Thinking of Drinking

When I was little, I found it so strange.

Why do adults always keep drinking more and more, no matter how drunk they get? And not only that, but then the next day they always look like they’re suffering terribly in their hungover state. What on earth is it that makes them turn to alcohol?

My father is someone who rarely drinks. Before, he would sometimes drink when he was out with someone or when he had visitors over. But unfortunately, because he was not accustomed to drinking and because he had this surplus of pointless energy thanks to all the strength training he did, he would be throwing back shots of whisky like it was water.

Usually, by midnight, he would have fallen into a state of total blackout.

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Hara Setsuko
If you have nothing better to do so you just drink
Actress | 17 June 1920 – 5 September 2015

In the past six months, I have been getting wasted less often.

“What are you talking about? You’re out there getting drunk night after night, swaying back and forth on your stool at the bar while totally out of it!” Well, I don’t know what ordinary people call it. But for me, personally, I would only call that being “slightly tipsy.”

With great anguish, you try to force solid matter and liquid out of your mouth. You have lost your phone, your wallet, even your dignity. Filled with immense regret, you think to yourself, “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t drank.” That’s what it means to be wasted. And by that definition of the word, I have been nowhere near it as of late.

In the past, I was buying a new pair of glasses once every quarter. People would look at me all puzzled and ask, “Are you, like, super particular about your glasses or something?” No, I am not the slightest bit particular about my glasses. It’s just that I would wake up in the morning, and my glasses would be gone. What else could I do in that situation except go and buy new glasses?

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Fujiwara Toshio
If you feel like drinking for eight hours every day
Kickboxer | 3 March 1948 –

From the late 1960s to the early 70s, the Japanese Islands were captivated by a kickboxing boom.

Sawamura Tadashi, the central figure of this craze, was known as “The Demon of Kickboxing.” He was the equivalent to baseball’s Oh Sadaharu and Nagashima Shigeo, or sumo wrestling’s Taiho—a role model for children all over the country.

Sawamura even debuted as a recording artist, gracing the covers of boys’ magazines. It seems somewhat unsettling now, looking back, to imagine some guy with a beard and a crew cut smiling on magazine covers, but so great was Sawamura’s popularity that no one gave it a second thought. Even in the 1980s when I was a grade schooler, the “Vacuum Jump Knee Kick”—Sawamura’s classic move—had still not become an obsolete word, and kids were always imitating him in the hallways. (Although it may have been a strange phenomenon that was endemic only to the Nerima Ward in the outskirts of Tokyo.)

It was due to kickboxing boasting such popularity that then led to the constant mergings and dissolvings of its various organizations, ultimately causing the sport to disappear from the social stage. Right around the final phase of this boom, however, there was another character who made his entrance: Fujiwara Toshio.

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Kasai Zenzo
If you just try and keep drinking without a care in the world
Author | 16 January 1887 – 23 July 1928

Every organization has that one person who is funny to observe from afar, but a complete nuisance in close proximity. They get violent when drunk, knocking down beer bottles, covering themselves in vomit, and habitually exhibiting bizarre, eccentric behavior.

Author of numerous I-novels in the Taisho era (1912–1926), Kasai Zenzo—sometimes called the “Drunkard Author”—could surely be counted among these people.

But even if you’ve heard of him, not many among you will actually know any of his work by name. Some of his representative works include With the Children in Tow and Mourning Father. His work was always grounded in the negative aspects about himself: poverty, drunken frenzy, and illness. While some contemporaries such as Kikuchi Kan criticized his work, saying it was “not literature,” his self-deprecating writing style earned him many fans as well, especially among male students.

But in discussing Zenzo’s writing and his life, it is impossible to do so without also talking about his hardships. Even his breakthrough piece, With the Children in Tow, tells a story about poverty in which a father and his children wander the streets.

What, then, was the source of Zenzo’s hardship? Why was he so very poverty-stricken? Well, in his case, it’s not that he had no work. It’s that he wouldn’t work.

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Umezaki Haruo
If you start drinking methanol
Author | 15 February 1915 – 19 July 1965

There was a time when my body would not accept sake. Whenever I drank it, I would always feel unwell the next morning. I was a big beer drinker at the time, so I figured that perhaps sake just wasn’t for me.

But as I became a working adult and got more opportunities to drink the stuff at fancier places, I realized something: what I had been drinking back then had not been the real deal. See, what with me being so broke, I would have to go out drinking in more dubious places, and I’m guessing what I had been drinking there had actually been cheap, synthetic sake.

Synthetic sake is, in a narrow sense of the word, different from actual sake. It’s an alcoholic beverage which includes amino acids and other food additives, but of course I had no clue about any of this back then. Some of you might now be scolding me. “Who cares what it is as long as it gets you drunk. Don’t be such a damn snob.”

It’s true that there are people out there who do not care what it is they’re drinking so long as it contains alcohol. Some people can drink anything and everything and still be completely fine. Be that as it may, there are plenty of examples in history of people who—because of their single-minded desire to get drunk—chose the wrong kind of alcohol to drink, and it nearly cost them their lives.

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