From Diaries to Dissent: Satoko Shibata’s Reflections on Seven Years and the Struggle Against the Pervasiveness of “Interesting”

Inspired by Momoko Sakura: ‘It’s Meaningless if It’s Not Interesting

In your afterword, you wrote that you felt “extremely embarrassed” about your past manuscripts.

Shibata: “Was I thinking like this?” I was aghast when I was working on the draft. I think I was even more incoherent and messed up than I am now. I was in my thirties when this series began, but I was reading it over again and thinking that if I had been like this at the age of 25 or so, I could still forgive myself (laughs).

(Laughs.) But when it’s about yourself, it’s hard to forgive, isn’t it?

Shibata: I just can’t give up on my desire to become a respectable person.

What do you mean by “a respectable person” in your opinion?

Shibata: I want to be respected by people, to be dependable, to be a good person, and so on (laughs). I know it’s impossible, but I can’t give up hope.

Especially at the beginning of the series, I felt more strongly than I do now that “if it’s not interesting, it’s meaningless,” and I’m quite embarrassed to admit that I exaggerate a bit. I was also embarrassed to exaggerate my writing. I had an image that an essay should be something that made people laugh like Momoko Sakura did.

So you were influenced by Sakura.

Shibata: I used to read a lot. Sakura’s pop-ness is amazing. But I think I took on the challenge without really analyzing how Sakura-san does it. But I recently realized that readers are not really looking for “hilarity. In an essay feature in Bungakukai, Matsuo Suzuki wrote, “I also realized that readers are not looking for ‘fun’ in writing,” which made me nod my head.

I was nodding my head when you wrote in your essay “Kireigire no Diary” that “readers are not looking for ‘fun’ in writing.

Shibata: I like to read plain, stiff sentences like newspapers, rather than the broken-down, frank style, so this is one thing I was conscious of when I was given this opportunity.

Yes, that’s right.

Shibata: Oh, yes. I admire that kind of writing. It is a systematic and correct Japanese language. If I say it is uninteresting, it may be uninteresting, but in the end, what is written is easy to convey.

Is “ease of conveyance” an important point for you?

Shibata: I don’t write sentences that are easy to convey (laughs).

Challenges in the Art of Weaving Words Unlike Crafting Lyrics

In the interview with Mei Kawano in “Bungakukai,” you mentioned that, unlike lyrics, “I always feel that in writing, it is important to feel that the meaning of the text is ultimately written out in words.

Shibata: I think that in lyrics, tanka poems, and novels, the good parts remain even if they are not fully conveyed, but I think that this is ambiguous in essays. Some people write very artistically, while others write essays like “Tenseijingo. I think that since they are published, there is inevitably a fictional quality to them, but I have the impression that they have to be written in a completely different way than lyrics to be interesting.

With lyrics, it is possible to convey a message by combining various elements such as sounds and performers, but text is abstract, and it is quite difficult to express something by itself. I felt that you can’t build a house without a foundation, and that something can’t be conveyed unless it has a proper structure.

Do you feel that the plain style of writing helped you in this process?

Shibata: For example, it is quite difficult to describe an apple using only letters. People might be able to imagine apples, but things that are a bit mysterious or far from reality, or things that are on your mind, people might not be able to relate to them.

In order to express such things, you have to have a solid structure, and I think that sentences that feel like they are correctly connected are easy to convey. I felt that people who write words are doing a solitary task, because it seems like writing something that no one has ever seen before is what makes it interesting.

I think that in the case of – – writing, there may be no melody, but there is a kind of rhythm or groove, so what were you conscious of when you were writing?

Shibata: I usually emphasize the importance of rhythm when writing poetry and applying it to melody, so it has become a habit of mine. I was conscious of things like how it feels good to read, how it speeds up, or conversely, how it slows down. I thought it was interesting that you could build the rhythm more freely in writing than in music.

But I felt that the text was more free.

Shibata: However, there are times when you are faced with infinite freedom and you can’t do anything. Because there are almost no restrictions, I felt, “This horizon is vast. In the case of music, the whole process of writing poems, composing songs, making arrangements, and mixing is connected to me all the way through. But with writing, the only clue is the written word. I really wondered how people who write long sentences keep track of them.

One of the restrictions was that it was in a diary format, as the title “Diary” suggests.

Shibata: When I told the first editor that I did not know how to start writing, he suggested that I start with “a certain day of the month. I thought it was important to have one constraint.