Late youth

Author: Wang Xinxin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-01-01
Features: The Late Bloomer is regarded as a self-portrait of Dai Jiang's growth. The young protagonist struggles with communication barriers with the outside world, the dissonance between the real and ideal worlds, and as a result, develops a sense of inferiority. In the chaos, the young man's ideals are constantly shattered, growing up with difficulty to become an independent thinker.
Excerpt: Walking through the university gates, the winter wind, raw and direct, blew sand grains that stung painfully. I closed my eyes, bracing against the wind and stopping in my tracks, as if this great Tokyo had reverted to darkness, and I had become a primitive resident of this alluvial wasteland from two thousand years ago. I thought to myself, I really don’t want to hear those dogs’ frantic barking today. However, as I ran across the sand dunes ruffled by the wind and took the shortcut to the university hospital, heading to the Dog Interrogation Room, countless barks poured down from above, satisfying the cruel wind. The name Dog Interrogation Room was coined by one of my classmates while he was hospitalized at the university hospital. He had always been a quiet person, but suddenly attempted suicide. It refers to a section of the gravel path between the hospital and the auditorium. Standing there, gazing at the sky and listening carefully, barks always fall from high above. There are two hundred dogs there, all nameless mongrel wild dogs used for experiments. Between the university hospital building and the huge garbage incineration plant lies a square plot of land, enclosed by neat wooden fences like a grid on graph paper, where the dogs are tied one by one. These dogs suddenly bark at the sky all at once, and they won’t stop for over two hours. The place where the most intense and vivid barking can be heard is this Dog Interrogation Room. In fact, standing there listening to the dogs bark, I can’t help but meditate—under the bleak, grayish-yellow sky of this severe winter, perhaps only the countless barks of these dogs exist, twisted and compressed like wool in a yurt, barking like compressed felt. Especially today, the dogs’ barking gave me a sense of cowardice. I felt as if a hateful omen raven was gripping my chest tightly with its claws, chattering endlessly. Like a child fleeing the darkness, I ran away, climbing the slope next to the auditorium. I thought to myself, in the Dog Interrogation Room, it’s actually the people who are on trial! Then, I remembered the barking behind me, the sound that kept chasing me. At the Literature Department Student Self-Governing Association, I called out Beitaizenko. Since the time I enrolled at Komaba, he had been my friend, and now served as the Secretary-General of the Self-Governing Association, alsoing as a central executive committee member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Self-Governing Union. During the two years at Komaba, Beitaizenko acted as a conduit between our university students and the underground Communist Party cadres, allowing those frugal and saving poor students to timidly drop their copper coins to their conduit. And our fundraising campaign, the faint sound of copper coins coming from far underground, could only be heard through Beitaizenko. We, the non-Party students and Communist Party students, had a rather distant gaze toward each other, mixed with humility and arrogance. We always avoided personal relationships with each other, even finding it unbearable to chat closely or share a bowl of noodles together. However, Beitaizenko was the exception. In my eyes, Beitaizenko was not like those Communist Party students, with a politically precocious kind of lecherousness, but rather seemed like a free-spirited enthusiast. That’s why I got along well with Beitaizenko. I really liked Beitaizenko—he rescued a prostitute from Yūgen and wanted to marry her; to fund the establishment of a political weekly in intaglio printing, he raised 80 million yen; he fought fiercely with members of the private university support department, leaving him scarred— I liked these aspects of him that transcended time and space.