Do Not Go Against the Flow

Do Not Go Against the Flow is the principle Mr. Honda gives Toru Okada for meeting a world that cannot be mastered by ordinary legal or rational categories: move when the current carries you, remain still when it does not, and do not force a direction. Its significance lies in the way an apparently cryptic instruction becomes a practical pattern for Toru’s later encounter with the dry well, while the accompanying warning about water gives that pattern an unsettlingly concrete edge.

The Counsel and Its Terms

Mr. Honda first distinguishes the domain of law from the world to which Toru belongs. Law, he says, presides over “things of this world,” where shadow and light, yin and yang, and one person and another can be kept distinct. Toru, by contrast, belongs above that world or below it. Mr. Honda does not present either direction as better. The point is to recognize the direction demanded by the moment rather than impose a preference on it.

He spells out the instruction through contrasting movements: when it is time to go up, climb the highest tower; when it is time to go down, find the deepest well and reach its bottom. When there is no current, do nothing. The counsel is not simply an injunction to passively accept events. It calls for discerning whether movement is possible and, once the time comes, following its direction fully. Forcing movement during a still period, he warns, makes everything dry up; dryness then leaves the world in darkness.

The advice is expressed through paradox as well as practical images. Mr. Honda’s verse, “I am me and / He is him: / Autumn eve,” gives way to the instruction to abandon the self, followed by another verse in which “I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.” The movement from fixed separation to relinquishing the self makes the counsel difficult to reduce to a rule of ordinary decision-making. It offers a way of being in relation to change, not a formula for controlling its outcome.

Stillness, Waiting, and Nomonhan

When Kumiko Okada asks whether this is a time with no current, Mr. Honda answers that it is. His advice is immediate and restrictive: stay still, do nothing, and be very careful of water. The warning is deliberately imprecise. He cannot say what kind of water he means, but describes the possible danger in terms of water missing from where it belongs or present where it does not. The ignorance does not cancel the warning; it leaves Toru with an image whose meaning may only become apparent later.

Mr. Honda grounds stillness in the memory of Nomonhan. His unit had been ordered to remain in place, but many of his fellow soldiers could not bear waiting and went toward the river. Soviet tanks with flamethrowers, machine-gun positions, and sharpshooters blocked the way; the Japanese soldiers had only Model 38 rifles and twenty-five rounds each. None of those who went to the river returned. The episode turns his abstract counsel into a lesson about the cost of mistaking impatience for necessary action: at times, movement toward an apparent need is precisely what leads to death.

Waiting, in this account, is not easy or comfortable. Mr. Honda says that when the current has not begun, one must wait and, meanwhile, “assume you’re dead.” Toru repeats the idea as a question about remaining dead for the present, and Mr. Honda affirms it with the verse “Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.” The image of death thus joins waiting to release: stillness entails relinquishing the demand to act, even when the interval feels like an ending.

The form in which Mr. Honda delivers the lesson complicates its authority. During a year of monthly visits, he rarely divines and almost never has a teaching for Toru and Kumiko to receive. Instead, he repeatedly recounts the Nomonhan Incident, including the death of the lieutenant beside him, his burning of a Soviet tank with a Molotov cocktail, and the shooting of a downed Soviet pilot. He screams these stories rather than simply telling them, and the couple eventually find that they can barely hear after leaving his house. The instruction about stillness therefore arrives through a voice marked by remembered violence and repeated retelling, not through detached exposition.

The Well as a Later Application

Toru recalls Mr. Honda’s words when he looks into the dry well and considers why it has not been filled in. He reasons that a hole left open could injure someone, and that something must have caused the water to disappear. Against this practical observation, the remembered instruction supplies another possibility: the well may be there for him to use if he needs one. The earlier image of descent becomes newly available as a direction, rather than remaining only an enigmatic saying.

At the edge, Toru looks down without anticipating anything in particular. The contrast is stark: it is the middle of the day, yet the well contains darkness deep enough to make the ordinary daylight world feel insufficient. Even the small sounds of his throat clearing and swallowing echo as if someone else had made them. The scene does not resolve the mystery of Mr. Honda’s warning, but it gives the counsel a place in Toru’s experience: a descent may be called for where ordinary light and ordinary categories fail.

Water, Flow, and the Expression’s Force

The expression holds together movement and restraint, height and depth, life and the imagined condition of being dead. Its governing test is not whether action is inherently good but whether the moment has a current. That distinction links Mr. Honda’s wartime recollection to Toru’s later attention to the well: in one case, rushing toward the river proves fatal; in the other, descending into darkness becomes thinkable as a response to circumstances that cannot be addressed by conventional means.

Water remains the warning’s unresolved center. Mr. Honda speaks of both absence and misplaced presence, refusing to identify a single literal danger. The dry well supplies an image of absence, while the broader counsel anticipates that water can matter precisely when its expected order is broken. The expression consequently works both as practical advice and as a structure of attention: Toru is taught to notice when a world’s usual arrangements have failed, to avoid forcing an answer, and to wait for the direction that the situation itself makes possible.