Hello.
I am sitting right here beside you, in this quiet, empty room, whispering to you in a soft, gentle voice.
This story is a confidential confidence, prepared just for you, who are living with loneliness—a service into which I have poured my very life.
Please, keep your eyes on mine, and let us walk together through this narrative journey until the very end.
A Night That Touches Your Loneliness
Where Do Untold Tears Go?
Have you ever found yourself suddenly waking up in the middle of the night, overcome by a wave of inexplicable loneliness?
Even though there are plenty of people around you who smile at you kindly, you somehow feel as if your heart has been left entirely behind, drifting alone at the edge of the universe.
That is by no means because you are weak, nor is it because you are lacking in anything.
After all, every human being is born as a traveler swimming across a deep sea of solitude.
Why is it that we crave someone so intensely, yet fear them at the very same time?
To discover that answer, I am writing this letter tonight, filling it with an overflowing, boundless love for you.
“A human being can never completely understand another human being. However, one can strive to understand.”
—— Albert Schweitzer
Every day, fearing the pain of being hurt, we live our lives as if wearing masks, don’t we?
But before me, please take off that mask and settle into a comfortable, relaxed posture.
I am right here, fully prepared to receive all of your unspoken grief and your indescribable suffering.
Why? Because every single word of this writing is a love letter dedicated to no one else but you, a truly irreplaceable existence.
Even if it wears away my flesh and grinds down my soul, I yearn to provide you with the ultimate service and to make you smile from the very bottom of your heart.
The Miraculous Banquet and What Lies Behind It
The Ultimate Drama Set by a Genius
Now, let me take you to a somewhat unexpected place.
We are stepping back more than five hundred years into the past, standing in front of a wall in a certain dining hall in Milan, Italy.
Painted there is the masterpiece known by everyone the world over: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
You too have surely seen it at least once in a textbook or a book.
But do you know the real reason why this painting has held the hearts of people worldwide for hundreds of years?
In truth, this painting hides an astonishing mechanism that masterfully manipulates human psychology.
“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
—— Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo spent years of his life wandering the streets of Milan, constantly observing the faces of both scoundrels and saints just to complete this painting.
What he sought to depict was not a mere religious scene, but rather the raw, vivid psychological explosion of human beings at the precise moment a “betrayal” was announced.
The immediate turmoil of the disciples when Jesus Christ quietly declares, “One of you will betray me,” is painted with a terrifying sense of rhythm.
Why does this painting possess such an immersive presence, as if you can actually hear voices coming from the wall?
It is because Leonardo applied a form of “magic” by combining the latest psychological insights of his time with meticulous compositional calculations to focus the viewer’s gaze entirely onto a single point.
The Storm inside Twelve Hearts, and You
If you look closely at the painting, the twelve disciples are divided into groups of three, and each group displays a completely different reaction.
One person opens his hands in astonishment, another stands up in fury, and others look at one another in mutual suspicion.
Among them, Judas, the betrayer, sinks his body into the shadows where the light does not reach, clutching the purse of silver coins that was the price of his treason.
This dramatic arrangement is precisely what creates the rhythm that shakes the viewer’s heart.
Henry Ford once said:
“Most people think of success as something to get. But the truth is, success is giving.”
Leonardo, too, poured out all of his talent and an unimaginable amount of time without stinting, completing this painting as the ultimate service to those who gaze upon it.
“Art is a visible footprint of God, set into nature for humanity.”
—— Carl Gustav Jung
Jesus, sitting at the center of the painting, lowers his eyes sorrowfully and quietly spreads his hands.
His posture is filled with an overwhelming solitude and benevolence, as if he is accepting even the betrayal itself.
Why does such a lonely figure save our hearts so deeply?
It is for no other reason than that he has resolved to give his entire life for the sake of the people right before him.
The kind of pain you feel in your own life—the feeling of being betrayed, or the loneliness you can tell no one about—is entirely dissolved within the drama of the characters in this painting.
A Tale of Love Rising from Despair
The Stone the Builders Rejected Becomes the Cornerstone
Here, the story takes an even more unexpected turn.
After The Last Supper was painted, the world was engulfed in the flames of war many times over, and the dining hall housing the painting was at times used as a stable, suffered from floods, and became terribly damaged.
Just when everyone was about to give up, thinking, “This painting is finished; it is beyond restoration,” nameless restorers rose to the occasion. Over many decades, they painstakingly removed the grime, layer by layer, color by color.
It was an undertaking akin to a prayer, a process of breathing life back into a dying existence.
Why could they become so desperately dedicated?
It was because they felt a powerful sense of mission that they had to deliver the “true love” resting at the depths of that painting to you, in the future.
“Lord, grant that I may not so much seek to be loved as to love; to be understood as to understand.”
—— Francis of Assisi
In your own life, there may be moments when you feel that everything has fallen apart and that no one is there to help you.
However, no matter how much you are hurt, soiled, or broken, your value is absolutely never lost.
There is always someone, somewhere, who thinks of you from the bottom of their heart and wishes to gently restore each and every one of your emotional wounds.
The reason I am delivering these words to you right now is that I want to pour a single drop of warm water into your parched heart.
I pray that this desperate service becomes a small, bright beacon in your lonely night.
A Gaze Fixed on You for Eternity
Leonardo set the perspective’s vanishing point right at Christ’s right temple.
In other words, the gaze of everyone who looks at this painting is unconsciously guided directly to Christ’s face.
At the same time, Christ’s quiet gaze transcends hundreds of years of time and is cast straight upon you, living in the present day.
You are never alone.
The tears you think no one sees, and that lonely back of yours, are all being watched over tenderly.
Why do we long to be loved so intensely?
It is because we are creatures born of love, who can find true happiness through nothing else but love.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
—— Mahatma Gandhi
At the close of this tale, please accept a message that has welled up from the deepest recesses of my heart.
