Chapter 314: Tenka Ippin? Not Worth Mentioning! (Patreon)

From the moment the news of the prize broke, the phones at the Tsushima residence and at Shinchosha never stopped ringing.

What nobody knew yet was that Tsushima Kagami was still on the other side of the ocean, in America.

Publishers, TV stations, magazines, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, literary societies of every description: they all fought to be the first to interview this national genius who had come out of nowhere.

But the voice on the other end of the line only ever gave one answer.

"Mr. Tsushima is currently out of the country and unable to accept interviews."

Once word of this got around, the media began digging, on their own initiative, into anything that could be dug up.

The university Tsushima Kagami attended, his junior high grades, every piece he had ever published, the bookstores and cafés he frequented. Even a composition from one of his Japanese-language pop quizzes was unearthed and printed in that evening's paper.

"The Trajectory of a Genius: The Signs Were There All Along."

The Yomiuri Shimbun devoted an entire page of its education section to tracing Tsushima Kagami's upbringing, and the lead beneath the headline was written in categorical terms.

Reporters tracked down his Japanese teacher, a white-haired old man who spoke to the camera with great emotion.

"Kagami-kun had a perceptiveness beyond his peers from the time he was small. The compositions he wrote, children that age simply couldn't have written."

Another outlet found his junior high deskmate, a young man who stood before the camera looking somewhere between smug and dazed.

"He always sat alone in the corner reading and hardly talked. We all thought he was kind of weird. Who knew… who knew he'd turn into this."

Every interview, every blurry old photograph, every hearsay anecdote was enlarged, processed, and endowed with the flavor of destiny.

Under the media's brush, the image of Tsushima Kagami gradually peeled away from the true outline of a nineteen-year-old and drifted toward myth.

But the building of a myth has never required the cooperation of the person concerned.

On October 15, the Chief Cabinet Secretary raised Tsushima Kagami's prize himself at a regular press conference.

His wording had been carefully polished.

"Mr. Tsushima's achievement fills the entire nation with pride. The government is considering using this as an opportunity to further promote the international spread of Japanese culture."

The moment he finished, a low murmur rippled through the room.

That same afternoon, the Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that the feasibility of establishing a "Tsushima Kagami Prize for Literature" was under study.

On October 16, the Governor of Tokyo publicly called Tsushima Kagami "the greatest cultural asset of the Heisei era" and proposed making his birthday a national commemorative day.

On October 17, the Ministry of Education announced that all of Tsushima Kagami's works would be placed under review for inclusion in high school Japanese-language textbooks.

News arrived every day, and each item was more astonishing than the last.

Discussion on social media grew exponentially, and the name Tsushima Kagami went from being a writer to being a symbol.

This symbol carried far too much.

The revival of national pride, a vague hope for the future, resistance against a "Lost Decade."

Nobody knew what Tsushima Kagami was doing at that moment.

Nobody cared, either.

They only needed him to be there, in that spot lit by the spotlight, the place that belonged to a national hero.

October 17, 2000, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, USA.

"Remember to email me when you get back. Once I've saved up from my summer job, I'll come visit you next year."

"Then you could just sell the signed group photo I gave you, and the books too. You'd be able to visit me this summer."

"No way, that's proof of our friendship!"

"When you come, I'll sign new ones for you."

"Really? Why didn't you say so earlier!"

In the New Haven airport, Tsushima Kagami embraced his roommate Kevin and said goodbye.

Nearby, Sayuri and Emily were hugging each other in tears. They had known each other little more than a week, yet had built a deep friendship.

Professor Takeuchi, standing beside them, smiled and patted Sayuri on the shoulder.

"It's about time we left."

Only then did Sayuri wave a reluctant goodbye to Emily.

The cultural exchange had been planned for three weeks, but Tsushima Kagami's out-of-the-blue Nobel Prize in Literature threw the rest of the schedule into disarray.

After a simple celebration banquet at Yale University, the group from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Tokyo flew back to Japan first, while the other faculties completed the full three-week exchange as planned.

On October 19, a handwritten letter was released to the public through the publisher.

Its content was so brief it bordered on cold.

