”Beginning with that afternoon when I happened to go to this park, I’ve never been away from it for long. I understood at once why it was there. As I said in one story, “In a densely populated city, it’s as if God painstakingly arranged for a place as serene as this。”
The first few years after I was crippled, I couldn’t find work: I had no future; all of a sudden, it was almost as though I couldn’t find anything. And so I wheeled myself to the park almost every day: it was another world, one where I could escape this world. I wrote in one story, “With no place to go, I used to spend the whole day in the park every day: other people went to work; I went to the park. It was an abandoned park. When it was time to go to work or time to go home, people took shortcuts through the park, and it became animated for a while. Afterwards, it was still。” “In the dazzling golden sunlight, the park’s wall provided shade: I wheeled myself over there, put the back of the wheelchair down, and—either sitting or lying down—I read or thought. I would break off a cypress twig and drive away the insects who didn’t know any better than I did why they had been born in this world。” “A bee like a tiny piece of mist hung on in midair; an ant was deep in thought, its head wagging and its antennae quivering, and then, all of a sudden, it must have come up with the right answer, for it turned back and scudded off; the ladybug climbed around wearily, stopped to pray for a while, and then, flapping its wings, suddenly soared to the sky; on the tree trunk there was one cicada, as lonely as an empty room; dew rolled around on the leaves of weeds, and then coalesced, weighing the leaves down until they broke into thousands of rays of golden light。” “The whole park was astir with the sound of weeds, bushes, and trees growing, all shattering ceaselessly。” This was all true: the park was a wasteland, but far from going downhill。