‘How to Deal With People You Dislike’

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 fifteenth installment, ‘avoid keeping company with those you might come to dislike’.

I recently published a new book. The release of a book is always an opportunity to reach new readers and, for the author, a source of stress. Some writers make a point of avoiding reviews altogether. I tend to do the opposite: I actively seek them out. When you go looking for reactions, you inevitably encounter both praise and criticism.

As I have written before, comments such as ‘It was fascinating’ or ‘It was boring’ do not trouble me much. A reader’s response lies beyond my control. No novel can please all of humanity. In fact, if a book were written with the intention of satisfying everyone, I suspect I would dislike it. The novels I value are those that unsettle my assumptions and shake my convictions. Books that, in a sense, wound me.

This way of thinking is merely an extension of how I have long approached human relationships. Many people suffer over being disliked or over relationships that fail. When I hear such concerns, a thought often crosses my mind: what a subtle form of arrogance. Just as I cannot control how readers perceive my work, I cannot control how others feel about me. To attempt to be liked by everyone is, in effect, to try to govern other people’s emotions. That ambition strikes me as presumptuous.

Of course, there are professional or institutional contexts in which being disliked can work to one’s disadvantage. In such cases, it is necessary to make every reasonable effort to maintain the relationship. I, too, encounter such situations. But our responsibility ends with effort; how the other person ultimately feels remains outside our reach.

In human relationships, there is only one principle I try to uphold: not to let myself come to dislike others. I cannot control the emotions of others, but I can, to some extent, manage my own. My first rule is simple: avoid, whenever possible, meeting people I might come to dislike. I readily decline invitations that do not genuinely appeal to me, especially gatherings filled with strangers whom I suspect I will not connect with. My second rule: if such an encounter cannot be avoided, create distance. No matter how cautious we are, we sometimes meet people with whom we simply do not align. In those cases, I step back. We tend to dislike only those with whom we maintain some form of engagement; without interaction, neither attachment nor aversion has room to grow. On social media, I mute acquaintances whose posts unsettle me. I refrain from reading books by authors whose sensibilities do not resonate with mine. This, too, is part of my personal survival guide.

Rather than scrutinizing how others feel about me, I prefer to pay attention to my own emotional responses. For instance, I find myself wary of people who strive to be liked by everyone. I can never quite discern what they truly think. And as long as people like me exist, it seems unrealistic to expect universal approval.

We tend to like those who like us, and to reject those who reject us. Instead of agonizing over an unanswerable question, ‘What does the other person think of me?’, would it not be wiser to find the right distance, one that prevents us from developing resentment in the first place?

At least, that is the conclusion I return to time and again.

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.