How Do You Live? By Genzaburo Yoshino Is A Coming-of-age Japanese Classic, An Excerpt: 

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino is a coming-of-age classic from Japan on what really matters in life. An Excerpt:

It happened one October afternoon last year, when Copper was still a first-year student. He was with his uncle, the two of them standing on the roof of a department store in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

A fine mist fell quietly and ceaselessly from the ashen sky, so that it was hard to tell if it was raining or not, and before they knew it, small silver droplets had fastened everywhere on Copper’s jacket and his uncle’s raincoat, and they looked as if they had been covered with frost. Copper was silent, gazing down at the Ginza Boulevard immediately below.

From seven stories up, the Ginza was a narrow channel. At the bottom, cars streamed past in great numbers, one after another. From Nihonbashi on the right side, flowing beneath him to Shinbashi on the left, and from there in the opposite direction, from the left side back to Nihonbashi, the twin currents slipped past each other, waxing and waning as they went. Here and there between the two streams, a trolley crawled sluggishly by, looking somehow world-weary. The trolleys looked as small as toys, and their roofs were slick with rain. The cars, too, and the asphalt road surface and even the trees lining the road and all else that was there were dripping wet and gleaming with the brightness of daylight shining from who knew where.

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino. Published by Penguin Random House (2021).

Gazing down in silence, Copper began to imagine that the individual cars were insects. If they were bugs, he thought, they would be rhinoceros beetles. They’re a swarm of rhinoceros beetles that comes crawling in a big hurry. Then once they’ve done their job, they go hurrying home. There’s no knowing what it’s about, but to them great affairs are happening, make no mistake.

 As Copper thought about the beetles, he noticed how the Ginza gradually narrowed in the distance, finally bending to the left, and there, where it vanished amid the tall buildings near Kyōbashi, didn’t it seem like the entrance to their nest? The little creatures, in their rush to return, disappear over there, one by one. And as they do, their replacements come hurrying back, one by one. A black one, a black one, again a black one, now a blue one, a gray one . . .

 The powdery mist continued to fall quietly as before. While immersed in his strange fantasy, Copper gazed for some time toward the Kyōbashi neighborhood and eventually raised his face. Below him, the rain-soaked streets of Tokyo spread boundlessly in all directions.

It was a dark, lonely, endless prospect, and watching it, Copper began to feel gloomy, too. As far as the eye could see, the innumerable little roofs continued, all the while reflecting the light of the leaden sky. Breaking up the flat house rows, clusters of high-rise buildings poked up here and there. The farthest of these were gradually caught up in a haze of rain and at last became silhouettes floating between the sky and the vague dullness of the monochrome mist. How profoundly damp it must have been! Everything was wet through and through, and it seemed that even the rocks themselves were permeated with water. Tokyo was submerged, motionless at the bottom of the cold and damp.

Copper had been born and raised in Tokyo, but this was the first time he had ever seen the streets of Tokyo show such a sad and somber face. The hustle and bustle of the city came welling up endlessly from the depths of the heavy wet air to the seventh-floor rooftop, but whether this registered in his ears or not, Copper just stood there, transfixed. For some reason, he had become utterly unable to look away. At that moment, something began to happen deep inside him, a change unlike anything that had happened to him before.

Excerpted with permission from How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino. Published by Penguin Random House (2021).

Love books? Join the SheThePeople Book Club. Click Here