Nasubi

When a forum on meaning and purpose of life referenced his reality TV stint, many aspects came back to me. The room that he was put in, the close-up lunacy, the neon cartoonish captions and the strategically placed nasubi, aubergine, covering his modesty.

I tried to find where he's been since the show ended nearly two decades ago, there were but scant references about him possibly fundraising for his native Fukushima. He published three diaries of his time on Denba, but my Japanese is non-existent and they didn't gather enough fame to be translated.

There were vague hints about the toll this took on his mental health, but that was an epoch free from the worries of #metoo, Black Lives Matter and shopping consciously, so in interviews he focuses on the fact that he chose not to escape despite repeatedly considering it (alongside suicide), because he'd be arrested for public indecency, because he had no clothes and would be on the run, and it would be doubly shameful because his dad was a policeman.

I feel that perhaps he was lucky to have the mental fortitude to withstand the deprivation, and particularly so in a country that prioritises corporate productivity and balance-sheet health over individual well-being.

I wonder if he would do it again? I wonder how many parallels he saw in the semi self-enforced lockdown with his own experience? At least, this time around, he was no longer living the surrealism alone. I wonder how he stayed so focused, entering sweepstakes day after monotonous, sensory-deprived day. I feel sad the producers couldn't have just let a good thing go. I wonder what the producers of Terrace House thought of Nasubi's trials and how they distance themselves of responsibility in Hana's suicide.

I wonder what I would do in Nasubi's place? I felt a little like this, going to Wilko's day after lonely, structure-less day hoping for a bag of Perlite. Or doing my usual loop via Aldi to scan for reduced meat to freeze? This was self-imposed though, and Nasubi's competition wins were far more exotic and valuable. Nowadays, he'd be armed with knowledge from Buzzfeed listicles and Facebook's 'life hack' videos to open a can with nothing but a slab of concrete, to fashion a sewing needle out of chopsticks so he can amend the women's knickers he won to fit him and he would know to chew crunchy veg for oral hygiene until his toothbrush win. Challenges are fun, but not when you don't know when they're going to end, eh?

The whole premise that we all need meaning and purpose in life, and striving towards them to give ourselves feelings of satisfactions met or otherwise, that's also what this reality show was, and what we've had to decide when staying within our respective four walls became a matter of national security. We start focusing on minutiae, obsessing over fungus gnats and achieving the perfect distribution of holes in my sourdough crumb, and actually, these aren't bad distractions for this life wildcard that we know as the pandemic.