Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.20

020

“—If someone were to give me such a command, would even a hopeless person like me be able to obediently apologize?

“If I were to be compelled.

“Then obediently, or perhaps, reluctantly.

“Unwillingly, or maybe, graciously.

“Would I be able to apologize?

“Like how I need an excuse to forgive when I’m forgiving someone, I’d like to have an excuse to apologize when I’m apologizing. And it wasn’t just me, as I’m sure any twisted person would truly feel the same.

“On the topic of shogi players, when it comes to the fact that they have to admit defeat when they don’t see a way forward, but that wasn’t because all shogi players were obedient, or because all shogi players were gracious losers. It was simply because that was the custom.

“That was how it was legislated.

“So, even if you might be writhing with frustration, even if you don’t want to admit defeat at all, even if you can’t accept the difference in your abilities, even if you believe that ‘There must still be a way,’ you can still say, ‘I’ve lost.’

“You can accept your own loss.

“And forgive yourself for doing so.

“You can think that you don’t feel as though you’ve lost, but you have to because it’s the rules.

“It’s like a form of mediation. Even with an inflexible custom, the more clearly it’s defined, the easier it is to follow.

“Even when told to decide for themselves if they should apologize or not, there will be people that would rather not apologize when deciding for themselves. And for those people, they’ll want an excuse for apologizing.

“They know that it’s better to apologize.

“They just don’t know what the right way to apologize is—and I’d like to confess that I often find myself with the intrusive thought that, rather than just not wanting to apologize, I feel like I shouldn’t be apologizing.

“I very much understand that it makes no sense, but I get this premonition that if I were to apologize there, I’d end up losing something important to me—perhaps my pride, perhaps my dignity, or perhaps something even more important.

“To put it in a weird way, then yes, it felt like I might lose people’s trust in me—if I apologized, I might be able to get through for the time being, but I couldn’t help but feel that it would come back to bite me in the future.

“For the sake of getting through it, I had to endure it.86

“Even though it was actually the opposite. If I didn’t apologize immediately, I’d miss the timing to do so, and I’d regret it for the rest of my life—like how I could no longer apologize for the thoughtless words I’d said to my mother.

“How nice would it have been if there had been some figure to harshly rebuke me and tell me, ‘Apologize to your mother’—well, not someone, but.

“If that sort of spirit existed in the law, how many could it have saved?—at the very least, my mother would have been saved.

“I, too, would have been saved.

“Apologizing is not something people should be compelled to do.

“An apology not given by one’s own volition is meaningless—and perhaps that’s true. But if it’s the law that defines what is wrong, then according to the principle of ‘no punishment without law’, shouldn’t it also be the law that provides the solution?”