"Thank you all for your concern and kindness."

"I am currently focused on writing and unable to accept interviews. I will speak with readers once my new work is complete."

The letter was signed Tsushima Kagami and dated the night of October 18.

The new round of discussion this short letter set off in the media was fiercer than anything any of his works had provoked.

The literary criticism section of The Asahi Shimbun devoted a full page to analyzing the little letter, under the headline "The Power of Silence," and wrote:

"In this utterly plain letter, we see the self-awareness of a true writer."

"He is unmoved by clamor and untempted by fame and fortune. He has chosen to return to the work itself."

"This is precisely the essence of the Japanese literary tradition."

The editorial in the Sankei Shimbun wrote in an even more impassioned tone.

"While the whole nation cheers for him, Mr. Tsushima has chosen silence."

"This silence is not cowardice but a clarity beyond his years. He understands that the loudest answer is always the next work."

Every outlet read from this short letter what it wanted to find, and every critic saw in the silence of this nineteen-year-old the virtues they had hoped for.

Layer upon layer, Tsushima Kagami's image was wrapped up, drifting ever further from the person who actually existed.

At the same time, another kind of voice began to surface quietly.

On October 21, a signed essay appeared on the official website of Bungei Shunju. Its author was a veteran writer who had been active in the literary world since the late Showa era.

The wording was relatively restrained, but every sentence was precise.

"I am happy that Mr. Tsushima has won the prize."

"But I am also puzzled."

"Has Mr. Tsushima truly 'expressed the essence of the Japanese soul'?"

"The Academy's citation is grand, but how many people have actually read his work? In the field of literature, are we not too eager for a hero?"

The essay landed like a bucket of cold water on a boiling pot.

Supporters and opponents quickly formed two camps online and in the papers.

The argument spread from the value of Tsushima Kagami's work to the credibility of the Nobel Prize in Literature, then to Japanese literature's standing in the world, and finally turned into a great debate over "nationalism versus the purity of literature."

"You're just jealous!"

"Dare you say you're not green with envy?"

"If you're so great, go win a Nobel Prize yourself."

"Japan produces one genius, and you people can't stand to see it?"

Attacks and abuse replaced rational discussion.

The old writer's personal website was spammed with malicious posts.

Under his column in one magazine, thousands of abusive comments appeared.

The most common word among them was "traitor."

From that moment on, anyone who voiced a rational or dissenting opinion received the label of "traitor to the nation."

Nor was the camp of Tsushima Kagami's supporters as harmonious as one might imagine.

The two factions began arguing over which school his literary style belonged to. Some called him the representative of the "new I-novel."

Others insisted he belonged to the lineage of "Surrealism."

Still others boldly declared that he had founded an entirely new "Tsushima school" of literature.

Each faction claimed to be the one that truly understood him, and everyone else only half-understood.

On October 22, a fan group called the "Tsushima Kagami Support Association" held a rally in Shibuya.

The turnout was small, around two hundred people, but they held up handmade banners and glow boards bearing slogans like "Kagami-sama Is Number One Under Heaven" and "The Nobel Is Only the Beginning."

Photos of the rally were uploaded to the web and passed a hundred thousand hits the same day.

Some commentators noticed a subtle phenomenon.

The vast majority of the Association's members were young women, and besides slogans, their placards were printed with a blurry side-profile photo of Tsushima Kagami.

The photo had obviously been screen-captured from video of some public event. The image quality was rough, but a handsome silhouette was still visible.

"Is this worship of a writer, or worship of an idol?"

One cultural critic wrote in his column, his tone openly worried.

"When a literary prizewinner is chased like a pop idol, have our expectations of literature drifted away from its true meaning?"

But voices like this were soon drowned in a still bigger uproar.

On October 24, a regional TV station in the Kansai area aired a special program with an extremely sensational title.

"The Nineteen-Year-Old Nobel Laureate: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tsushima Kagami Phenomenon."

The program invited a psychiatrist and a professor of social psychology to try to explain the causes of the nationwide fever from an academic angle.

The psychiatrist called it "collective vicarious satisfaction," while the social psychology professor proposed the concept of "national narcissism."

