myself to admit that.
