A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer (2000)

by Shirō Ōyama

How might your life look if its guiding principle was simply: minimize responsibility? Shirō Ōyama gives his candid answer in A Man with No Talents, a memoir of his unfettered life as a day laborer in Tokyo’s San’ya district and the Buddhist philosophy that led him there.

To the foreign reader’s great benefit, Ōyama meticulously depicts the mechanics and dynamics of the San’ya day laborer scene and of life at the bottom of Japan’s social hierarchy. Details include the taxonomy of bunkmates encountered over fifteen years renting the same few square meters in a doya (flophouse). The tactics of the queue at the front gate of the employment center. Recession pushing the start of this queue from 6:00am to 1:00am to just after the gates shut on the previous day. The common vices and uncommon virtues of his queuemates. A navigation guide for the restrictions placed on the unemployment dole and the officious clerks who administer it.

Representative doya interiors (source)

That being said, the success of A Man with No Talents isn’t owed to these details. No — it succeeds because Ōyama is a shrewd observer with zero artifice or pretense, a self-proclaimed “average loser” with no swollen ego to stop him from telling things as they are.

A person cannot be gentle if he lacks strength; nor can he embrace others if he is not himself brimming with quiet self-confidence.

Not strong or self-confident, Ōyama is nothing if not self-aware. In true Japanese form, he rigorously catalogs the spectrum between salaryman and street scavenger and describes his slide down this social ladder as an inevitable consequence of his innate unreliability and his uncompromising values system in which freedom from restraint outranks access to material comforts.

It is easy enough to conjure up the sort of scene that would spark the outrage of someone like the activist Saitō: a wealthy executive riding in a chauffeured limousine driving by a homeless man foraging garbage from a trash can on the streets somewhere in the metropolis. Were he to witness such a scene, Saitō would be crying out for social justice until he was blue in the face. I, on the other hand, would be thinking about the heavy responsibilities shouldered by that same executive and feel very grateful not to be sitting in his seat. Since I can imagine just how carefree the life of a vagrant is, once he gets used to the idea of people watching him scavenge for his food, I don’t think of it as the ultimate tragedy that it is usually made out to be. Most important, a society that exhibits such an obvious gap between rich and poor is also one that tolerates diversity (insofar as it doesn’t round up the scavengers and cart them off to an institution). Just what a person considers to be the ultimate misfortune depends on that particular person’s values.

Ōyama’s is a diverse perspective I would recommend to anyone in this era when the phrase “men are opting out” is leaking into the mainstream.

Further reading:

• No Longer Human (1948) by Osamu Dazai
• Hunger (1890) by Knut Hamsun
• The Burnout Society (2010) by Byung-Chul Han
• Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville