Banana Yoshimoto on Why They Earned Their Sister's Medical Bills on note, and the Choices They Make to Keep Writing as a Novelist

According to Yoshimoto, the motivation for writing the article was quite concrete. They had figured that if around 3 million yen came in, it would get them through the immediate crisis. In a situation where their sister might die if treatment was delayed, Yoshimoto first considered writing a book. But books take time to come out. Feeling that they needed money right away, they turned it into a note article "with a fairly casual attitude," and it spread in a way even they hadn't anticipated. In the end, Yoshimoto says, they earned roughly that 3 million yen.

On the very day the article went up, the hospital called. The sister's test results were poor, and if they went home without being admitted, they might die—what did Yoshimoto want to do? As the only family member, Yoshimoto was asked to make the call, but since the sister herself was saying they would go home rather than stay on a 24-hour IV drip, and was an adult, there was nothing to be done. With that in mind, Yoshimoto agreed. It was a period when exchanges like this happened every day, they say.

Because the sister wasn't admitted, they went to something like an emergency center every day to get an IV and then went home, paying each time. Even with insurance, it cost tens of thousands of yen a day. The money should eventually come back under the high-cost medical expense benefit, but at first Yoshimoto didn't know about that system and wondered what on earth to do. It wasn't that Yoshimoto had no savings. But they felt it would be wrong to pour everything into their sister until their savings hit zero, and after considering various options, they landed on note.

Yoshimoto says there are misconceptions about their sister's illness. People tend to assume the house was so messy that rats got in, but in terms of tidiness, the house was clean. It was a clean house in which the rats had multiplied, which made it all the more insidious, and Yoshimoto thinks that's probably why no one noticed until it got this far. The hospital's diagnosis was an infection and cellulitis, in which the tissue under the skin becomes badly inflamed and swollen. Yoshimoto still genuinely believes the rats were the cause, but says the hospital can't diagnose it that way. The number of rats was beyond imagining. When the sister's fever was around 40 degrees, Yoshimoto even wondered whether their mind had gone.

The sister read the article too. At first they were fuming, but when Yoshimoto told them money had come in, the reaction was "I see," and the mood now isn't bad, Yoshimoto says. Still, the sister is the lonely type and wants emotional support more than money. Yoshimoto has kept turning that down because they're too busy, and looking back, they say it was good that they were able to say "no is no" on that point.

The interviewer brought up the example of Sakamoto-chan, who kept giving money to family after breaking through. Yoshimoto says they often hear about cases like that. When illness or caregiving is involved, the person who has the money has no choice but to pay. Yoshimoto says they have the sense of having poured most of their savings into their parents. Asked about the gap between this and the public image of "a genius novelist who has always sold well," Yoshimoto replied that they don't think they've been selling well for all that long.

Incidentally, Yoshimoto says they watch Gairoku ch a lot, and when the appearance was confirmed, their child was thrilled. When Yoshimoto won awards in the past, the child would only say things like "How much do you get?" or "Buy me something," so Yoshimoto laughed that they were happy the child respected them this time.

Yoshimoto sold well early on and their work even appeared in school textbooks, but they say they grew up in an unassuming old downtown neighborhood. Their father (Takaaki Yoshimoto) didn't earn much as a poet and was a literary critic. Life was the kind where the father would walk from the house in Sendagi to Yanaka Ginza for a change of pace and buy prepared dishes. The mother collapsed at one point, the asthma attacks grew severe, and pushing themselves was no longer possible, so from around the time Yoshimoto was in high school, the father prepared the meals. "Yanaka Ginza was cooking for us," Yoshimoto laughs. The sister, seven years older, spent about seven years at a university in Kyoto and rarely came home.

Yoshimoto explains the origin of becoming a writer as a matter of "conviction." The father worked at home, so as a child, Yoshimoto had no sense of going out to work. And since the sister, who was good at drawing, had pictures, Yoshimoto figured theirs must be writing—an offhand either-or decision—and once they had convinced themselves of it, things somehow worked out. Even accounting for the seven-year age gap, the sister was exceptionally good at drawing, good enough to win prizes at school.

There were also many self-employed people in the neighborhood, such as eyeglass craftsmen, so Yoshimoto thought work was something you did inside the house. Looking back, Yoshimoto thinks it was probably a good thing that they made the decision before learning that there were all kinds of occupations.

