たばこの気持ち

Somewhere along the way, I got into the habit of putting a dockier or a sticky note on the pages I wanted to excerpt or on passages I liked in order to have used bookstores take back the books I read.

So I have done the same with Kafu Nagai's "Danchotei Nichijo".

However, doing dockyards on every page became very tedious and I started to write or make horizontal lines.

Looking back, I don't think I've been in such a reading mode myself since the winter of my freshman year of high school, when I started reading books.

I have already thrown away the book, but Nietzsche's "Too Human" was covered with underlines and writing in blue ballpoint pen. 

The cover of that book was also stained by hand.

This feeling is the same today, but back then I was a 17-year-old who had no room in my heart and was simply rushed by something. 

Now, 50 years later, it is a very enjoyable process.

For example, let's pick up two descriptions about cigarettes that appear in the book from "Danchotei Nichijo".

On page 289 of the picture, "In the afternoon, a child in the next house called me from the window and told me that he sold cigarettes at the corner of the post office in Tenjincho, U.S.A. When I gave him 50 yen, the child just did not notice. I gave him 50 yen, and he immediately bought two boxes of Camel cigarettes and brought them to me.

Another example is on April 28, 1945, page 297, which states, "Rationed cigarettes have become increasingly inferior and are now almost unbearable to smoke." Comparing this with data from the supply side (the then Ministry of Finance Monopoly Bureau and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which was in charge of rice and other supplies), the atmosphere of the times emerges in layers.