What Uesaka Fuyuko's Oi no Shūhen Taught Me About Living Alongside Growing Old

Uesaka Fuyuko's essay collection Oi no Shūhen — roughly, The Vicinity of Old Age — is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. The headings are short, almost bare words — "Secrets," "Truth," "Maturity," "Isolation," "Forgetting," "Honors," "Death" — and each essay runs only a few pages. But out of small, real encounters from the author's own life, the texture of growing old slowly comes into focus. Reading it at 66, some passages had me nodding along immediately; others still felt a little ahead of where I am.

Not rushing toward a "serene old age"

One scene stayed with me: at some gathering, the author is unexpectedly singled out, and the laughter she'd been holding in bursts out loud — only for her to catch herself, suddenly aware the room has gone quiet, and quickly compose her face again. She writes, half self-mockingly, that she's clearly still too green to belong to the ranks of the truly "mellow and detached" — the serene old age people imagine. And yet, she also notices that she no longer gets angry, cries, or laughs as easily as she once did, and finds an odd sense of relief in realizing that there was never really a fixed role called "properly aged" to grow into in the first place.

Reading this, I recognized moments where I notice my own emotional swings have grown quieter than they used to be. Small irritations that once stayed with me all day now pass with a single deep breath. But I don't want to treat that as some kind of achievement — approaching "enlightenment." I'd rather hold it as lightly as the author does, laughing at how "green" I still am. Not rushing to finish becoming old. Just honestly noticing, each time, how my feelings are actually moving right now.

Learning from "Defeat" — taking my own feelings seriously

Another essay, called "Defeat," stayed with me too. The author, an older gentleman, and another woman had booked a table at a restaurant that was notoriously hard to reserve. Just before the date, the woman cancelled — selfishly, asking the other two to simply find someone to take her place. The author was furious. The gentleman, though, felt the opposite: he confessed he regretted never having had that kind of selfishness himself, and that he almost envied that stubborn self-assertion. Looking back, the author writes, she has come to understand — belatedly — exactly how he felt.

I recognize in myself a habit of prioritizing other people's comfort over my own actual feelings. Since reading this essay, I've started being more direct about declining invitations I don't really want to attend, or obligatory gatherings I used to force myself through. Much of the pain in relationships, I've come to realize, comes from putting yourself last. And when I do have to see someone I'd rather avoid, I now try not to disappear into the occasion to keep things smooth — instead, I stay present, but briefly and on my own terms.

Encouraged by "Haiga" — taking small chances

One essay I especially liked: the author hears, almost by accident, that an eighty-five-year-old haiga (haiku-painting) teacher is holding an exhibition at a department store, and she can't help but go straight there. The teacher, a warm, humorous old man, would add just one brushstroke to a student's painting on television, and the whole piece would suddenly come alive. Even the author's homebody sister, watching from her living room, dropped everything and came up to Tokyo the moment she heard about it.

That lightness — not letting age be a reason to hesitate — stayed with me. My own practice now is simple: when something catches my interest, I move on it in some small way right away. It doesn't have to be a big decision like starting a new class. Going to see an exhibition that caught my eye, buying one introductory book on a subject I'm curious about — that's enough. Thinking about "job hunting" or "what's next" at this age can feel intimidating, but I've started to believe these small moments of curiosity might actually be the real entry point to whatever comes next.

What "New Year's Card" taught me about a lifetime's work

The essay called "New Year's Card" tells the story of a man who spent years caring for elderly, unattached Japanese wives at a facility in Korea. After retiring, he moved to New York, where he lived quietly until his death. His daughter, who studied in both Korea and Japan, became a social worker in New York, now supporting the medical needs of people living in poverty and people with disabilities.

Reading this, I was quietly moved by the way a life spent caring for others can pass, transformed, into the next generation. I don't have a settled answer to why we're born, or where life comes from and where it goes. But every time I come across a story like this — a life spent giving time to someone else — I find myself thinking that life might not be something that completes itself within one person, but something handed from one person to the next. As a small practice, I've started occasionally writing down what, exactly, I've received from other people over the years.

What a Chinese retirement facility taught me about a rich old age

Another essay describes a facility the author visited in China, called a "veteran cadres' activity center." Women retire at fifty-five, men at sixty, and from then on they live out their later years there on a pension. The place was equipped with gym facilities on par with an athletic club in Japan, along with a mahjong room, a social dance club, and a karaoke room.

It struck me that designing your later years isn't only about solving for money in isolation — it's about picturing a place where physical activity, human connection, and small pleasures all come bundled together. Living abroad, none of that is handed to me automatically. So I've started deliberately building it myself: keeping somewhere nearby where I can move my body, keeping regular plans with people I enjoy being around, and holding onto at least one hobby I can lose myself in. The real shortcut to worrying less about money, I suspect, is having a place to belong and something to look forward to already in place.

Not keeping death at arm's length

Near the end of the book, in an essay simply titled "Death," the author writes that death is something everyone knows and everyone, ordinarily, forgets. If we knew the exact date, we might live with more tension; not knowing, the day feels both close and impossibly far, and the honest feeling, she says, is that we'd rather not get involved with it at all. And yet, glancing back over the years that have passed, she admits that at her age, death no longer feels like a distant subject — and that realization makes her flinch.

At 66, death has stopped being purely someone else's business for me too. But rather than living in fear of it every day, I've come to think the right distance is closer to the author's — occasionally, honestly, acknowledging it's there, and then letting it go again. My practice has been to take "do today what can be done today" a little more seriously than before. Writing the letter I've been putting off. Seeing the people I want to see, while I still can. Nothing dramatic — just practicing a distance from death that neither pushes it away nor lets it take over.

The small practices found in the vicinity of old age

Oi no Shūhen isn't a book that offers a method for overcoming old age. Instead, by carefully gathering up small moments — being angry at someone's selfishness, laughing when you shouldn't have, glimpsing the life of a stranger in a facility far away — the outline of what old age actually is slowly comes into view. Not rushing to let go of feelings. Not putting myself last. Moving quickly on small curiosities. Valuing time spent for someone else. Building my own sense of place. Not keeping death at arm's length. None of these are extraordinary, but at 66, they feel like practices worth holding onto deliberately.

The book I mentioned here:

Uesaka Fuyuko, Oi no Shūhen (Japanese edition)

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About the author: Uesaka Fuyuko and the era she lived through

Uesaka Fuyuko was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1930 and died in 2009. She belongs to a generation that experienced the Second World War directly, as a girl and then a teenager — living through the tension and scarcity of wartime, and then the chaos and rapid rebuilding of the postwar years, during her most formative period. That experience of living through such an upheaval seems to show up throughout her writing as a distinctive plainspokenness: she doesn't dress things up in sentiment, and trusts only what she's actually seen with her own eyes. In Oi no Shūhen, that comes through in the way she openly envies someone else's selfishness in "Defeat," keeps an honest distance from social honors in "Honors," and looks death directly in the eye rather than looking away — an unadorned toughness that feels particular to someone who lived through that era.

She's also known for having remained unmarried throughout her life, continuing to write even in her later years while caring for her aging mother. Because she genuinely chose a life of building her own household without assuming she could lean on someone else, her writing about old age, solitude, and how to keep the right distance in relationships carries a lived-in kind of conviction. She had a reputation for speaking her mind bluntly, unafraid of disagreement — which, I think, was really just an extension of her insistence on working things through for herself and saying them in her own words to the end. In that sense, Oi no Shūhen is also an honest record of one writer still, visibly, in the process of coming to terms with her own aging.