"When reality falls short, people pin their hopes on a symbolic figure."

The professor held forth confidently in front of the camera.

"Mr. Tsushima happens to fit every condition."

"Young, a genius, recognized on the world stage. He's not just a writer. He's become a mirror in which the Japanese prove their own worth."

After it aired, the program's ratings were number one in its time slot.

The comments section split into two entirely opposed camps.

One side thought the program rational and objective. The other denounced it for "trying to erase national glory."

Around the same time, a report from overseas media was translated and reposted on the Japanese internet. The literary review section of Britain's The Guardian had run a meaningful headline: "Too Young? Too Eastern?"

The article read:

"Tsushima Kagami's win is undoubtedly a historic event."

But we must also ask.

"Has the Swedish Academy overcorrected?"

"After a full century of Western monopoly, they have chosen a nineteen-year-old Japanese youth. Is this a literary judgment, or a form of cultural compensation?"

The article provoked enormous anger in Japan.

Within an hour, the comments section on Yahoo! Japan was flooded with over a thousand messages, nearly all denouncing The Guardian.

"Westerners just can't stand losing!"

"They can't accept that an Easterner beat them in their own field!"

"This is arrogant white supremacy!"

"Just wait, Mr. Tsushima will prove everything with his work!"

The tone of these messages was so certain that it seemed they had already read the next work Tsushima Kagami had not yet written.

Then, on the last day of October, an even bigger piece of news seized all the headlines.

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology officially announced that a preparatory committee for the "Tsushima Kagami Prize for Literature" would be established, with the first call for submissions to begin formally next spring.

The whole country boiled over once again.

On December 10, Tsushima Kagami, who had vanished from view after returning to Japan, appeared at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden.

It was the day most of the Nobel Prizes were officially awarded, and the prize was presented personally by the King of Sweden.

After the ceremony ended…

A private reception room in the Grand Hôtel Stockholm.

This hotel, built in the late nineteenth century, had hosted countless Nobel laureates, but hosting a nineteen-year-old winner was a first even for an old building that had seen so many grand occasions.

The Time interview team was nothing short of star-studded.

Chief correspondent Richard Kramer was a veteran with twenty-five years of battering around the news business. He had given exclusive interviews to three American presidents and no fewer than ten heads of state, yet now he felt, unusually, a touch of nerves.

He sat on the leather sofa in the reception room. On the small round table in front of him lay a recording device and an open notebook, densely filled with prepared questions.

When the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, their editorial team had pulled Tsushima Kagami's file at once, and, as luck would have it, an acquaintance of Kramer's taught at Yale University.

It was that acquaintance who told him Tsushima Kagami was on a cultural exchange at Yale, which let them beat everyone else to booking the follow-up interview.

In the meantime, the team had prepared detailed questions in advance. They even had to study the core of Eastern culture and Japanese literature, and read through several of Tsushima Kagami's major works, before a long, in-depth interview was possible.

From interview and writing through editing to final printing, the process usually takes a cycle measured in weeks.

"Nervous?"

Martin, the photographer, asked as he adjusted his Hasselblad.

Kramer didn't deny it.

He took off his glasses, wiped them, put them back on, and said:

"I wasn't this nervous when I interviewed Gorbachev."

"Why?"

"Because I knew exactly who Gorbachev was. Every question was within my control."

Kramer pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"But this young man, we know next to nothing about him."

"His works, his experiences, his way of thinking, all of it is like a riddle."

"And right now he stands at the peak of world literature. A peak at not yet twenty."

Martin whistled and went on adjusting his equipment.

According to the plan, they would shoot the cover photos first and then do the in-depth interview.

The arrangement itself was unusual.

Normally the interview comes first, then the photos, but this time the photography team had been instructed to secure the cover material as the priority.

The door of the reception room was pushed gently open.

Everyone turned their heads.

When Tsushima Kagami walked in, the room fell still for a second or two.

It wasn't that his presence was overpowering. Quite the opposite: the way he existed was different from what everyone had imagined.

He wore a dark gray turtleneck sweater under a black overcoat whose hem hung to around his knees.

