The other day, I watched the latest film by director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, A Sick 23-Year-Old.?
The story is set in a care facility in the suburbs of Paris. It centers on the encounter between the facility director, who is searching for a more humane form of care, and a Japanese theater director with stage IV cancer. Through the relationship between the two, it portrays the tension between the ideal of care and labor shortages and economic rationality, as well as how illness, disability, death, and each person's individuality are treated in society.
It felt like a story that had been born in this moment, with a certain inevitability.
Within the more than three-hour film, there are many memorable lines and scenes. Among them was a phrase that, for some reason, stayed in my head even after I finished watching.
“Seen up close, no one is normal.”
It is the title of a play that appears in the story.
When those words appeared in the subtitles, they suddenly seized my heart. They sounded a little blunt, but I felt they captured one truth about human beings.
People who live in the same country. People who work at the same company. People who share the same hobby. Through various attributes and labels, we make a provisional understanding of ourselves and others.
That, too, is necessary for living in a complicated world. We cannot know from scratch the background and circumstances of everyone we meet. By giving people a certain outline, we find our place in society and relate to one another without too much friction.
But as we grow closer to someone, details begin to protrude little by little from that rough outline.
Odd fixations. Incomprehensible habits. Anger and sadness that only the person themselves can understand. The closer we get, the more the person’s unique distortions, invisible from afar, inevitably come into view.
Writing “distortions” may sound negative in some way. But it is also something that could be called “individuality.” And of course, the one who is distorted is not only the other person.
We can only see others through the lens of our own experiences and values. Even when we think we understand someone, what is there is still only “the person as seen through my eyes.”
When people with different distortions look at one another from different angles, it makes the idea of fully understanding each other seem stranger, in a way.
Perhaps we have created shared standards such as “normal,” “common sense,” and “sane” in order to live together while carrying that incomprehensibility. That, too, is one kind of wisdom for people who are “individualistic” to live in the same place.
But if we demand those standards too strongly, people who fall outside them will emerge. Some may even be forcing down their own contours just to remain inside the group. In the first place, being inside a group and being “normal” are not the same thing.
Recognizing one another's differences does not mean understanding everything about the other person, nor does it mean accepting everything. Sometimes it is necessary to draw boundaries.
Even so, we should not immediately treat the parts we cannot understand as mistakes or defects. Leave what we do not understand as it is, without forcing an explanation.
That seems like the only place to begin.
Seen up close, no one is normal.
That is why, rather than measuring whether the person in front of you is “normal,” we should focus on what kind of unique outline that person has.
To treat someone as a human being is not to understand them completely, but to leave room for what cannot be understood while not stripping away their uniqueness.
To live in the same world while carrying different outlines. In that difficulty, there may also be the richness of relating to other people.