X NO SEI TO SHI: STEP 3
10. Shunkan o Ikiru
[Living for the Moment]

The most severe thing that ever happened to me then was having 14 stitches in my arm to sew up an injury.

The day before our concert at Osaka-jo Hall, I went out alone and got into a accident; I didn't brake in time and smashed into a glass window. I was rushed to the hospital right away and got stitches, and they gave me some morphine for the pain, but the doctor's verdict was: "It's impossible for you to play bass like this." The medicine they gave me suppressed the pain, but he said that in the middle of playing, my wound could open back up.

But even so, no matter what condition I was in, I wanted to play in the live. "There's tens of thousands of people waiting for me. I can't disappoint the fans," I pleaded, unable to fight against my enthusiasm. The next day, I took a ton of morphine and went on stage. Because of the medicine, I felt no pain and had a great live.

Since that time, Osaka-jo Hall has become a legendary place for me.

Thinking about it, it wasn't just limited to accidents, but we really broke a lot of things. So we kept having to pay compensation for things. Even so, somehow I was the only one who had the experience of once not being able to pay someone back for something I did.

Before we won the best new band prize on a cable prize show, I was arrested for destroying some receptacles in a fight and was held for several days in custody. I'm not sure if I have a short temper or supreme calm, but I have the strange thought of needing to destroy the evidence after I smash everything in sight, so that can't be helped...obviously, that was the only time I stopped to reflect on it.

Fights are definitely not a good thing, but we were always fighting over something. Maybe by fighting, we were trying to destroy all the common sense and contradiction in the world.

There wasn't anything that we had to protect. It was really a repeating of tension and strain. Because of that, I think, betting everything on a single moment, we lived for that moment with all our might.

Out of all the modern rock bands, I wonder if there are any who have managed to carry out what we did when we existed. We were a little like "flightless birds."