Yoshimoto started writing around age five, and what they wrote were stories, not diaries. Mystery-ish things, occult-ish things, stories with ghosts in them—"content not all that different from now," they say. The readers were always friends, and when someone said "I like this main character," Yoshimoto would write another story with that character. Exchange diaries were also popular, so there were a great many occasions to write. The mother didn't say anything in particular, and Yoshimoto didn't show the writing to their father or sister.

From around the time Yoshimoto was in second grade, the mother began being taken away by ambulance repeatedly because of asthma. The house they lived in then got little sunlight, and Yoshimoto says that, thinking about it now, it was no wonder someone got sick there. During Yoshimoto's childhood, the mother was fully occupied with their own health, and the children's attitude was, "Mom's having a hard time right now, so let's stay quiet upstairs." While the mother went to the hospital, the children were left with the neighbors, where they played, ate dinner, and then came home. So childhood itself wasn't that problematic, Yoshimoto says.

Things changed after the sister finished seven years of university and came back. The sister didn't take a job and instead became a manga artist, working from home. The mother began to interfere heavily. Perhaps lonely after seven years of living alone, the sister may actually have welcomed it at first, Yoshimoto suspects. A mother in poor health and a sister who stayed home—"two people with time on their hands got matched up"—and Yoshimoto, then somewhere between the second year of high school and university, watched the relationship harden.

Yoshimoto's guess is that the mother had some kind of neurosis. The mother lived stably until around 50, but Yoshimoto thinks a sudden lull, after being busy helping with the coterie-style magazine the father published, may have coincided with the daughter's return home. Yoshimoto also said it probably didn't help that the two started playing Dragon Quest together and got far too absorbed in it. Later on, whenever the sister went out, the mother would call every few minutes.

The father didn't just leave it alone either; Yoshimoto says the father did everything possible, saying things like, "Aren't you two spending way too much time together?" When the sister began tagging along to the mother's lessons like an attendant, the mother's friends became the sister's friends, and the sister ended up with no friends of their own—a vicious cycle. But the sister was the type who found going out a hassle, and didn't seem to mind much. Yoshimoto, meanwhile, was always staying over at a boyfriend's place at the time, and thought, "At this rate, my sister's never going to get a boyfriend."

Yoshimoto has also thought about why the two siblings treat the mother differently. During the seven years before Yoshimoto was born, the mother was healthy and fun-loving, and the father's friends would come over and everyone would have a lively time. Because that happy period took root in the sister's heart, the sister probably never thought "Mom is such a pain" the way Yoshimoto did. From around the time Yoshimoto was born, the mother was often bedridden, and Yoshimoto was raised almost entirely by the father. Their image of the mother is of someone lying in bed who would get angry if you made noise. Yoshimoto thinks that showed up in the difference in how each of them dealt with it.

Having closely observed people in order to write novels, Yoshimoto also watched the mother as one such subject. That's why they thought, "If this goes on, it's going to get bad." Even so, once the two became a pair, there was no stopping it. If it had been just one of them, Yoshimoto might have been able to do something, and looking back, they think they could have tried a little harder. But Yoshimoto added that the sister also allowed themselves to be drawn in.

Yoshimoto's debut came about when their graduation project at Nihon University College of Art won a prize. Thinking this could work, they didn't take a job, and instead worked part-time at a café while submitting to new-writer prizes, and won one. That was Kitchen. It was their first year of part-time work; the book then became a huge hit, and Yoshimoto left home. Yoshimoto thinks they were able to distance themselves from the family situation because they aren't gloomy by nature, and could think "Ugh, there they go again" and just go off somewhere on their own and write.

Of the drastic change in their life, Yoshimoto says it was "the time in my life when I most wondered what on earth to do." Nowadays they would do tax planning and take tax measures, and if they had done so back then, they could still be taking it easy now, they say. Royalties for each print run come in about three months later. Even little by little, the total was large, and a big chunk was taken in taxes the first year. In a panic, they took out a loan with the remaining money and bought a workspace for about 90 million yen during the bubble era. This was in their early twenties. The location was settled when the father casually said "This looks nice, doesn't it?" and a real estate agent who was a friend of the father's sealed the deal. Yoshimoto smiles wryly that they would be much choosier now.

The father was overtaken by their child in sales, but was not the least bit envious, Yoshimoto says. The father had a "me is me, others are others" personality; the only advice was that since Yoshimoto was now socially recognized as a full-fledged adult, they should carry themselves accordingly. When the interviewer compared Yoshimoto to "the literary version of Hikaru Utada," Yoshimoto responded, "It really was like that."

