Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism

Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism is Misuzu’s comic but serious rule for living with disappointment: expect life to move backward more often than forward, and let modest pleasures count as victories. Its importance grows beyond a joke about arithmetic. The philosophy gives Kido a way to understand pessimism as a form of resilience—and later helps him see why abandoning his established life for a sudden romance would contradict the grounded compromise he has begun to value.

Definition and Method

Misuzu names her philosophy Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism. Its basic calculation is intentionally unfavorable: life is not all “unicorns and rainbows,” so she is willing to accept three steps forward and four steps back. When Kido assumes she has simply reversed the familiar expression, she insists that the imbalance is the point. A person who expects a net loss can be delighted by something merely “a little bit nice”; low expectations make small gains feel substantial rather than inadequate.

Misuzu presents this outlook as the practice of a “megapessimist,” not as a claim that hardship should be denied. Her motto, “true pessimists are full of cheer!”, rests on the gap between an unfavorable forecast and a welcome surprise. Cheerfulness does not require believing that events will turn out well. It can come from expecting very little and recognizing what is good when it arrives. Kido is initially puzzled by her personal theories, but then finds that the logic clicks into place for him.

Misuzu’s Experience and the Philosophy’s Scale

Misuzu connects the maxim to her own bad luck, naming Daisuké’s disappearance as an example. She says she would honestly settle for two steps forward and four back, suggesting that even the philosophy’s three-forward expectation is, for her, an ambitious one. The joke carries a history of loss: the rule does not promise recovery or erase what has happened, but makes room to value a little progress without demanding that life balance the account.

Her description also turns the saying outward. In her view, the world is treated as better than it really is because people see it as they want it to be. When reality disappoints them, they blame others for their misfortunes, while remaining dissatisfied with their own lives. The maxim counters that cycle by lowering the distance between expectation and experience. It is not simply a private trick for surviving bad luck; it is a critique of the wishful standards by which people judge their circumstances and one another.

Kido’s Recognition and Identity

The exchange gives Kido language for a pessimism he recognizes in himself. He agrees that the way the world is now can make a single backward step seem to cancel three steps forward, and accepts Misuzu’s suggestion that he, too, is a pessimist. His response does not turn him into an optimist; it marks a change in how he understands his own outlook and the limits of progress.

The conversation also touches the difficulty Kido has discussing his Zainichi identity. He says that being Zainichi is not itself a step backward, but that he finds it difficult to measure the stress the subject brings and tiresome to talk about. He makes light of the possibility that someone might write a novel with him as the protagonist, and dismisses the alternative of a novel about a lawyer as no more appealing. The humor fits Misuzu’s philosophy: neither reduces his identity to a misfortune nor pretends that it carries no strain. It leaves room for difficulty without making difficulty the whole story.

Consequence for Kido’s Choices

The maxim later becomes a standard against which Kido considers his attraction to Misuzu. He imagines the destructive possibility of giving in to a sudden middle-aged dream, throwing away the life he has painstakingly built and beginning another with her. He concludes that this would be the opposite of the grounded, compromising way of living that Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism had impressed on him. The philosophy therefore does not merely console him after disappointment; it restrains an impulse to treat a new life as an easy escape from the existing one.

That restraint is set against Kido’s speculation about X. Considering whether X may have grown bored with an ordinary life and sought another, Kido wonders whether memories of another person could allow someone to become that person. This thought brings the maxim’s concerns into sharper focus: the wish to exchange one life for another promises a clean break, while Misuzu’s rule asks for a less dramatic accommodation with the life already being lived. Kido does not claim that the maxim resolves his conflicts. Its significance is more modest and more concrete: it helps him recognize the difference between accepting life’s imperfect balance and impulsively destroying what he has built in pursuit of a fantasy.