SECTION 5
SOUZOU [CREATIVITY]

3. Mai Ruum wa Shiro no Chikarou
[My Room is a Castle Underground Dungeon]

My house is pretty unusual. Everyone who goes to it for the first time gets really impatient.

Because there are no windows, it is fairly dark. From the ceiling, there isn't even a single fluorescent lamp. There is only indirect lighting set into the floor. It really is quite dark. It feels even darker than it does inside a club.

Also, the partitions from room to room are all glass. I can see pretty well in the dark, but my friends would frequently bump against the walls. So I have placed small flashlights for their use in the front foyer.

But not many people come over. When they do visit, there are always people who say "Gacchan, I'm a little worried for you."

I like dark rooms. When I was renting a house, I would remodel it. I would cover all the windows, and I would change all the fluorescent lights to black lights.

Time stops in my house. Because the outside light doesn't shine in, I never know what time it is. There are no clocks, either. And there are no televisions.

Because I never watched television when I was a child, now I don't watch it either. To me, a television is just a monitor on which you watch videos or DVDs.

In order to maintain such a lifestyle, I can't be bothered with other things. My biological clock always knows what time it is. My activities are irregular, but the moment I wake up, I know what time it is. And usually I go to bed for around two hours.

The thing that concerns me the most is not wanting to make my home comfortable. I want my house to be a place that makes me want to go outside.

My house is a place where people can gather. It is a place where your spirit can gather. I want it to be a place that gathers energy together.

If the inside of a house is always like that, energy accumulates. If that happens, you feel like going outside. If you always stay in a dark room, your spirit becomes heavy. If that happens, I think that you would want to get out.

To rest your soul, you could go to a place like the park. If you are looking for something bright and cheerful, it's all right to go outside, because the sun is out there.

Outside, many ideas and opportunities can come to life. However, if you become comfortable at home, you never go outside and that never happens. That's nonsense.

If you live in a house that makes you want to go outside, you will keep doing it your whole life. Since my house is dark, it builds up an uncomfortable feeling.

Now, if I have to sum up my new concept of a house in a single word, it is "dungeon." I have an image of a castle dungeon. It's not a house. I and the designer made it of stone with a gloomy image, collaborating with each other on it right down to the last minute detail.

I built it even though the designer believed in feng shui, and he would tell me that designing things like this was no good.

My present house has an archive.

There are a lot of things that you haven't seen on TV, like the fact that I have a huge number of books. I don't keep journals. I don't have any handwritten books.

Most of the books that I bought and like are instructional books on languages. They are books like "Learn Spoken Chinese in 3 Seconds" and "Your English is Counterfeit."

3 seconds? No way! But if you think your English is pretty bad, or something like that, you will have fun reading them.

As I read dictionaries and language instruction books on my own, I laugh a lot. They are very funny. But I really like books like that.

About ten years ago, I found a book that even up till now has made me feel emotions very deeply. The name of it is "Smell Otoko."

It's an old story, the contents of which came to me completely one day, a story that I realized very quickly. The plot development was really interesting, and even now, I can read it over and over. But I think that it's already difficult to find this book.

I also built a wine cellar in my house. It houses up to 100 bottles.

I like wine. When I say that, everyone then gives me wine for presents, and then I start noticing that I've accumulated quite a few bottles.

While I say that I like it, if I go by myself to buy wine, I have no idea which kinds of wine are good wine and which kinds are bad. If I don't drink it, I won't know. So I like to taste wine.

So I just started tasting a lot of wine, and because of that, I now know which kinds of wine from different places and which kinds of wine from different time periods are good.

Right now, a kind of wine that I think is very good is "gold." Not white or red, but "gold." It means that the color of the wine is golden.

For the most part, the grapes from one vine can make about one barrel of wine. However, the grapevines that make this "gold" kind of wine can't even make one glass of it. It tastes wonderful, but it's very expensive. It's to the point where I feel bad about buying this wine for myself.

Though I say I like wine, I don't drink when I'm at home by myself. When my friends come over, if they say to me, "let's open a bottle of wine," then I will open it for them and we will drink together. I'll just look at the wine that my friends choose, and then afterwards I'll say "That was great, don't you think?" and "How about drinking this?"

The wine that I have at home is the most expensive wine, about 400,000-500,000 yen a bottle. That doesn't mean that it is also absurdly delicious wine, though. It just means that when I have a party, my friends who also like wine can enjoy good wine.

I can finish about 20 bottles by myself. When I drink with friends, they will drink about 10 bottles. In all, if there are 10 of us, that's all the 100 bottles! It's rather distressing.

Though gathering 10 people together isn't something too out of the ordinary, it somehow happened that I was able to build a wine cellar.

Besides wine, I also have kuusuu (Okinawan wine). It's Awamori (Okinawan liquor). I collect as much of it as I can. I don't like to drink it, but my friends like it, so I feel that I have to have it for them. I like to present it to my friends and say "Here, I got this for you."

"Bar Gackt" – moreover, there is something like that. I say, "Do you want to try this?", and when they say back to me "that's good!" it makes me really happy.

The time when I last got drunk was probably at the time of my birthday party.

I felt really bad about it to everyone, but I got so drunk because I just couldn't handle the tension I'd built up anymore. Of course, I remember everyone that I met that night, and everyone I shook hands with, and everyone I kissed, but…

That day was actually two days after my birthday. It was the last day of the "Jougen no Tsuki" tour. The live was over, and I felt liberated from everything.

Being tired, being relieved, thinking about the next new thing I had planned, my feelings of thanks towards the members and thanking the staff, my gratefulness to my friends – so many things were swirling up, and already I couldn't handle it. I've never gotten drunk like that before.

In spite of having drunk a fair amount at our first meeting, when I walked into a club the next time, Lee Hom and Tarou-chan were there (Wang Lee Hom and Yamamoto Tarou). Hyde also walked in, and then we all started to drink. I wondered if I was going to die, but I was also really happy.

The day the live ended, all the actors from Moon Child were on the stage together. Though I'd planned that from the day the tour started, actually, it was really difficult to work around all the schedules of the different actors. It was reported to me many times, "it's impossible." But I kept saying, "If you believe you can do it, then you can definitely do it!"

I struggled to do it with everything I had up till the very last day. I think the staff was really working hard. Thinking that we could really do it, they pressed on, and the end result was that we really did it, and that made me the happiest.

The liquor on that day was really great. I had a wonderful experience, and was engulfed with gentleness.