If you enter my father's study, there's an interesting painting. A precarious wooden raft atop the surging waves of the open sea. People abandoned there, with neither food nor drink. Neither compass nor hope. People who out of thirst and hunger, fear and loathing, horror and greed, suck each other's blood and kill each other and, in the process, kill themselves too.
When I was young, I was so afraid of this painting that I didn't go into the study. I even wondered why my father would have hung such an awful painting on the wall. But as time passed, the painting gradually became just a part of the study, not the subject of fear or concern.
Instead, I developed a different fear. That was the fear of the room on the other side of the door inside the study. Neither the door nor room was anything special. It wasn't locked with a padlock or code, and what lay behind was only an extension of the study. If there were anything special about it, it was only that it had a lot of books--the bookshelves were packed with papers and books from my father's high school days and onward. I called that room the 'interior room.'
The interior room was a place where my father could go alone to gather his thoughts or come up with new ideas, and other than him. Nobody else went inside. I had gone inside the room only once. And even though I was young, I had known. That wasn't simply a study full of books. At a glance, the books placed in no particular order and the carelessly-stacked boxes and docu-ments only seemed to be human. I felt no warmth from the paper, and there was no emotion even in the paintings or photographs. Even just standing in the center of the room and looking up at the bookshelves, I felt a sense of intimidation that made my whole body feel as if it were crumbling.
I don't remember there being any commotion over me having entered (although there may have been one), but from some point onward I stopped going into the room. Once or twice, I went as far as to stand in front of the door. But I only looked up at it for a second, and didn't even think of turning the knob.
TRANSLATED BY @ORIGAMYFIREFLY. PLEASE DO NOT REPOST.