“But every decision rests on something unmastered, concealed, bewildering; otherwise it would not be a decision at all.” —Martin Heidegger
Translator’s caption: The four passages displayed in this screenshot from the visual novel Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue read, in translation from the Chinese:
My heart made a dull scraping sound.
Then… it was knocked open.
I think the heart is made of iron and wind.
For as a sound like a heavy iron plate being struck rang out, a sound like the sea breeze swept right through me, from my heels to the top of my head.
The sentence that moves me here is, of course, the third:
I think the heart is made of iron and wind.
This sentence is stunning—stunning in its simplicity and boldness. Simple, because the elements that make up the proposition are all within reach; bold, because the proposition is childish. But here lies the mystery, too: why should the heart be made of iron and wind, of all things? In my younger, more naïve days, I wrote some stories of pure love myself, but I reckon a metaphor like this would have been quite beyond my powers. The most I could have written was that the heart was made of iron—easy enough to understand: a heart of steel, after all. Any brat in the habit of acting tough likes to write about a “heart of steel.” Everyone knows why: cold-hearted people may not be cold, but they are always cool. By contrast, nobody writes that “the heart is made of wind.” We might say “my heart goes with the wind,” but it would never occur to us first to make the heart out of wind. A heart can be made of plastic, or even water and fire, but rarely wind. Why? I think the reason is probably philosophical: iron is matter, whereas wind is the motion of matter—matter can be transformed into matter, but motion can only be transformed into another motion. Motion and matter are incommensurable; the difference between them is a little ontological difference—an abyss!—that keeps the two apart.
But it would be wrong merely to reduce iron and wind to elements. Because—no element exists independently of context. Every element is like a Leibnizian monad, standing in metaphysical space and reflecting, in its own features, the world that belongs to it. Once we understand this, we can also understand why we must tether the imagery of iron and wind back to its roots in the story.
Here we must restrain our speculations about the game’s writer. For even I cannot help wondering what sort of mind—carrying what sort of experiences—could bring both iron and wind into its conception of what the heart is made of. And this is also because even I, whose writing teems with manic metaphors, could at that moment have served up nothing but alcohol, marble, or flame—
But since our inquiry here is confined to the proposition about the heart’s composition, we must, painful as it is, stop speculating about the writer’s historicity. The context is this: the protagonist, a boy carrying a dark past of his own, discovers that he faces a predicament. His past actually overlaps with that of the heroine, Misaki! Misaki is his classmate, of course, but it never once occurred to him that his classmate was also that very person from his childhood. At this point, the wheel of fate turns again—and rather over the speed limit at that. In the writer’s rich metaphors, the protagonist’s inner world seems to take tangible form as a firmly locked iron door. His feelings for Misaki cause the door to fly open, and wind pours in—and just then, at exactly the right moment, comes the metaphor of the heart, steel, and wind.
Now, then, the subtlety of the metaphor gradually reveals itself: the protagonist’s heart is not merely iron, but an iron door. A tightly shut door, and nothing else. But the wind—now it is more than wind: it also implies an open door. For there can be no wind inside a tightly shut door.
So if the protagonist’s heart is a combination of iron and wind, this simply means that his heart is now an open door. Beyond it lies an entire, infinite world: a vast space where currents of air can roam freely. To say now that “the heart is made of iron and wind” means that the heart is no longer a self-enclosed prison, but a gap in fate. As Laozi says, “Shape clay into a vessel; its use lies in what is not there.”1 This absence, too, becomes a meaningful absence because it makes room for the wind.
Through its gap, the heart joins inside to outside. We therefore call it the mediator through which the protagonist opens to the world. Through that metaphor of iron and wind, the transition between concealment and manifestation now acquires a body in the elements. I do not know whether this is what the line of poetry is meant to do. I only know that when Heidegger divides entscheiden [to decide] into ent-scheiden, he too means to emphasize the same mediating relation: as a German prefix, ent- really does carry the sense of “opening, removal.” Thus, to understand entscheiden as ent-scheiden is simply to emphasize that the relation between entscheiden [to decide] and scheiden [to distinguish] is one of ent- [opening, removal].
Heidegger can therefore say, “But every decision rests on something unmastered, concealed, bewildering; otherwise it would not be a decision at all” (Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 43).2 For it is decision that establishes itself as a mediator between being and non-being. Thanks to this, we need not ask why things that do not ordinarily manifest themselves can become known to us—things concealed, bewildering, mad… We need not know how this is possible, because decision has already shown that it is possible.
And so I often think: if only these high-school students studying Heidegger would play some competitive games—or even just a little mahjong. For we know that the experience of decision and bewilderment comes not through words, but through decision and bewilderment. Take mahjong: perhaps its appeal lies in that little part that reason cannot fully account for. However well you know the theories of suji and kabe,3 there is always a point that calculation cannot exhaust. But if—if this is the moment when you must make a decision, what will you do? If it really came to that, I imagine you could only play your tile on a wild impulse. But people nowadays are accustomed to calculating; they think calculation is everything. And the laughable thing is that genuine calculation knows it can never calculate everything. For just as established patterns depend on something prior to them, such calculation knows that there is indeed a domain governed by chaos. Calculation, by contrast, always arrives late.
I do not pretend that these ravings can give me any insight into Aokana, nor do I pretend that I can put a full stop to this experience by writing with such pretensions. Either would be too easy, far too easy, and too dishonest. I only hope that by doing this I can summon a gust of that same wind—even a typhoon would do, so long as it could make my heart, too, an isomorph of wind and steel. Or, if there is no wind, summon fire or water—even becoming pure steel would do. I would welcome any of these. Still, this seems to make it look as though I have only ever been looking out for my own heart—besides, come to think of it, who doesn’t think of their own heart? But never mind that now. Once this night that has squeezed the heart into juice has passed, it seems everything can be forgotten. So let it be. Let all these tangled thoughts disappear.