Yoshimoto attributes their success to "timing." During the bubble, everyone was living flashy lives, but people were neglecting their hearts and felt lonely, and anxiety about what would come next was widespread. A lonely story fit perfectly into that. Yoshimoto said they think that was the power of the times, not their own.

On the other hand, Yoshimoto has been aware since childhood of being a good writer. They wrote friends' compositions for them, changing the style to match each friend's personality. They would ask a friend about something fun from the summer and write it up like reportage or a documentary. They would include things the friend hadn't noticed but seemed to care about, and win the teacher's heart. Some of those friends even won prizes. Yoshimoto says they're still good at writing the qualities that make someone who they are, qualities the person themselves hasn't noticed. Yoshimoto says the reason they observe people is that they wanted to write novels.

Yoshimoto never won the Akutagawa Prize or the Naoki Prize, but says they had no desire to. After Kitchen came out, a publisher called and asked, "Do you want to win the prize?" If so, they wanted Yoshimoto to write the next work with them. Yoshimoto answered that they had already promised it elsewhere and might not be able to, and that was the end of it. Later, when Yoshimoto asked that company's president, "Why didn't you give it to me?" the answer was that it's meant for new writers. Yoshimoto speculates that the editorial department has some input in selecting the shortlist, after which the selection committee deliberates seriously. Yoshimoto also remembers getting a call saying "You didn't win" while traveling in New Caledonia. Winning a prize later for Tugumi may have been the only Japanese prize they won as a new writer, they say. Abroad, Yoshimoto received a prize from the Italian town of Scanno. The prize was a gold bar, and when they tried to bring it home in a convenience-store bag, they were stopped at customs.

Yoshimoto was busy right from their debut, but never wanted to quit, though there were times they wanted to rest. They got by with little bits of rest, going to karaoke with tremendous vigor, and complaining to the mama-san of a snack bar. But their body was tired, and they collapse at turning points in age. In their thirties, they collapsed once and were hospitalized, and used that as an opportunity to move and cut back on work. When you're in the hospital, you can't do anything and time is wasted. Yoshimoto realized in their thirties that if they didn't want to go through that, they had to rest.

During a period when they kept turning down interviews, they even started being photographed secretly. Their twenties were busy, leaving no room to think about marriage or children. Since they couldn't meet up otherwise, boyfriends ended up more or less living at their place. The partners were often financially worse off than Yoshimoto, but each had their own home and job, and Yoshimoto wasn't supporting them, they say.

Around age 39, Yoshimoto began living with their current husband. Thinking children would be impossible at that age, they talked about getting lots of animals instead, and just after they had gotten a dog, cats, and a turtle, Yoshimoto became pregnant. They gave birth at 40. "I really thought I was going to die," Yoshimoto says. "This is something you should do while you're young." The morning sickness was terrible, but they kept writing through it.

Yoshimoto says they never become unable to write. There are times when they write while thinking it isn't interesting even to themselves, but they keep going with the sense that if two lines survive, that's a win, and then keep the two interesting lines and rearrange them. Being able to do that is why they're fine, they explained.

When Yoshimoto gave birth, their mother was still alive and doted on the grandchild. After Yoshimoto left home, their relationship with the mother wasn't bad. Yoshimoto could refuse the mysterious summonses of "You come too" with "No way," but the sister was the type who couldn't say no and went along with all of them. After the grandchild was born, the mother often told Yoshimoto, "You don't need to come, just send the grandchild."

When Yoshimoto first received a large sum of money, they didn't even know to keep receipts. It was a situation where, for example, if 100 million yen came in, about 70 million would go to taxes. If they had rented a workspace separate from their home, it would have counted as a business expense, and now they wonder why they were working from home. The parents had never had money coming in either, and were naive about such things. The father didn't earn much and belonged to a generation that would give lectures even for free. Yoshimoto gradually learned what business expenses were, but the family didn't.

Day-to-day living was covered by the father's income. But for major repairs, or when the house needed to be adapted for the elderly or have an elevator installed, Yoshimoto supported them as much as they could. That transitioned "seamlessly" into supporting the sister. The trigger was when the father, mother, and sister were all hospitalized at the same time. The father died there, the mother was hospitalized for half a year, and the sister was in and out of the hospital repeatedly. Yoshimoto kept paying, saying "I'll just cover the hospital bills for now," without really knowing who was getting what, and as they went one by one, the sister was the one who remained. Yoshimoto paid for the sister's major surgery. With the sister, it's never something like a wedding gift; it's usually a matter of life or death, so they have no choice but to pay, Yoshimoto says.