In Stockholm in October this outfit was perfectly ordinary, yet on him it had an indescribable rightness, as if the clothes and he had reached some tacit understanding.

He was tall and slender, and he walked at an unhurried pace.

What held the eye most was his face.

It was a face with a strong Eastern air, its lines poised between the softness of a boy and the sharpness of a young man.

The brow ridge was not high but clearly defined, the bridge of the nose straight, the curve of the jaw clean and crisp.

Each feature, taken apart, was just right in its refinement, yet put together they produced an indescribable sense of distance.

He was like an ancient well whose bottom couldn't be seen, the surface calm and without ripples, the undercurrents below known to no one.

Standing at the door, he swept his gaze unhurriedly over everyone in the room, then gave a slight nod.

The nod was light, yet it made everyone present stiffen involuntarily.

It was neither fear nor awe, but the instinctive solemnity of facing something beyond ordinary experience.

Later, in his interview notes, Kramer described that moment this way:

"I have met kings, popes, and men with their fingers on nuclear buttons, but no one's appearance changed the density of the air in a room the way this nineteen-year-old Japanese boy's did."

"With him standing there, and with him not there, were two entirely different worlds."

"Good evening."

Tsushima Kagami spoke, his voice neither high nor low, his pace moderate.

Kramer stood and held out his hand, covering his inner tremor with the most standard courtesy.

"Mr. Tsushima, thank you so much for agreeing to our interview."

"I'm Richard Kramer."

Tsushima Kagami shook his hand. His palm was dry and warm, his grip just right.

"I've heard a lot about you."

Tsushima Kagami spoke in English, with better pronunciation than any Japanese person Kramer had ever met.

"But I'm more used to people calling me Kagami."

The simple sentence made Kramer blink.

Most Japanese people he had interviewed kept to the habit of surname plus honorific, and very few would let Western media use their given name directly.

Let alone such a near-friend form of address.

Yet Tsushima Kagami said it in an utterly ordinary tone, as though it were a trivial matter.

"All right, Kagami."

Kramer went along smoothly.

The cover shoot went far more smoothly than expected.

Martin had worried that this young genius writer would be uncomfortable in front of the camera, like so many interviewees, or worse, strike one of those poses that think they're cool and are actually ridiculous.

But Tsushima Kagami's performance dispelled every misgiving.

He stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, the light of a Stockholm autumn afternoon striking his face from the side and casting faint shadows beneath his brow ridge and nose.

He needed no direction. He turned his gaze naturally toward the lens, as if looking past it at someone far away.

His left hand was tucked casually into his coat pocket and his right hung at his side. His whole posture was relaxed but not slack, like a sharp blade resting in its scabbard.

Martin pressed the shutter again and again, his finger barely pausing.

As a professional with twenty years in the trade, he knew exactly what kind of image could become a classic.

The frame in his viewfinder needed no retouching. Put straight on the cover, it would sell like mad.

"Perfect."

He said it to himself.

An hour later, the in-depth interview formally began.

Kramer switched on the recorder, spread open his notebook, and began the conversation that would be the most unforgettable of his career.

"First, I'd like to know something very basic… When you learned you had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, what were you doing?"

Kramer asked.

"Sleeping."

Tsushima Kagami's answer was so concise it was almost laughable.

"Sleeping?"

"One in the afternoon Swedish time is around seven in the morning on the U.S. East Coast."

"I was still at Yale, enjoying a baby's sleep."

Tsushima Kagami paused.

"Then the phone woke me up."

The answer was nothing like what Kramer had imagined.

He had expected a dramatic scene.

Writing at a desk, gazing at the night sky, caught in a burst of inspiration.

What Tsushima Kagami gave him was almost excessively mundane.

"And then? What was your reaction?"

Kramer pressed.

Tsushima Kagami tilted his head slightly, as if recalling.

"I answered the phone, confirmed the news was real, poured a glass of water, and went back to sleep."

"Went back to sleep?"

Kramer thought he had misheard.

"I have to get a full eight hours every day or I lose my edge."

"I had class that morning, and I didn't want to leave the professor with the comment that I'd dozed off in class during the exchange."

