Published

そのまんま荘で感じた事

By A student who stayed at Sonomanma-so (name withheld)

In September 2020, a student who had been job hunting and staying at Sonomanma-so wrote this on their own, after the bullet train ride home. We didn't ask for it. We've withheld only the name; everything else is left exactly as it was written.

September 7, 2020

All the fears about going to Tokyo — the city, hardly knowing anyone, danger, loneliness, the cost —
"Sonomanma-so" reduced them and made a place for me to be.
The "point" where my life changed, a place where people I love gather.
Because it takes you in, as you are, with everything it has,
I somehow found my own way of living.
It let me find the "future" and the "world" I want to build together with others.

The "loneliness and unease" I felt on this, my fourth trip up to Tokyo (Aug 19 – Sep 7, 2020).
I had an offer from a company I love. Going to the office, I get to see the staff and the others starting with me. I get to work happily as an intern every day. When I get back, someone is always at the share house.
And yet — the moment I woke up, walking to the station, going to the convenience store — I somehow felt alone.

I thought maybe the homesickness I felt this time came from having set my expectations of Sonomanma-so too high — from the strangeness I felt toward a Sonomanma-so that had changed a great deal from six months earlier.

You come home, and Jo-san is in the living room, calling out to you.
Tate-chan, in a big voice: "You're back!"
Ko-chan comes home drunk and starts singing something odd.
Oba-chan brings sweets over, and we all eat them while playing a game.
There were so many other interesting people, and so many new encounters.
Just living at Sonomanma-so was like being on a journey — a place that was new and warm at the same time.
Every day was dense, irreplaceable time; I wanted to keep it all on video.

It's true that the number of residents had dropped, and that COVID had cut the number of guests.
But beyond that, something about Sonomanma-so had changed.
What I had found there six months before —
"myself, as I am,"
"the values I decided I wanted to hold onto,"
"the world I decided I wanted to build from here" —
I couldn't feel any of it in the Sonomanma-so of now.
Talking with Cheki-chan, I understood:
"Warmth. That warmth is what's missing from Sonomanma-so right now, isn't it."

Going home like that felt too sad. I wanted, somehow, to keep us and Sonomanma-so tied together.
So on Sunday, I made curry and we all ate it.
For the first time in a while, I looked at each person's face, and we ate telling each other it was good — and the old air of Sonomanma-so ran through the table again.

"I want to become someone who can give warmth to the person in front of me."
The words that drifted down to me on the train ride home.

The things I've held dear across my life so far,
the things I loved so much it ached,
the things that let me be most honest with myself and feel happy.
All of them were born inside a relationship with someone, warmed my heart, and over time became "love."
Friends, my university club, Sonomanma-so…
And so the world I'd been seeing until now overlapped with the world Sonomanma-so is trying to build.
I felt something similar about the company where I'll be working.
So I think these two will carry a large meaning in my life.

My job hunt was, in the end, the time in which I gained these two precious things.

I pushed through with the "thing I wanted to do" that I had finally found, and I clashed with my family.
I had never rebelled in twenty years, but for the first time I shouted in front of my parents and walked out of the house.
The money in my account was taken, and I was cornered financially too.
Even then, I held onto "walking the path I chose myself."
That's why now is so much fun.
And having come through it,
because I started communicating properly with my family,
"how carefully I had been raised all this time" —
I could feel my family's worth, and their great love, all the more.

"Sonomanma-so," which showed me the world I had wanted to live in.
"Sonomanma-so," which held me up when I was standing at a fork in my life.
It's only been six months since I met Sonomanma-so, but I feel I've been given so much love, warmth, and courage.

"What moves you brings with it a responsibility to carry it forward."
Words from a book Taka-san gave me.
Rather than holding what moved you at arm's length, you take it into yourself, and then you
"live the feeling itself."
That's the way I want to live.
So the feeling Sonomanma-so gave me, I want to deliver to someone else this time.

"To live, at ease, as the life-size version of yourself."
Each of us guests lays this over our own life so far,
notices it, and builds it together —
that, I think, is what Sonomanma-so is.

この文章について

KIBOU has added nothing to this piece. Apart from withholding the name, it stands as it was written.

What I keep returning to is the fact that it isn't all good things. The strangeness toward a Sonomanma-so that had changed in six months is there. So is the clash with family. And still, the words left at the end were "to live, at ease, as the life-size version of yourself." A tidied-up testimonial would probably never arrive at that sentence.

What KIBOU is trying to build is places like the one in this piece — not one house, but many. What actually happened at Sonomanma-so, we wrote down in the record of that one house in Ebisu.

→ A thousand people came to one house in Ebisu.

→ See the record of Sonomanma-so