Long time no see, everyone.
I've been staying in New Zealand for work this past week, returning to Japan the other day.
Having been abroad both privately and for work since year end it's like I've been abroad for
half this month. In Australia, that I visited on a week long holiday,
I spent a quiet time surrounded by the nature of beaches and forests.

Usually when I'm in Japan I long for Europe and wish to next do something
like visit a French art museum or see the streets of England,
but once a get a holiday and open up a map to see where I'd like to go,
I always become attracted to places like the west coast of America,
Hawaii, or some country below the equator surrounded by beaches.
I grew up in a town surrounded by mountains and beaches, so maybe I naturally go where
I have a view of grazing sheep or cows, or restaurants where you can feel the sea breeze.

I always board the plane to and from a foreign place carrying several books,
as it is my habit to retreat into the world of a book so I don't feel the turbulence.
This time I devoted myself to reading the story of "Me" and "The Rat",
which starts in "Hear the Wind Sing" by Murakami Haruki-san.
The first time I read this series must have been during that carefree spring vacation,
when I waited to become a student after the university exam and high school graduation.
My reading was driven by the feeling of impatience caused by wondering how many of the
countless books the Earth has on offer I would be able to read in the time I have to live.

For my 18-year-old self reading "Hear the Wind Sing", the protagonist university
student "Me" and his friend philosophising about the meaning of human existence
and talking about girls while drinking beer at the bar,
felt like really accomplished adults.
I was surprised that my seniors when I entered university that spring would be that mature,
but when I reread that same book on the flight back from Auckland to Narita this time,
"Me" and "The Rat" anguishing in earnest over the universal themes of "Life" and "Destiny"
felt like really immature, innocent, upright young men,
which had become adorable to see.

That the same person reading the same book can experience it differently surprised me,
but me compared to my younger self has no choice but to think in that way,
because I've become much better at "explaining" and "accepting" various things.
For better or worse, I've learned that everything will resolve itself with time.
Like Me says, I also become weirder with every hour that I grow older.

The critics may not approve of me saying it,
but there is no rule that
people reading a book have to interpret it in one particular way,
or if you know what the writer intended to convey then that is the correct interpretation.
I think that it's great to cheerfully say,
"Go make yourself at home".
Whenever I enter into the world of a book,
I will selfishly experience it, and proceed by my own imagination.
One of the charms of a book is that your age and how you perceive things may have
changed completely since last time, so I will never ever throw away or sell a book I like,
but read it again about a year later.

One phrase by "Me" that I took no notice of but that I really liked this time was,
"When the beach is all you see you want to meet people,
and when people are all you see you want to see the beach. How strange."
It really is like that for me.

Thinking, "It's about time I meet some people again",
I had the clothes fitting for a new work yesterday.
The start of filming will be real soon.
I want to pour the power I got from nature into this work.

If you've read Keiko's writings long enough then you know that she uses line breaks to end each line explicitly, which I try to reflect in the translation as well as I can. This becomes a bit of a problem when viewed on a small screen. Take this bit of text for instance:

If you happen to read it on a smartphone then it may look like this:

The lines are now broken twice, which doesn't look too good. To solve this problem I've made one little change. If the screen is too narrow for Keiko's maximum line length then all the forced line breaks in a paragraph are suppressed, with this as the result:

I thought you needed to know, because it presents Keiko's text differently from how she wrote it.