"A Man with No Talents"

Japan: Past/Present

5/30/06

Through the narration of Oyama Shiro in A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, we enter the San’ya, a neighborhood of the lower economic class in Tokyo. Oyama describes in detail the world of day laborers, but the real picture we get of the mentality and perspective of these people comes from Oyama’s perspective; his expectations and the way he presents his story tell us much more about the state of things. While this man’s life is not a representative example of the common experience in contemporary Japan, it can illustrate aspects of contemporary Japanese society.

One of these aspects is a tendency to define oneself by what others think: even after describing specific instances which would suggest otherwise throughout his book, Oyama declares himself in his postscript to be “in short, a man with no talents who is incapable of relating to women or coping with work.” While we see from his memoir that the quip about women is based in some fact, his assertion of being incapable of coping with work is obviously false. The justification he offers for this idea of himself which he takes to be true is that he is “confident that the self-portrait… offer[ed] here is in fact an objective assessment of how people regard” him (128).

The living situation in the San’ya is characterized by a distinct lack of privacy; Oyama lives in a doya, or a room shared by 8 tenants with hanging curtains to divide separate space. Numerous examples are given in the first chapter of A Man with No Talents of the ways in which these spaces made living privately impossible: noise carries very well, and one can hear everything from the neighbor’s curtain’s scraping open and shut to the pages of their books turning. Resolved as he is to an austere existence and used to a room the size of a single tatami mat, Oyama even thinks that life in this doya is rather extravagant.

The tendency for self-assessment based on the ideas of others pervades the thinking of the day-laborers as Oyama describes them. There are constant struggles of ego between workers. “If you talk to any day-laborer (myself included), you’ll soon discover… They’re all dying to feel superior to the next man,” (36) he says, remarking on how unusual it was to work with another laborer who didn’t have this tendency. The worker in question, Tsukamoto-san, tells Oyama that he is considering going into the forest and committing suicide; Tsukamoto’s main concern is that his family won’t learn of his death. “[Tsukamoto] wanted nothing more than to vanish from this world without his family or relatives ever learning about it,” (39) a desire which reflects the pressure he must have felt from his family.

Other workers play this game of one-upmanship in ways appropriate to their differing personalities. One they call the Masked Man who was certainly “possessed of an enormous ego… he was always ready with a barb for someone else whenever the chance arose” (45).

This vanishing-from-the-world is sought by the day workers as a state of being, because it removes them from the standards of society and allows them a greater degree of self-ownership. “Ever since I was a boy, I felt that I would never be able to survive in the world of ordinary adults,” Oyama tells us, beginning his first descriptions of his early past. “I always believed that I could never lead the life of a normal human being: to go out into society and find a job, to marry a woman and raise a family” (112). Such fatalist reasoning seems to have led him to his current place in the world.

In a highly stratified society, belonging to a group which is totally off the map allows people autonomy. On one of his walks, Oyama points out that the middle-aged government employee women don’t acknowledge him, though they “[would] cross paths three to six times per week (I myself was a middle aged man, after all, and a day laborer to boot); we simply lowered our gaze and passed each other in silence” (70). Still he is pleased that the hobby of walking which he’s taken up for himself is eccentric because it means he is independent, and looks forward to a homeless wandering life.

“No significant class distinctions obtain between San’ya day laborers living in doya and those living on the street,” he observes (73). In the author’s postscript, we read that Oyama is now homeless and living off of the prize money which A Man with No Talents won him. “Money had given me freedom of a peculiar kind: the freedom to disassociate myself from my fellow man,” (123) he says, confirming the fact that, for one who has so internalized a societal tendency to seeks definition through others, independence comes with severing ties with the rest of humanity.

When he describes what led him to day labor, Oyama tells us how he was first convinced that he wasn’t the type of person for a married, career life, and how “as if to brush aside this conviction, [he] drove [him]self excessively for periods of time in an effort to adapt to the ways of society (which is to say, the corporations I worked for)” (112). He seems to define by success in societal terms by this discussion as a product of one’s ability to conform; this is a sort of exaggerated version of the tendency to rely on others for definition.

“Of Course I can’t live out my life in a place like this (that is, in some corporation, or society in general), I told myself with profound satisfaction,” Oyama writes (112). The alternative was to fall through the cracks, and San’ya offers this opportunity. As a day laborer you are overlooked by society at large apart from interactions with the welfare system. In fact, as Oyama sees it, the life he lived as a day-laborer was the only place for him: “I shudder to think of what might have happened to me had there been no social outlet in Japan like Kamagasaki or San’ya” (113). If it weren’t for the option of the day-laborer’s life, he seems certain he would’ve ended up in a mental institution.

The day-laborer community has the advantage of being transient and invisible, a place where “a man who had showed up two or three times a week for years on end might suddenly disappear and never be heard from again” (33). Many of the denizens, including the author, seem to suffer from at least a mild form of clinical depression. The most marked manifestation of this in the book happens during an economic recession, when Oyama stops working and talking to people for nearly a year. “I spent one idle day after the next living off the meager savings I’d socked away during the bubble years,” he explains, “I did absolutely nothing” (64). Only when this state of affairs lends itself to a physical illness does he seek to change his ways, and this is when he takes up the practice of walking.

Oyama doesn’t drink or gamble, but he describes the San’ya as a place where alcoholism and gambling run rampant. “I’d say that fewer than a tenth of the day laborers in San’ya are nondrinkers,” he says, and “San’ya day laborers who don’t gamble… also number fewer than 10 percent of the total” (67). The third vice, which he admits he is occasionally party to, is prostitution; Oyama estimates less than 20% of the day laborers frequent prostitutes.

Though he calls winning the Kaiko Takeshi Prize for the A Man with No Talents manuscript, “really the only major achievement of [his] life,” “apart from attending a “reasonably good second-tier public university” (129). The author’s postscript happily mentions “relief… felt when the publisher granted [Oyama’s] timid request to absent [himself] from the award ceremony,” for he was very anxious about it. The author is utterly convinced of his own worthlessness. He declares himself to be “in real life… an even more dull-witted and unattractive person than the one who appears in the pages of this book” (129).

The general tendency to look to others for a portion of their personal identity is a current among others in the contemporary Japanese consciousness; through the story of Oyama Shiro the consequences of an extreme form of this kind of thinking can be seen. The community members of the San’ya described in his book reflect this general trend as well: the ones Oyama gets close enough to in order to know well express similar wishes to dissolve themselves as Tsukamoto-san’s wish to vanish. Indeed, we see the fulfillment of Oyama’s version of this dream in the last paragraph of the book: “even if my present life… cannot be called a happy one, the fact that it has become an exceedingly tranquil one… which has liberated me from the demons of fear and uncertainty and profound anxiety that had constantly threatened to overwhelm my previous existence – brings me no little satisfaction” (130).