So you often hear about “not shunning any means to accomplish your goal,” but realistically speaking, I feel like once your goal is set, there aren’t all that many means to choose from in real-life cases. There’s maybe just one or two, at most three options to begin with. The drift here being that when you’ve settled on a goal, it pretty much equals having picked your means. If you want to adopt the loose stance of not shunning any, the best course of action would be to avoid settling on a goal for as long as possible so you could dart about as you please. Alternatively, though it’d be a dishonest and shabby way to live, having several goals at the ready might be effective. I’ve accomplished my goal, you could insist wherever the chips fell. Just once I’d love to say, All according to plan, or I was prepared for just this!─but that aside, the point is to be careful about settling on something as orienting as a goal. If you don’t watch out, you won’t be able to shun any means! In a world that has ended up getting established in modern society’s manner, there’s no greater luxury than the luxury of choosing. I’m being very personal here.
This book, the second case of the Nonsense User, who is competent when it comes to getting into hopeless fixes, is titled Strangulation─well, it’s hardly his second case─and concerns so-called murderers. You could say it’s the tale of a serial killer who lost sight of his goal and the culprit of a homicide who couldn’t find the means. It would be pretty pointless and, moreover, boorish to pile word upon word about this, but in contemplating the difference between a serial killer and the culprit of a homicide, the author is beset with conflicting thoughts and impressions. There are helpless, dead-end situations in the world, and when you’ve ended up in one you’re probably stuck there, and facing it is like dying from a thousand cuts or “being strangled with cotton” as the Japanese expression would have it, but that is precisely why how you comport yourself in such an instance might be particularly important. And this was Strangulation: No Longer Human – Hitoshiki Zerozaki.
As with the previous volume, Decapitation, I was aided by a ridiculous number of people. For their patience in coping with a confounding author like myself, I would like to give my special thanks to Kodansha’s Paperback Department and illustrator take. So long.
NISIOISIN