Artist's commentary
Opinion/Hypothesis “That was NOT a Dream”
Do you know the expression “profoundly gifted?” It refers to genius children who naturally have an extremely high level of ability. If they are given an appropriate environment, they can graduate from university at around 10 years of age. The little girl who committed suicide was one of these children.
Her name was Mochizuki Madoka. She was born in Tsu City, in Mie Prefecture. She was 12 years old. Entering Tokyo University at age 8, she graduated the next year at the top of her class. She spoke 21 languages, and had an exhaustive knowledge of almost all of modern learning.
It's an easy thing to say, but there probably wasn't anybody, including myself, who could understand the way she thought. The world that she perceived must have been so different from the one we see. It's often said that “genius and insanity are two sides of the same leaf,” and just as Pablo Picasso one day decided to draw humans with polygons, she was apparently quite manic during her short life.
Constantly repeating magic spells like a broken record player. Writing completely incomprehensible shapes and colors on a piece of paper. For ordinary people, this sort of behavior is exactly the same as that exhibited by mentally-challenged people. But there was nobody capable of following her in a conversation in the first place.
For her to take action to come to a mutual understanding with other humans would have been like, to put it differently, a human trying to speak to a bird. For her, everything apart from her was something inferior, something bearing life lightly, incapable of existing and looking at the world in any other way than objectively. Of course, she had absolutely no friends.
However, there was an area of study that she hadn't yet experienced. That was the concept of death. She gradually became more and more preoccupied with the question, and started gathering materials on death from across the world. I had her show me her scrapbook, and I was shocked. There was somebody that had gotten crushed by a truck in the rain. Somebody who's hands and feet had been amputated and then reattached in the wrong places. A girl with blond hair whose face had been burned until it turned black and was grotesquely crumpled. A young girl, who, having frozen to death, looked like she was sleeping.
In the end, in order to be able to see death closer-up, she took to wandering the streets at night with a knife in her hand. She rode on her bicycle. It was the terrible birth of the youngest serial killer in the world. However, none of this still satisfied her intellectual curiosity. This is probably obvious; if her thoughts were that everybody apart from her was an inferior life form not worthy of being called a human. To really be satisfied, she had to kill a “human.” In short, she had to kill herself.
...In any case, there is a copy of the dying message that she left on top of her desk. Actually, it's rather more like a diary... If you want, why not take a look at it? I guarantee you pleasant dreams.