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注目 comes from a Chinese word meaning “to gaze,” and its parts seem particularly evocative. 目, pronounced “moku” here, means “eye.” It's one of the first kanji most people learn, and its purpose in this word is obvious. But 注, chū, means “pour.”
When I learned that, I remembered one of the poems about the moon that I wrote a few years ago:
It's not to be looked away from,
this white flame above the horizon.
I lose track of how long I've been resting here,
filled with its cooling blaze.
When I gazed at the waning gibbous moon before writing that poem, it was a sort of communion. I felt not only that it was pouring light into me, but that I poured something of myself into it.
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Before my breakdown, I worked in the rather pompously-named field of “nature connection.” One useful thing I took away from this work is the concept of “effortless attention,” which many people experience in natural settings; it's what I was experiencing when I looked at the moon, for example.
The term “effortless attention” sounds almost oxymoronic. “Attention,” after all, comes from a Latin root meaning “stretching toward something.” Maybe 注目 has a more fitting pedigree for this concept. To pour, or to be poured into, is not an entirely passive experience, but it doesn't require striving; only a removal of barriers, a willingness to give and receive.
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I've always paid careful (some would say obsessive) attention to things that interest me. It's why I find close reading so satisfying. Treating every aspect of a text as if it matters, listening intently to both what it says and what it doesn't say, gives me the same sense of communion I felt when I gazed at the moon.
As a child, I sometimes thought about the fact that everything in our house was in some way the work of other people, from the blurb on the side of the cereal box to the spindles on the kitchen chairs.
I thought that if I could, I would pay close attention to every one of those people's stories. And then I would ponder the trees that had left their grain like signatures in the chairs, and the kernels that fell to the ground to make the Wheaties. Only then, it seemed, could I understand the richness of the world.
I must have assumed that someone, somewhere, would want to pay similar attention to me. It's always disconcerting to learn that someone doesn't want to stretch that far.
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Jason Arday got so much attention from the wrong people that it killed him. But that attention was of a strangely incurious kind. One of the claims his critics most viciously mocked was his story of having run 30 marathons in 35 days for charity. After he died, researcher Emma Monk dug into old news articles and found that the story was true. No one had bothered to do this when he was alive.
Like all lynchings, Professor Arday's was led by a white supremacist. But it was a more mundane type of person who took up the chase: people who feared they were losing the overgrown nursery games of academia, whose biographies led with decades-old awards. They poured their own insecurities into Professor Arday's humiliation. I don’t think it occurred to them that there was anything for them to receive.
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I started reading Higashino Keigo's novels after seeing Fukuyama Masaharu play his physics-professor-turned-detective Yukawa Manabu in the TV series Galileo. The Devotion of Suspect X is the most famous of the Detective Galileo novels, and it has a plot twist that made me gasp out loud on the Tube. I'll do my best not to spoil it, but its power lies not just in what's revealed, but in how it's been hidden. Or rather, not hidden. As a reader, you have all the information you need from the start to work out what must have occurred. The surprise comes because of what – or rather, who – society has primed us to pay attention to, and who it hasn't.
Plot twists sometimes leave me examining the writer's technique: does everything that came before really work in light of the new information? But Higashino's technique was solid, and his twist left me examining my conscience.
The Japan Foundation recently made the film of this book (called simply Suspect X, and also starring Fukuyama) available on its streaming website; you can watch it for free with subtitles until 4 November 2026.
Obviously one important reason to watch a film with Masha is to gaze at him, and this one gives plenty of opportunities for that. It's a well-made film in general, too. But I don't think it handles the plot twist nearly as well as the book. It couldn't, because in a film the camera pays attention for us.
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A child nowadays might well find that no human wrote the text on the cereal box. More and more, we outsource both our creativity and our attention. At worst, this suggests a future where no person will stretch to meet another.
But I wonder if the all-seeing eye of artificial intelligence might comfort some. Perhaps a machine tasked with paying attention for us will retain things that a more subjective observer wouldn't consider important. Maybe those who feel overlooked will pour themselves into the void and hope that someday, a human gaze will flow back.