Description & Thoughts

I loved the description of the world in this series. It’s a utopian story of a world which has genuinely nice people, and everybody’s living in perfect harmony, all sunshine, and rainbows. I read this book during a gloomy fall week, at a time when I was feeling pretty low about my work and life in general.

The story follows Sibling Dex, a monk whose life revolves around traveling, brewing tea, and listening to people’s problems. Their life seems perfect, they get to satiate their wanderlust by traveling across the world and “drink tea for work”. Yet, that is not enough. They are troubled by a persistent restlessness, a “need” to hear the sound of crickets. And to satiate this need, they first become a tea-monk, and when that doesn’t help them achieve their goal of listening to crickets, they decide to leave civilization and go into the wild.

This immediately reminded me of the film Perfect Days, which I watched early last year. The protagonist, Hirayama, has constructed his own personal utopia within the routine of cleaning toilets in Tokyo. He follows the same route, drinks the same coffee, listens to the same cassette tapes every day. We eventually learn he likely walked away from a “rich,” high-status life (a societal utopia), to find peace in the mundane.

Looking at both these stories together made me realize that perhaps “Utopia is a state of mind”. As a friend once told me, “To have problems is to live.” It is human nature to find friction, to seek the “something else.” But as long as we can process and work through that friction, we are okay.

Following is a quote from the book, which is the literary equivalent of “Komorebi”. In Perfect Days, Hirayama spends his lunch breaks photographing this light. We feel restless because we treat “happiness” like a destination - a place where we finally stop moving. That we need to get a few things checked off on our endless to-do-list, we can finally be happy, but that rarely works? We need to find happiness in everyday moments, before it’s too late.

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”