Kramer stared at the young man across from him for a full three seconds, trying to judge whether he was joking or serious.

But Tsushima Kagami's expression showed no crack. He really did think that way.

Next to the quality of his morning's sleep and a professor's remarks on his class conduct, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature seemed not to hold an absolute advantage on his scale of values.

"You know,"

Kramer couldn't help saying.

"This answer will probably strike readers all over the world as unbelievable."

"Is that so."

Tsushima Kagami only smiled faintly.

The interview moved forward.

Kramer asked about creative inspiration, and Tsushima Kagami's answers were as precise and restrained as ever.

When he spoke about the essence of words, a flicker of sharpness crossed his eyes, barely perceptible.

That sharpness didn't match his nineteen years at all, as if a soul that had weathered much lived inside the young body.

"The Swedish Academy has described your work as 'expressing the essence of the Japanese soul.'"

Kramer turned through his notes.

"As such a young writer, how have you come to grasp the national soul so deeply?"

Tsushima Kagami was silent for a moment.

"A phrase like 'the essence of the soul,'" he finally said, "is a label other people stuck on."

"I only write what I want to write."

"Whether it represents something or grasps something is up to the readers. It's not something I should be concerned about."

"So you don't agree with the Academy's assessment?"

"It's not that I disagree."

"Agreeing or disagreeing is itself giving weight to someone else's evaluation."

"I don't have that habit."

Kramer scribbled in his notebook.

Every sentence could stand alone as a headline. This young man's way of thinking was unlike any writer he had ever met.

He didn't flatter readers, didn't pander to judges, and didn't even avoid expressions that might stir controversy.

The interview ran more than seven hours, until the early morning.

The topics stretched from literature to philosophy, from Eastern culture to writing in the context of globalization.

Tsushima Kagami's answers were sometimes sharp as a blade, sometimes light as drifting cloud, but from start to finish he kept that distinctive composure of his.

It was as if nothing in the world could truly surprise him, and no achievement could truly satisfy him.

Or rather, he stood in a dimension higher than everyone else's and looked at it all from there.

Kramer turned to the last question in his notebook.

He glanced at the red light blinking on the recorder, took a deep breath, and asked the question he had weighed over and over beforehand.

"Kagami, there's one question I'd like to ask you face to face."

Tsushima Kagami looked at him, his gaze calm.

"Since the announcement of the prize, praise for you in Japan has reached an unprecedented height."

"The media call you the 'national writer,' and The Asahi Shimbun in particular has used 'Tenka Ippin'—best under heaven, number one in the land, without peer—to describe you."

Kramer looked straight into his eyes.

"In the hearts of the Japanese people, you are already the greatest literary genius of this age, the glory of the nation, the pride of Japan."

"How do you yourself see such a nearly mythical title as 'Tenka Ippin'?"

When the question had been asked, the reception room went quiet.

Tsushima Kagami rested his chin lightly on his hand and thought for a while.

Then he smiled.

"Tenka Ippin? Not worth mentioning."

Kramer's pen froze in midair.

He had interviewed so many people and heard so many responses to honors.

Some deflected modestly, some accepted frankly, some expressed gratitude at great length.

But he had never heard an answer like this.

Four characters, light as brushing a fallen leaf from one's shoulder, yet heavy enough to make the heart of everyone who heard them skip a beat.

"Not worth mentioning": is it even worth saying? Not worth a word!

The glory that had set all of Japan boiling, the praise that had driven the whole country wild, was to Tsushima Kagami's lips not even worth a passing mention.

This wasn't modesty, because modesty presupposes acknowledging the weight of the honor.

A tremor of indescribable shock climbed from Kramer's spine to the back of his skull.

He suddenly understood what that indefinable quality in Tsushima Kagami was, the one he had sensed from the very start.

It was neither the maturity of an old soul in a young body nor the success of youth, but something nearly transcendent, belonging to no race, no age, no nation.

Like a shooting star that pays no mind to the lights on the ground.

And this moment of Tsushima Kagami, this sentence, this expression, would become the heaviest ending to this issue's Time cover story.

Kramer could almost picture, in his mind, the readers' faces as they turned to the last page.