Both the husband and the son are only children, so Yoshimoto is often asked, "You've already left home, haven't you?" and "Grandpa and Grandma are dead, so why?" Yoshimoto has answered that siblings are at least somewhat connected. The couple manages their household finances strictly separately, and Yoshimoto hasn't broken that boundary. The thinking was that since they were doing it within their means, it was fine. But after turning 60, they started running out of spare capacity.

The 12 million yen mentioned in the note article was not a cumulative total but an amount given at one time, Yoshimoto says. The family home was owned but built on leased land, and with the Olympics, land prices rose and the lease renewal fee suddenly tripled. Thinking it was wrong to keep supporting them indefinitely, Yoshimoto told the sister it was meant as an inheritance given in advance, and shared part of the money from selling a house. Yoshimoto hoped the sister would live on that for a while, but the sister spent it on a cat's illness. The sister spends nothing at all on themselves. They always wear short sleeves and have no interest in clothes or travel. They're someone who can only spend money on a little drinking for themselves and, without limit, on cats. Giving someone money and then asking in detail how they use it is like a salary, and not good—thinking so, Yoshimoto didn't ask, and that backfired: the money vanished into treatment for a cat that had to go to the vet about every other day.

The sister loves animals, which is probably why they couldn't kill the rats either, Yoshimoto says. The sister still says that they were able to keep living because of the cats. Yoshimoto thinks the sister has a love-hate relationship with the mother. Yoshimoto's own view is not love-hate but "just objectivity," they say. Things like this happen in every family to some degree; relationships build up bit by bit, and once built up, they can't be torn down. But Yoshimoto stressed that nothing has been built up between them and the sister; they have simply been doing what they could with their spare means.

Yoshimoto says the criticism online didn't bother them at all. Their explanation is that only the title suggested it; they didn't do crowdfunding, never once solicited money, and delivered the piece as entertainment. They say they're glad the money from the article went to good use for their sister.

On whether their writing still fits the times, Yoshimoto describes themselves as "still just barely on the edge of becoming an out-of-touch old fogey." They judge it by feel and don't use the reaction as a metric. Young readers are living their youth, people around Yoshimoto's age are living old age, and middle-aged people are living middle age. When they wrote the piece, they felt they were still active and that it was fine to put it out. They weren't aiming for anything; it was more like, if two or three million yen came in, it would be good to be able to cover the treatment. As for current sales, Yoshimoto said they "really can't say."

Yoshimoto says they don't think the writing is all that great. They think a real grown-up would use this money to go to a casino or build a vacation home, but they say they'll earnestly give it to their sister. When Yoshimoto told their husband they intended to at least keep the royalties if it became a book, the husband said, "You wrote it and you earned it, so why are you giving it to your sister?" But the husband has few desires either, and the height of luxury for them is eating sushi, so the mood is one of resignation. During the bubble era, Yoshimoto had plenty of experiences like going abroad on someone else's money and partying wildly, but says it wasn't fun. Luxury inns are usually secluded and not interesting either, because Yoshimoto wants to go out into town and observe people. Yoshimoto thinks they'd be annoyed if the sister started driving a Mercedes, but the sister is only interested in animals and izakaya. The Yoshimoto household isn't in financial hardship either, so whoever can give should give. Meanwhile, Yoshimoto may be able to save some money too, they say—they're planning their life in an ordinary way.

The person Yoshimoto named as someone they envy was Haruki Murakami. When Murakami is invited by a university abroad and lives for about a year in places like Hawaii or Boston, teaching classes is a condition. Yoshimoto envies Murakami's character, which allows doing only the bare minimum of one class. Yoshimoto, by contrast, would think one wasn't enough and end up doing four or five, expending a huge amount of effort. Even if Murakami contributes in other ways, Yoshimoto says they lack that "good kind of audacity" and negotiating skill to draw the line cleanly.

Yoshimoto has been the target of scams; usually they get away at the last line of defense, but sometimes they don't notice until it's too late. There has been only one major loss. A tax accountant asked them to be a guarantor and then skipped town, and what was supposed to be a 4-million-yen loan turned out to be 20 million, Yoshimoto says. Since a tax accountant knows all about your assets, the accountant must have been counting on that; Yoshimoto thought it was deliberate. Since then, they have never again acted as a guarantor. Real learning only comes from getting burned and then acting on it, they say.

