Genki Kawamura

My life was over and I had no one who mattered enough for me to call.

When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety of not having one.

Throughout human history we’ve given birth to new things, only to lose the old

Like love, life is beautiful because it has to end.

In my dream the man says, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

What do you want meaning for? Life is desire, not meaning. Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish

That must be it. It has to be. Life has meaning for everything, even a jellyfish or a pebble by the side of the road. Even your appendix must exist for a reason.

If you’re trying to separate out the countless “meaningless things” in the world from everything else, you’ll eventually have to make a judgment about human beings, about our existence. In my case, I suppose it’s all the movies I’ve seen, and the memories I have of them that give my life meaning. They’ve made me who I am.
To live means: to cry and shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to even experience horrible, frightening things… and to laugh. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, feeling nauseous, people singing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouth-watering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their pistols at dawn…
And next to all the movies that play on a loop inside me, sit the images of friends, lovers, the family, who were with me when I watched them. Then there are the countless films that I’ve recorded in my own imagination—the memories that run through my head, which are so beautiful, they bring tears to my eyes.

Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after a long time, it makes a totally different impression than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed. It’s you that’s changed, and seeing the same film again makes that impossible to forget.

I suppose you could say that my life is like that photograph. A movie that shows my whole life, the comedy and the tragedy. But if you put that all into one still photo, all that would be left is a blank screen. All the joy, anger, and sorrow I’ve been through, and the result is that my life shows up as nothing more than a blank movie screen. There’s nothing there, nothing left. Only an empty blank space.