I.D Essay Book - A Thrilling Weakness! A Life of Lost Property

In Japan currently and got my hands on Maaya's essay book/photo book 'I.D' when I went to her concert in Osaka. It's really good. I had no idea she wrote such interesting essays. Her I.D entries are one thing (some of them are in the book) but she's just genuinely good at writing. The essays are all really interesting. I'll try to translate them as I can but some are pretty long. Anyway, here's one from the book for you:

“A Thrilling Weakness! A Life of Lost Property”

If I were to describe the amount of things I have lost it would be extraordinary. From childhood right up until the present, I have lost something somewhere everyday. Every time it happens it is at the time a bitter experience and very regretful but why can’t I remedy this habit.

It was completely normal to lose textbooks and homework. Forgetting my gym kit on the day of the school sports festival, forgetting my camera on class trips, the loss of the remote control to a stereo I just bought (I still haven’t found it): this power is displayed upon the moment of ‘Oh, it was here!’.

Even since becoming an adult, after many incidents of forgetting things when going home, finally the staff began to make sure that when it was time to go that ‘Have you forgotten anything?’ How shameful. Once after I had appeared on a TV talk show I went home with the pin microphone still attached to me.

After living this life where I have just about forgotten more or less everything, my nerves have thickened to the point where it doesn’t bother me anymore. When I became an adult I learnt the art of being able to get over losing things by buying them again as soon as I lost them, the power of money. Although I have somehow avoided any huge disasters up until now, there have been many instances of forgetting things that couldn’t be made better with money.

One thing was something that happened when I was a university student.

I was tired from work being particularly busy and being in the middle of my midterm exams. Unexpectedly receiving a day off from all this I went out to a department store. It was right in the middle of the winter sale season. Get rid of stress by buying lots of things! I shopped until my legs were stiff. Then, when I was tired I went into a café and drank tea by myself. As I was doing this a friend rang me.

“Maaya, what are you doing?!” this seemed very serious.

“Huh? Right now? Shopping.”

“Today’s our Chai exam, stupid!”

I felt myself going pale. Hmm, now that you say that…it feels a bit like there was something like that today…

By the way, the ‘Chai’ exam she was talking about was the Chinese language module that I was taking. It was compulsory. If I failed ‘Chai’ it would be really bad. And if I didn’t turn up for the test my overall grade would drop considerably. On top of that the teacher in charge was pretty scary and I wasn’t that good at it anyway…

Without saying more than that I rushed home and phoned my teacher. I don’t remember the exact excuse I gave to her but probably that I was so sick that I couldn’t stand to leave the house even one step, I hadn’t even gotten to the phone before I had fallen over etc. I think it was something like that. A blatant lie but there was nothing for it. I knew it was pretty obvious that she’d seen through it but I couldn’t take it back after I’d said it. There was no way in hell that she’d be willing to let it go if I’d just said ‘I just forgot’.

Although she made a face about it, I somehow was given a chance to retake the test. However, she’d only recognise more than a 50% score on the make up test so I was in hot water if I didn’t get a near perfect mark. This was probably the most I ever studied in all my 4 years at university.

I also often forget people’s names. At least once a day.

For some reason, whenever I forget someone’s name I have a habit of thinking ‘I’m sure it was Yoshida-san.’ It doesn’t matter who they are, it will come out as ‘Yoshida-san’. Of course, it will always be that they actually have a completely different name.

Once this happened. At work one of my fellow actors greeted me with an ‘It’s nice to meet you’ and I replied with ‘What are you talking about, we’ve met before!’. The person responded with the negative ‘No, this is the first time…’. However many times I said that we’d met before the other person replied ‘we definitely have not’. In the end my dogged persistence was eventually met with a doubtful look.

Months after I had thought “But I was sure…” I was flipping idly through a magazine when I saw a picture of that person on one of the pages. That was when it finally came to me that she was an advertising model that often appeared in magazines. I had one-sidedly decided that I knew her but we hadn’t ever met…I was really embarrassed after that.

Within all this, the Maaya Sakamoto Lost Item Episode which is the biggest mistake I ever made in history…I can’t say it. It makes me feel faint, come out in a cold sweat and all the hair on my body stand on end, to the point where I can’t tell anyone about the most frightful mistake of my life. ‘Ahh, that time was awful…’.

I’ll save that for another time.