There actually weren't many periods when they got carried away, Yoshimoto says. There's only so much they can do anyway. About the only time was when they ordered room service on a publisher's dime and thought, "Maybe I'm getting a bit full of myself," and now they think they could have gotten a little more carried away. They just can't get used to the lifestyle of the rich; condominiums with a 24-hour concierge who holds your packages give them goosebumps. Asked why they never lost their footing, Yoshimoto answered that it was because they kept writing steadily. It's a job you can't do if you're out and about, they say.

Yoshimoto makes a point of turning down work that doesn't excite them. Among the hardest is work for the national government or local authorities, and advertising is the same, they say. When there are lots of prohibitions, it isn't fun. They're told not to use this word, not to write about the imperial family. Even when it's obvious and something they wouldn't write anyway, it feels burdensome. Yoshimoto says they want to write freely. It was around the time they published the note article that they made a clean decision to stop doing this kind of work. Until then, they had also been doing work related to the Expo, which they say was fun.

As another way of raising money besides the article, they say they were seriously considering carrying around a donation box for 500-yen coins and asking the many people they normally meet to chip in.

Government work doesn't pay especially well, but it's stable, because once you do one job, more keep coming. Government bodies and companies have an unwritten line about who is "safe to use," and once you've appeared somewhere, it's taken as fine to ask you, and the work comes one after another. Because it kept their name recognition nicely stable, Yoshimoto continued for a while, but it didn't suit them. The interviewer named Tadao Ando and Tadanori Yokoo as the pinnacle of people who handle government work without compromising their art, and Yoshimoto agreed. Yoshimoto says the decision came at a time when they had thought they might be heading down that path. They figured that if they wrote that their family home was overrun with rats and their sister was on the verge of welfare, this kind of work would stop coming. In other words, the note article was also a break with that path. That kind of work carries something like an image fee, worth more than ten 20,000-yen jobs, they say.

At this age, Yoshimoto felt that work like attending vague meetings to give opinions or becoming some vague adviser or board member seemed likely to suddenly increase. They didn't want that either. It's not that they want to compete; they want to keep writing. For that, they need to stay home, and they can't write if they're attending meetings. When the interviewer described turning down an offer from a dental clinic to become an adviser for "500,000 yen a month just for the title," Yoshimoto responded that it was "the same structure." It's because such roles make you less free, for example by preventing you from working for rival companies.

Still, Yoshimoto acknowledged that this kind of work satisfies one's self-esteem. A friend's mother says, "You did that thing for the government, how impressive," or "I saw you on NHK." When a bar's mama-san said, "Your books haven't been selling at all lately, what are you doing?" answering that they were doing government work made explaining easy. Yoshimoto said they suspect few adults can resist that ease.

It's tough for novelists to make a living from novels alone, Yoshimoto says. They heard from a certain writer that perhaps only four or five, or five or six, people in Japan live off novels alone. While saying they don't know if that's true, Yoshimoto says many work as school lecturers and the like. It's a truly difficult job, and they wouldn't recommend it.

As for closing off that path themselves, Yoshimoto says that when they weighed which was better, they decided it was better for their sister to be alive. Yoshimoto also thinks the times are bad. In the past, if you could draw a little or had once made a name for yourself, there were lots of small jobs that would let you make a living. Now nobody asks, and writers and photographers are struggling with less work. The sister manages the father's copyrights, and with the trickle of royalties from the father's books, royalties from their own books, and work doing illustrations or a few pages of manga, the sister should have been able to live normally. Due to the recession, AI, and so on, people in their seventies today may be struggling. Pensions aren't enough either. Yoshimoto thinks quite a few people are suffering because things suddenly got harder.

The ways Yoshimoto has earned money outside of novels belonged to a world separate from novels: vague lectures, interviews about whether they do health exercises, blurbs for book jackets, and comments for films. A film comment pays roughly 20,000 yen, so doing 100 of them comes to 2 million yen. That's how they've managed, they say.

During the worst period, they were writing while eating and running the washing machine with their foot. Their parents needed care, their child had started at a private university, and there was a home loan. It was so painful that they can't remember it now, they say. For freelancers, it's hard to get a fixed-rate loan like Flat 35, so they could only choose a variable rate. Since rates usually go up, they didn't want to take a long time paying it off. From a certain point on, they were constantly chasing money. After 40 years of such "extra stuff," problems appeared in their hands and knees, along with diabetes and sudden hearing loss. Just as they turned 60 and thought, "This way of doing things isn't going to work anymore," their sister collapsed, leading to the current chain of events, Yoshimoto said.

