Equal in points to your past self. Naoki Matayoshi’s thoughts on time and humanity can be found here

–You have just published your first collection of essays in about 10 years since “Tokyo 100 Views.” It’s a whopping 360 pages.

If you add up all the manuscripts that had piled up, the total number exceeded 200. Just the essays alone were about 80 long ones, and the same number of short ones, so it ended up getting quite big.

–While the work is based on the serialized version on the official community site “Moon and Prose,” there is a disclaimer at the end that reads, “Significant revisions and additions have been made to the book.” This is a common disclaimer for books that compile serialized works, but it seems unusual for essays.

That’s right. I think that most essay collections that compile serialized works are left as is, but I made a lot of changes to this one.

About 30 were used as is, and for the rest I lined up the things I had written and made changes like, “This and this one have overlapping points, so let’s use one of them,” or “Let’s combine this and this,” or I’d make changes like, “When I first wrote it, I stopped here, but I think it might be more interesting if I dig deeper,” and so on, and the number doubled.

That’s the kind of addition and restructuring that’s done. There were already many stories in this book, but there are more than 10 that I wrote for the first time.

I write them every week, and since essays are basically prose, some days they have a diary or journal-like aspect to them.

So sometimes the ending is quite negative, depending on how I feel at the time, and when I reread it, I thought to myself, “Is this really okay? Maybe there’s more I can do,” and rewrote some parts.

–You just said, “I’m already 42 years old,” but in the book you often refer to yourself as a “middle-aged man.” At what age did you start describing yourself like that?

I feel like I’m around 37-38 years old. The meaning of the word “middle-aged” is around the mid-30s, or maybe it could be earlier, but for me, that’s when you start middle-aged.

I think the reason I say it like that is because, to my shame, I feel that the themes and challenges I have in mind don’t match my actual age.

I think there is a gap of about 10 years. I wrote the novel “Hibana” when I was 34, but it is a story about my 20s to 30s, and I am looking back on that time.

In the next piece I wrote, “Theatre,” I look at the things I was thinking about in my twenties objectively, but it still feels like there’s a certain subjectivity mixed in.

So I thought to myself, “I’m a grown adult now,” but since I was about 38, I’ve always wanted to find the next stage, or the next theme.