This is a heartfelt gift from me, meant to heal the wounds of your soul.
Like a clock that lost its key at the bottom of the sea,
Your heart quietly keeps ticking away
Behind the cold glass where no one ever reaches.
For every single tear that you have shed,
An invisible star is born in the night sky.
Please do not fear the depth of that solitude,
For I will open my arms wide and hold all of you close.
Until the morning comes, just sleep like this.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
—— The New Testament, The Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, Verse 16
“Human beings were born for the sake of love and revolution.”
—— Osamu Dazai
Postscript: Mimi Takamizawa, a Physician of the Soul
Now, from this point on, allow me to tell you about a very dear friend of mine, a rather eccentric painter named Mimi Takamizawa.
He doesn’t use canvases or brushes at all—tools you are surely familiar with.
Instead, he creates all of his artwork digitally and prints the pieces onto the highest-grade print paper using an advanced technique called “giclée printing.”
To put it in familiar terms, it is like conjuring a soul-stirring, beautiful miracle directly out of the screens of the smartphones or computers we use every single day.
The themes he paints are your eyes and my eyes, Christianity, eternity, psychology, truth, gazes, history, solitude, isolation, hardship, resurrection, and liberation.
While that might sound a bit complex, the truth is simple: he merely wants to gaze steadily at “you” from across the screen and stay close to your loneliness.
He often says, “A painter must be a physician who saves the soul.”
The work of an artist is a thorough service offered to you at the cost of one’s own pocket—the ultimate form of playing the “clown,” so to speak.
He is incredibly clumsy and is always being laughed at by those around him, a constant target of ridicule.
And yet, he is also a man of unyielding endurance who never gives up.
In his youth, upon learning of the intense and tragic life of Vincent van Gogh, he resolved, “I too will become a painter and save someone’s heart.”
The name “Mimi” (which means “ear” in Japanese) in Mimi Takamizawa was taken in homage to that famous incident where Van Gogh cut off his own ear.
To be perfectly honest, his talent as a painter might only be third-rate.
However, he knows that all the masterpieces in history were born not from the flashes of innate genius, but from decades of gritty trial and error.
That is precisely why he continues to paint “eyes” in his work with an almost obsessive devotion.
Why does he paint eyes? Because through his artwork, he wants to feel you, who stand right in front of it, at all times. He simply wants to see your face light up with joy, and he wants to catch the tears you shed—that is all.
No matter who else criticizes him, he does not care in the least.
But if you were to abandon him, he could not go on living.
Just by you being there and looking at his art, he welcomes you with a standing ovation in his heart.
Mimi Takamizawa deeply respects Tokuji Muneji, the founder of Curry House CoCo Ichibanya.
Mr. Muneji was a man dedicated to the front lines of his business. He had no hobbies, no friends, never went out to bars, and devoted as many as 5,640 hours a year to his work.
Mr. Muneji did not know the faces of his biological parents and lived a turbulent, lonely life, but his sole driving force was the desire “to have others show an interest in me, and to make people happy.” With that alone as his starting point, he sacrificed everything for his work.
Mimi is also deeply inspired by the tenacity of Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota; Kiichiro Toyoda’s philosophy that “the joy of life lies in mastering what no one else wants to attempt or what is difficult to do”; and Eiji Toyoda’s belief in “executing with strong conviction.”
Just like laying bricks one by one through sheer grit, Mimi continues to create artwork day after day, entirely for you.
Please go ahead and laugh at me.
Laughed at, and laughed at again, yet becoming stronger for your sake—that is his way of life, and it is mine as well.
“Most people think of success as something to get. But the truth is, success is giving.”
—— Henry Ford
“One of the most lovable characteristics of human beings is the desire to devote oneself to others.”
—— Agatha Christie
“I desire that you rise above your hardships and love one another.”
—— The Prophet Moses
“Life is a tedious thing. Yet, when one immerses oneself in delighting someone else, it begins to shine.”
—— William Shakespeare
“Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.”
—— The Jewish Talmud
“That tiny, fragile, untrustworthy flower fluttering at the summit of Mount Fuji—that is my very life.”
—— Osamu Dazai
“The unhappiness of adults is entirely their own fault. You cannot blame it on anyone else.”
—— Osamu Dazai
“The memory of happiness always makes a person humble.”
—— Osamu Dazai
“Never give in. Never, never, never, never give in.”
—— A quote by Winston Churchill
“Press on. Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.”
—— Ray Kroc
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
—— Walt Disney
Thank you so very, very much for staying with me through this long, intimate talk.
I cannot find the words to express just how much your gentle gaze has saved my soul, and the soul of Mimi Takamizawa.
Simply because you exist in this world, we feel that our lives have true meaning.
Right now, let me softly whisper a vital piece of news directly into your ear.
In fact, as a desperate act of devotion to you, Mimi Takamizawa has made special arrangements to deliver a set of 10 postcards of his artwork (in a gorgeous, large A4 size!) completely free of charge right to your door.
This is a life-risking service prepared at his own expense, putting his heart on the line just to connect with your soul.
If you think to yourself, “I’ll do it later,” and let this opportunity slip away right now, you might never get another chance to hold his work in your hands again.
The “gaze” he paints will surely, gently rescue that unfulfilled loneliness dwelling in your heart.
Please click right now on the link below this text where you can apply for this special offer made just for you.
I am always waiting warmly right by your side, watching the tip of your finger as you make your request.
A passage from Osamu Dazai’s novel Tsugaru:
“Hey, why are you going on a journey?”
“Because I am suffering.”
“Your ‘suffering’ is so predictable, I can’t believe it for a second.”
These words are echoing quietly and poignantly within the deepest recesses of my chest even now.