Monday, October 18, 2000.

The newest issue of Time appeared in the most prominent spots at newsstands around the world.

The cover was a photograph filling the whole page.

In the image, an Eastern youth stood before a floor-to-ceiling window, the light of the Stockholm night outside carving sharply defined planes of light and shadow into his face.

He wore a dark coat, hands in his pockets, his gaze calmly fixed ahead.

In those eyes there was no youthful swagger and no genius's arrogance, only a depth that couldn't be put into words.

The cover headline was set in bold type across two lines.

The first line:

THE BOY WHO REWROTE HISTORY

The second line, a little smaller but just as eye-catching:

Kagami Tsushima and the New Chapter of World Literature

Inside, the last line of the interview had been deliberately enlarged and bolded by the editors, set alone at the end of the article, separated from the body text by a wide band of white space.

"Tenka Ippin?" Kagami said with a faint, almost indifferent smile. "Not worth mentioning."

Tenka Ippin?

Not worth mentioning!

Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.

Five-thirty in the morning. The early-winter daylight hadn't fully broken, and the streetlamps still glowed a dim yellow.

But outside several large bookstores in Kanda-Jimbocho, winding queues had already formed.

People bundled in thick coats, their white breath merging in the cold air. Some warmed their hands on canned coffee bought at a convenience store, and some simply sat on the ground with half-read paperbacks open on their knees.

They weren't waiting for a discount sale, an idol photo book, or a new game.

They were waiting for the latest issue of Time, going on sale today.

The bookstore's automatic doors opened at six sharp, and the crowd surged in like a rising tide.

The clerks had been ready. They had piled a small mountain of Time at the most conspicuous spot by the entrance, covers facing out so customers could grab them directly.

But when the first customers reached the mountain, every one of them stopped in their tracks.

That cover.

That youth.

The cover headline was in English, and most of the people in line couldn't fully read it.

But that name needed no translation: Kagami Tsushima. Those romanized letters had been carved into every Japanese mind over the past month and more.

"It's Tsushima Kagami!"

A high school girl at the front shrieked and snatched up three copies to hug against her chest.

"Give me five!"

"Don't push in the back! There's enough for everyone!"

"Manager! Manager! This shelf is almost empty!"

In less than forty minutes, all three bookstores in Jimbocho had sold out of Time.

The same scene played out simultaneously in Tokyo's Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro, in Osaka's Umeda, Nagoya's Sakae, and Fukuoka's Tenjin.

Bookstore phones were swamped, publishers' fax machines spat out long strips of reorders, and even street-corner convenience stores that rarely sold foreign magazines rushed in stock, only to sell out again within two hours.

And what truly set the Japanese archipelago boiling came after the magazine was opened.

At the end of that eight-page interview, Time's editors had set the final exchange alone on a full page of white space in bold type.

The reporter asked Tsushima Kagami how he viewed the title "Tenka Ippin" that the Japanese public had bestowed on him, and Tsushima Kagami's reply was a single offhand line.

"Tenka Ippin? Not worth mentioning!"

Just those eight characters.

Dropped lightly from Tsushima Kagami's lips, light as brushing a speck of dust from his cuff.

Then they crossed the ocean and landed on the soil of this island nation, smashing out a bottomless crater.

Tokyo, east exit of Shinjuku Station.

The afternoon sun slanted through the gaps between the high-rises onto the plaza, and a crowd gathered beneath a giant LED screen, heads tilted back.

The screen was playing a special edition of the noon news, and the anchor read Tsushima Kagami's line from Time in an unrestrained, excited voice.

"Tenka Ippin? Not worth mentioning!"

The crowd was silent for about half a second.

Then, as if something had been lit in all of them at once, cheers, applause, and whistles exploded in the same instant.

A salaryman in a suit raised his briefcase over his head and shouted something, his voice lost in the surrounding roar, but the look on his face said everything.

A few college-age young people beside him jumped straight up and slapped hands.

"So cool…"

A girl in a face mask murmured, so quietly that only she could hear it, but her eyes were startlingly bright.

"So cool, really, really cool."

Nobody thought Tsushima Kagami was belittling the honor.

