“Everything is both complicated and simple”

“Everything is both complicated and simple” is the governing maxim of Noboru Wataya’s televised speech, delivered in a dreamlike scene Toru Okada experiences at the bottom of the well. Wataya presents the phrase as a rule for understanding the world: beneath apparent complexity, he says, lies a motive that can be found by digging to its root. But the speech’s language of clarity and direction also becomes a means of contempt and control, intensifying Toru’s isolation as he hears it as a message meant for him alone.

The maxim and its argument

Wataya addresses an unseen mass audience from a television screen in a broad lobby. He appears in a tweed suit, striped shirt, and navy-blue necktie, with a world map behind him. More than a hundred people stop to listen. The scale and staging make his words seem public and authoritative, while Toru notices the practiced pauses, resonant voice, and shifting expressions that lend the speech an unusually persuasive air.

Wataya’s argument is that complicated events become simple when their underlying motives are identified. Motive, he says, is the root of desire; understanding therefore requires digging beneath reality’s complicated surface and continuing until that root is reached. The maxim does not deny complexity so much as subordinate it to a single explanatory principle: find the motive, and the world will come clear.

Darkness as a judgment

The speech turns its method into a hierarchy. Wataya describes those who cannot grasp the world’s fundamental principles as directionless, lost in a forest or deep in a well, and unable to distinguish one direction from another. He dismisses what they have in their heads as “garbage and rocks.” After pausing to let the words sink in, he tells his listeners to forget such people and attend to more important matters.

The contrast is pointed: a speech promising to make the world intelligible casts those who struggle to understand it as irredeemably foolish. Its images of darkness and the well also echo Toru’s immediate situation, so that Wataya’s abstract account of confusion takes on a personal and menacing force within the scene.

Toru’s reception and the phrase’s force

Toru grows angrier as he listens. Although Wataya appears to be speaking to the world, Toru believes that he is addressing Toru alone through television, using the public broadcast to send a secret message. Toru suspects a twisted motive behind this apparent communication, but nobody else in the lobby recognizes what he thinks is happening. Unable to share or discharge his anger, he experiences the moment as profound isolation.

The maxim therefore works on two levels. It is Wataya’s polished public doctrine about reducing complexity to motive, and, for Toru, part of a private antagonism concealed within mass communication. The scene does not make the audience’s interpretation explicit; it shows Toru’s certainty alongside the fact that those around him hear only the public speech. As he leaves the lobby for the guest-room corridor, a faceless man blocks his way and tells him that it is the wrong time and that he does not belong there. The encounter closes on exclusion rather than the clarity Wataya’s maxim promises.