I'm not as cool or forgiving as I sound

Yeah, the title is bait.

In his 9/11 album Love and Theft, Bob Dylan notoriously ripped off many authors, including Virgil, Ovid, Mark Twain and, somewhat surprisingly, Japanese author Junichi Saga, who wrote Confessions of a Yakuza. So, out of curiosity and boredom, I read it.

One can easily see why Saga's work caught Dylan's attention. Telling the story of completely deromanticized criminals, the book oozes the kind of energy from albums like 1976's Desire, people with mundane lives but who live in the edge of the law. The aforementioned Love and Theft has always seemed somewhat of a mafioso album because of the gem "Floater", whose lines invoke such imagery:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your own life
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I've seen enough heartache and strife
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once, though, I suppose
To go along with all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

The idea of the book is to be as loyal to the actual stories of a real-life yakuza, Eiji Ichiji. Mr. Ichiji was a yakuza, and happened to become an old patient of Saga, a doctor from modern Japan. Much of the book is basically explaining the perspective of another country from another era.

Although it did take a hit with its modernization, it's hard to say that Japan even after submitting at the end of World War II doesn't have an unique culture. They are, after all, the main producers and consumers of very specific products, including things incomprehensible to non-weeaboos, like tentacle porn. That reflects in both the perspectives of Saga and Ichiji.

While Saga shows a deep respect and even admiration for his patients which is hard to find in Western medicine, the contrast that makes itself more visible is not that of the change in Japanese culture, but the change in our times. The book isn't about a particular culture, necessarily — Bob Dylan resonated a lot with it — but about a particular state of spirit that isn't all that common nowadays. The sheer boredom would kill a modern person.

But that was not an issue for them and probably isn't an issue at all. We are the sick ones, overstimulated with shiny distractions grabbing our attention at all moments, and the fact that we are unable to deal with the mundane is a disease of our own soul. Personally, I do not put myself above this, as I am to a high degree a product of my time, but I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?

But we're not all that special, as ours is not the first age where boredom is demonized. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman talks about how much of violent ideologies from the wrong side of World War II drank from the Romantic fountain that urged for people not to be bored. "Better barbarism than boredom," as 19th century French poet Théophile Gautier put it. Hitting a little closer to my point, "Everything is always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing ever happens, absolutely nothing... If someone would only begin a war, it need not be a just one", wrote Georg Heym, a German Youth Expressionist poet.

I imagine people expect to read about the yakuza and find out about gang violence, tortures, tattoos to mark one another, but that's far from it. They were a business with a code that could almost be translated to our times as a contract. All the violence you see in the book is either a) from the government authorities and the police or b) in self-defence. These people were not troublemakers. In fact they avoided trouble at all costs and, when it did happen inevitably as consequence of our human nature, they did their best to comply and cooperate with authorities, even if they were to be basically tortured, as was Mr. Ichiji's case.

A lot of people who realize the modern distractions tend to idealize the lives of the past, often ignoring that, as Dylan put it, those weren't consequences of their dreams and hopes, as most of our lives isn't. Dreams and hopes have a place, they let us not just let life pass by our eyes and actively call us to live, but they're not the end-all be-all. There goes Dylan again on "Floater", and again robbing Saga/Ichiji:

The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
In bad times with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end
One of the boss' hangers-on
Comes to call at times you least expect
Try to bully ya—strong arm you—inspire you with fear
It has the opposite effect

I guess all generations are going to have their own conflict of visions, and thankfully people like Saga and Dylan, with their care for popular history and, of course, their own tradition, save us some time making us realize with their art things we could spend our whole lives trying to crack.