Deep in the bones of the Japanese is a distinctive aesthetic spirit called "iki."

It is hard to translate into any Western language, because it holds at once dash, transparency, unruliness, and a subtle rebelliousness.

A swordsman of the Edo period laughing and joking amid flashing blades is iki.

A Sengoku warlord's calm in the face of a thousand armies is iki.

A tea master whisking tea in a humble hut, mind free of attachment, is iki too.

And Tsushima Kagami's eight characters pushed the spirit of iki to a whole new height.

Tenka Ippin: peerless, invincible under heaven.

Not worth mentioning: a little thing like that, worth a mention?

Precisely because he truly is the best under heaven, he has the right to say "not worth mentioning."

This isn't contempt for honor but absolute confidence in his own stature.

From an ordinary person this line would be arrogance, but from someone who truly stands atop the world it is backbone and a state of being, the very spiritual stance of "I stand unmoved" that the Japanese worship most!

To him, the Nobel Prize and "Tenka Ippin" alike are just scenery along the road, not the destination.

This composure, this arrogance, this life attitude nearly worthy of a shonen manga lead, struck exactly the chord of the chuunibyou that runs in nearly every Japanese heart.

The four characters "not worth mentioning" swiftly became a social phenomenon across Japan.

In street interviews on TV, high schoolers used them to describe their just-finished midterm results.

Young office workers shrugged at colleagues with the line after finishing a project, and drew a round of admiring looks.

Even during a televised baseball game, after a pitcher threw a complete-game shutout, the commentator couldn't help remarking:

"At this moment, perhaps only 'not worth mentioning' can describe how he feels."

The following morning, The Asahi Shimbun ran a lengthy editorial titled "The Spirit of 'Not Worth Mentioning': On Tsushima Kagami and Resonance with Japanese Culture."

The editorial wrote:

"The reason Tsushima Kagami's words move the Japanese people so deeply is that they perfectly embody the most central aesthetic orientation in Japanese culture."

"True strength needs no display of power. True heights need no one looking up."

"Those four offhand words express the composure and unruliness most prized in the spirit of bushido over a thousand years."

"In this sense, Tsushima Kagami is not merely the summit of literature but the incarnation of the Japanese spirit!"

Other media were not to be outdone.

The Yomiuri Shimbun invited a literature professor from Kyoto University for a special interview. The professor spoke animatedly on camera for forty minutes, and his core point was just one.

Tsushima Kagami's line was "the most perfect Japanese expression" he had ever read.

The Mainichi Shimbun ran a street survey asking passersby for their first reaction on hearing "not worth mentioning," and over ninety percent of respondents used the same word: kakkoii.

Cool.

So cool.

Cool enough to make you cry.

And the young people who had never cared about literature now treated Tsushima Kagami as a god.

At schools across Japan, students wrote "Tenka Ippin, not worth mentioning" on their desks, engraved it on their mechanical pencils, and painted it on the walls of their club rooms.

One underground band even wrote a heavy metal song called "Not Worth Mentioning" overnight. At their live house show, the whole audience screamed the four words together, the deafening wave of sound nearly lifting the roof.

In manga circles, veteran critics began publicly discussing an interesting topic.

Tsushima Kagami's manner of speaking was just too much like the leads of the shonen manga they knew.

That confidence radiating from the bones, that nonchalance in the face of huge success, that air of looking down on everything from a higher dimension.

If Tsushima Kagami were a manga character, he'd absolutely be the template for a Jump shonen protagonist.

And the Japanese have a natural love for such characters, one woven into their blood.

Tsushima Kagami was a real-life shonen manga hero.

A nineteen-year-old Japanese boy standing on the summit of world literature, smiling as he told the whole world: this little thing is not worth mentioning.

"With an attitude like that, how could the Japanese not love him?"

He was right.

In Japanese culture, this kind of arrogant statement, charged with strong chuunibyou energy, has never been a pejorative.

On the contrary, when it is backed by real strength, it is the most blood-stirring attitude toward life.

The Japanese accepted this pride in full.

Not only did they accept it, they raised it high and made it a spiritual beacon lighting the whole nation.