‘What Is the Three-Step Process That Helps Us Understand Others?’

In every issue of Pen, the Naoki Prize-winning author Satoshi Ogawa presents a new essay in his series ‘A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Surviving Society’. In this series, Ogawa reflects on the often eccentric strategies he devises to navigate life’s everyday challenges. Below is the eighteenth installment ‘Reframing a subject.’

Many people who describe themselves as ‘bad at communication’ are, in fact, not especially bad at it. Not knowing what to say to a stranger, or struggling to keep a conversation lively, does not necessarily mean someone lacks social skills. If you don’t know what to say, staying quiet is perfectly acceptable. Nor is there any obligation to force every conversation into becoming entertaining.

Back in university, there was an older student everyone secretly referred to as ‘The Vacuum.’ Even when he had not been invited, he would appear at drinking parties and somehow absorb every conversation into his own. If someone mentioned starting a part-time job at an izakaya, he would immediately cut in with: ‘Speaking of part-time jobs…’ before launching into a story about how he once worked nights answering phones at a hospital, how the pay was good, and how he spent the quiet hours completing Dragon Quest on his Nintendo DS.

If someone brought up the manga Death Note, he would somehow steer the conversation toward Weekly Shōnen Jump, only to end up talking about the autograph board he owned signed by Takehiko Inoue. His conversational pattern never changed: ‘someone else’s specific story’ → ‘generalization’ → ‘his own personal anecdote.’ There was no defense against it. More than once, he managed to speak for one hour and fifty minutes during a two-hour gathering.

When someone quietly listens and nods along, you may think of them as reserved, but rarely as socially inept. On the other hand, people who endlessly monopolize conversations with self-centered stories quickly become exhausting. The real problem is that people like this often believe they are exceptionally good communicators.

I disliked The Vacuum so much that I avoided every gathering he attended. And yet, in completely unrelated contexts, I still find myself thinking about him from time to time. Take shōgi, for example. One of the key skills in the game is called ‘position evaluation’—the ability to assess who has the advantage, identify weaknesses in the board position, and determine which piece should move next. I’m no expert at shōgi, but the concept immediately makes sense to me because the same thing applies to writing fiction. A novelist also needs the ability to judge what works in a manuscript, what doesn’t, where its weaknesses lie, and how the story should move forward.

And it’s not just shōgi. Whether I’m hearing about football, video games, police organizations, or even the paint industry, I often catch myself thinking: ‘This is exactly the same as writing a novel.’ Literature is practically the only field in which I can confidently claim expertise, yet thinking deeply about novels has, at times, made me feel as though I can also understand the structures of industries I know almost nothing about.

The reverse happens too. When I speak to specialists in other professions about literature, they sometimes respond: ‘Ah, it’s the same in our field.’ In the end, every profession and every industry is still a human activity. Perhaps it is inevitable that they arrive at similar structures.

And then, suddenly, I remember The Vacuum. Without realizing it, I too rely on the same transformation: ‘someone else’s specific story’ → ‘generalization’ → ‘my own experience.’ It is through that process that I translate a discussion about shōgi into a reflection on novels. Perhaps these three stages are indispensable when we try to truly understand what someone else is saying. So, thank you, The Vacuum.

About the author

Satoshi Ogawa was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1986. He made his literary debut in 2015 with This Side of Eutronica (Yūtoronika no Kochiragawa, Hayakawa Books). In 2018, his novel Game Kingdom (Gēmu no Ōkoku, Hayakawa Books) earned both the 38th Japan SF Grand Prize and the 31st Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize. He was awarded the 168th Naoki Prize—one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, recognizing exceptional popular fiction— in January 2023 for The Map and The Fist (Chizu to Ken, Shūeisha). His latest work, Your Quiz (Kimi no Kuizu), was released by Asahi Shimbun Publishing in 2024.