Pain and Injustice

Pain and Injustice is the recognition that suffering is not distributed fairly and cannot be judged from the outside. The concept is most fully expressed through Creta Kano’s account of a life shaped by chronic pain: physical symptoms organize her daily choices, while other people’s disbelief compounds the injury by turning an already private burden into something she must continually defend. Later episodes place that history beside very different forms of helplessness and care, without suggesting that the experiences are interchangeable.

A Body Organized Around Pain

Creta’s account is specific rather than abstract. In junior high school, she could rarely participate in sports; an ice-skating fall left her hip aching every winter, and she sometimes fell while trying to rise from a chair. These limitations were part of a broader pattern of pain that affected ordinary movement and made her body seem unreliable. Her statement that she had become a “virtual sample book of pain” summarizes the accumulation, not a single illness or isolated episode.

That accumulation altered how Creta understood fairness. She believed she might have endured her suffering if everyone else had to live with comparable pain, but she saw that most people did not experience intense pain every day. The disparity made her feel cursed and led, when she had just entered junior high school, to wish she could die. Pain becomes injustice here not because the account identifies a cause or assigns blame, but because Creta experiences it as a burden imposed without explanation and distributed without regard for what a person can bear.

Her sister’s advice gave Creta a time-limited reason to continue living: wait until she was twenty before deciding what to do. Creta held on to that instruction for eight years, trying to notice life’s good side, avoiding complaints, and maintaining a calm exterior even when the pain was severe. Other people consequently saw a quiet, good-natured girl and trusted her, while the suffering that shaped her life remained largely hidden. The contrast shows how composure can make another person’s pain less visible without making it less real.

Disbelief and the Limits of Empathy

The gulf between Creta’s experience and other people’s assumptions becomes explicit when she describes pain to her boyfriend. She tells him that sex causes her pain and asks not to continue; he treats her report as an emotional problem and insists that she should relax and try harder. Creta answers by insisting that pain is real when she says it is, but her attempt to list what she has endured does not make him understand. The relationship ends. The episode connects bodily suffering to a second injustice: the person in pain must argue for the credibility of an experience that another person cannot directly share.

Creta’s twentieth birthday brings no promised turning point. Instead, she feels defeated by the failure of the hope that life would become easier, and sees the years of waiting as a detour that lengthened her suffering. Yet after an accident, she discovers that the pain has disappeared: ordinary bodily functions no longer hurt, and even a broken rib causes little pain. The change is unexplained. It brings temporary freedom, but not a simple resolution; Creta decides to live for the time being and find out what a life without pain means, while taking work as a prostitute to repay a debt of more than three million yen.

Pain, Vulnerability, and Recognition

The novel places Creta’s history alongside Lieutenant Mamiya’s experience at the bottom of a well. After a fall leaves him struggling to make his mind and body act together, his perceptions return gradually and intense pain follows. Alone in darkness, he understands his condition as a lonely death that might concern no one. His episode does not equate his situation with Creta’s long history; rather, it gives a distinct form to the same problem of suffering made more severe by isolation and the possibility that no witness will understand what is happening.

When Creta asks Toru Okada to hold her, the request follows her explanation that she is now a “prostitute of the mind,” through whom things pass. The encounter is not presented as a cure for her earlier pain. Instead, her request and Okada’s embrace create a moment of physical presence and recognition after a history in which pain has repeatedly exceeded other people’s understanding. The distinction matters: sympathy does not erase suffering, and closeness does not make one person’s experience fully transferable to another.

Everyday Care and the Larger Conflict

After leaving the well, Okada gives immediate, practical needs priority: going home, drinking something, eating, and taking a long shower. He postpones everything else until he has addressed the condition of his body. This modest sequence contrasts with the novel’s more spectacular forms of violence and disorientation. It treats care not as a grand explanation of suffering, but as attention to what an exhausted person needs next.

May Kasahara later admits that she had planned to rescue Okada from the well at the last moment, after frightening and tormenting him to see how far his sense of reality could be unsettled. Her admission complicates the difference between suffering inflicted as a test and suffering that cannot be set aside at will. It does not make the experiences equivalent: Okada’s confinement is temporary, while Creta’s account describes pain extending across years. The contrast directs attention to who controls another person’s exposure to distress, and to the responsibility involved in treating vulnerability as an experiment.

Ushikawa’s disclosure of his own history of abusing his wife and children offers a further, sharply different context. He says his wife left with the children after he broke his young daughter’s arm, and accepts that their departure was his fault. The episode is not a parallel to Creta’s chronic pain; it distinguishes suffering from the harm someone chooses to inflict. Together, these scenes keep the concept from becoming a claim that all pain has the same source or moral meaning: involuntary bodily suffering, isolation, manipulation, and deliberate violence require different forms of recognition and responsibility.

Pain and the Demand to Be Believed

The concept’s force lies in holding two facts together: pain can be intensely real to the person who experiences it while remaining inaccessible to someone else, and that gap can become a source of additional harm when testimony is dismissed. Creta’s account resists reducing her body to a symbol by tracing consequences in movement, adolescence, relationships, and the choices she makes at twenty. The novel’s other scenes widen the question without offering a universal explanation. They show that witness and care may matter even when they cannot remove pain, and that acknowledging suffering begins with refusing to confuse another person’s inability to feel it with evidence that it is unreal.