Yoshimoto intends to keep writing novels until they can no longer construct a story. They plan to stop if they reach the state of a film where none of the foreshadowing pays off and you're left asking, "What was that thing that showed up earlier?" They think essays and appearances like this one will probably decrease. Half-jokingly, Yoshimoto also said that if they start writing novels like "It's fun living with ten beautiful young men," people should take it as a sign they've become an out-of-touch old fogey.

Asked how having a child changed their creative work, Yoshimoto said they were grateful for the trends the child brought home. Hip-hop, idols, and so on—they had no choice but to learn about them, and came to understand what young people think is good. If they had lived only among older people, time would have stood still, they say.

On the theory that creators are better off without families, Yoshimoto responded, "If that's enough to ruin you, then weren't you no good to begin with?" They added that it might be an excuse from people who were popular with the opposite sex, and that it seemed widespread from the late '90s to around 2000. But it's true that it takes your time, and raising a child was the most time-consuming thing there is, they added.

The sister was angry at first, but after reading it carefully, said Yoshimoto hadn't misunderstood anything at all. Because the sister "isn't stupid," they properly understood what Yoshimoto was trying to say, Yoshimoto says. About the relationship with the mother, the sister says the mother did have a certain amount of love, and had good sides that Yoshimoto never saw. Having seen many of those good sides up close, the sister's way of relating was completely different. But the sister also says the controlling aspect was really hard.

Yoshimoto received many messages from people in similar situations about the article. People who are "not exactly abused, but troubled"; people whose parents ask for money every month and who send it, but sometimes really struggle. Yoshimoto says they're glad if the article opened up a breathing hole for such people—the sense that it's okay to say this, okay to feel controlled even though they were so loved.

Yoshimoto had thought that parental control peaks in early childhood, but it seems there are also many cases where parent and child suddenly become like friends after the child grows up, they say. This takes shape especially rapidly when the parent is in their fifties and the child around their thirties. What happens inside a home becomes normalized, and people stop thinking it's strange. Some people wonder why they're paying so much. Others, as in Yoshimoto's case, have actually lost a sibling and regret not knowing what they should have done. Hearing such stories, Yoshimoto felt glad they had written it. Their own heart was also "saved along with the money," Yoshimoto says. They had thought something more frightening would happen, but whatever people said, they felt grateful.

In an essay, Yoshimoto writes about a "happiness sensor." Having observed tens of thousands of people in many countries and from many angles, they can tell where a person is going to stumble. They think they've looked at people as much as a fortune-teller has, and can tell even if people don't confide their troubles directly. As long as you're pursuing what you love, you're fine, but even fan activities are bad if taken too far. Whether the person can see how far they've gone is something you can tell by looking at them. Everyone has a blind spot—one area they just can't see, Yoshimoto says.

Yoshimoto can recognize their own warning signs. When they start craving greasy food, it's a sign they're about to collapse. It's also bad when things other than novels start taking up a bigger share. When work like government jobs increases, and they haven't taken things to the dry cleaner and the house gets a bit messy, their creativity drops. When novels take up a large share, they're very stable. They grasped this sense around their thirties, and say that struggling to balance it with child-rearing taught them a sense of balance. Asked what's needed to juggle child-rearing, work, and caregiving, they said sleep comes first, then diet. But it's not about eating three balanced meals a day; it's whether you're eating in a way that suits you. When the interviewer said, "When my weight goes over 90 kg, I get sleepy and can't concentrate," Yoshimoto responded that knowing your own tendencies like that makes a big difference.

In the sister's case, it was the line between "loving animals" and "rats being different." That line wavered for a moment, Yoshimoto says. Previously, a tanuki had gotten into the sister's house and would sleep in front of the toilet and such. It smelled and was a nuisance, so the sister would put it in a cloth bag and release it on a faraway mountain. But once, a startled tanuki fell from the second floor, broke a bone, and died. Also, while the sister was scaring off crows that came to eat the cats' food with a slingshot, they hit a pigeon and killed it. The sister was devastated at having killed wild animals despite loving animals. The sister as they normally are would surely have dealt with the rats before they multiplied that much. But Yoshimoto thinks these two incidents made the sister feel they never wanted to do that again. That's why people waver, and everyone should take a good look at themselves, Yoshimoto said.

When the interviewer said they felt you could succeed at any age and fall at any age, Yoshimoto responded, "Every single moment truly holds opportunity and dangerous traps, and that's life." Finally, asked whether they had ever thought of themselves as a genius, Yoshimoto said no. They are the "quiet, plugging-away type," and envy the sharp, genius type who can dash things off while drinking and eating, they answered.