“the man who goes mummy hunting ends up a mummy himself”

The expression “the man who goes mummy hunting ends up a mummy himself” is Kido’s image for the cost of entering another person’s suffering: the seeker may become caught in the very condition he set out to examine. In his account, that danger is inseparable from his way of keeping himself together, and from the difficulty of turning his attention toward his own life.

Meaning and Context

Kido introduces the saying while explaining that he maintains his sense of self by living through other people’s pain. The image makes that practice sound less like detached observation than a perilous crossing of boundaries: to pursue another person’s wound is to risk carrying it away as one’s own. He presents the expression not as an abstract maxim but as a way to describe what he does.

Kido’s Confession

After Kido admits that the personal history he had claimed as his own was borrowed, the listener questions him about the lies. Kido responds with a lonesome smile and describes a contradiction: through brief performances in places like this, he can be “honest through lies,” yet he cannot wholly abandon himself. The mummy-hunting expression gives that contradiction a shape. His assumed stories let him approach other people’s pain, but the effort neither makes him entirely someone else nor allows him an uncomplicated return to himself.

Limits and Significance

Kido says that what he truly wants is to think directly about himself, but that doing so makes him sick; he also believes his need to act this way may eventually pass. The expression therefore points in two directions at once: toward the absorption involved in sharing others’ pain, and toward the self he cannot safely face. Its force lies in that unresolved tension. The listener finds Kido’s manner deliberately mysterious, yet remains fascinated by what he has disclosed and acknowledges a growing affection for him.