On the End of a Year--BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and me

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Everything is quiet in the end of a year in Japan.


Being a Japanese, I love this quietness of everything around me, and feel the happpiness of my being born in Japan in the final day of a year.
----My hospital is quiet now. streets are quiet. Everyone is being ready to send this year off and meet the new year.


When a year passes by, I recall various memories in my life.


I think about my far memories, past events, and so on.


In such meditation in the final night of a year, I make it a rule to read, or at least recall, the ending part of my beloved book--BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.


It is as follows.



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"Karamazov," cried Kolya, can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilyusha too?"
"Certainly we shall all rise from again, certainly we shal see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
"Ah, how splendid it will be!" broke from Kolya.
"Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don't be put out at our eating pancakes---It's a very old custom and there's something nice in that!" laughed Alyosha. "Well, let us go! And now we go hand in hand"
"And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his exclamation:
"Hurrah for Karamazov!"


（Fyodor Dostoevsky(English translation by Constance Garnett) "BROTHERS KARAMAZOV"(Dover Publications, Inc 2005) p.718)
http://www.amazon.co.jp/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/151438809X/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1451347767&sr=8-6&keywords=The+Brothers+Karamazov+Constance+Garnett
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This is the ending scene of the book--BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. It is a conversation between the protagonist Alyosha and a young boy Kolya after the funeral of a poor boy Ilyusha.



As I am a Japanese, I love Dostoevsky. (I am sure you are all aware how the Japanese love Dostoevsky.) And I have been attracted to this ending scene of BROTHERS KARAMAZOV since
my youth.


I recall this ending scene of BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and feel this conversation overlaps with my feeling about the people I have met in my life. To me, it is natural to recall dead people in the end of a year and make their memories overlap with this conversation in BROTHERS KARAMAZOV above every year, on the last day of a year.


And I feel this sense of overlapping my memories about dead people with Alyosha's words below deepens every year. It is probably because I got old and people around me have passed away.



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"Certainly we shall all rise from again, certainly we shal see each other and shall tell each other with joy and aladness all that happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
"Ah, how splendid it will be!" broke from Kolya.

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Such is my last day of a year. Or, such is the feeling Japanese have in their hearts in the last night of a year.



Japanese are not simple, are we?









Masanori





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