What "The Power of a 90-Year-Old" Taught Me About Living With My Own Scars

Shigehiko Toyama's The Power of a 90-Year-Old is the book behind this record of what I've actually tried at 66. The first thing that caught my eye when I picked it up in a bookshop was the story of the bruised apple. The book opens with an old woman at a morning market in Aomori, selling apples with blemishes, telling him, "The bruised ones taste sweeter, you know." Toyama, a scholar of English literature who kept writing well into his nineties, filled this book with short reflections on failure, ageing, restraint, and desire.

This illustration was created to evoke the book's story of a bruised apple that ends up tasting sweeter than an unblemished one.

Learning from a bruised apple

Early in the book, he writes:

A bruised apple. It ends up tasting better than an unblemished one. — Shigehiko Toyama, The Power of a 90-Year-Old

A wounded apple, he suggests, pushes its sugar content up as it tries to protect itself. Reading this, I thought of stepping away from my long-time work at 65. Both the Japanese food business and the acupuncture clinic had reached a settled shape by the time I retired, so it hardly counts as a wound in any dramatic sense. Even so, letting go of a familiar title felt far more unsteady than I'd expected. Now, rather than filing that unsteadiness away as simply a bad feeling, I try to treat it as the kind of pressure that draws something new out of a person. Even the way I've been rethinking how I write for this blog lately feels, in hindsight, close to that same idea of turning a bruise into sweetness.

Listening to a cold as a signal

One story that stayed with me was about two childhood friends, Takeshi and Hiroshi. Takeshi was sturdy and never missed school; Hiroshi caught cold after cold. Takeshi, proud of his health, died unexpectedly of illness before turning sixty, while Hiroshi, always catching colds, lived on. Toyama writes:

Rather like a car on a road full of traffic lights — never quite able to pick up speed. — from the same book

A minor cold, in other words, was quietly doing the work of a brake. This story brought to mind the Buddhist idea of impermanence — that nothing, including good health or a smooth run of things, is guaranteed to last. Seen that way, ignoring the body's small signals starts to look different. Having studied acupuncture, I'm familiar with the Eastern medicine concept of treating minor imbalances before they become illness, and the traffic-light image in this book felt strikingly close to that same idea. As an aside, in the UK it's common not to see a doctor for a minor cold, while in Japan there's more of a culture of acting early on the strength of a number from a checkup. I don't think one is more correct than the other — living between the two countries, it feels more like a difference between listening to the body through figures and listening to it through sensation.

Crying and laughing without holding back

In a chapter on stress and illness, he writes:

Crying, laughing — it stands to reason these are effective ways of releasing stress. — from the same book

The point is not to hold in check what can't be managed by numbers. For me, the equivalent of "crying and laughing" is time in the garden. The asparagus I grow in a raised bed takes several years from planting before it can be harvested. Going out each year just to see a little more growth is an unremarkable habit, but the act of waiting without rushing the result seems, without my quite noticing, to work as its own small release. I think the same is true of feelings — rather than trying to tidy them away immediately, simply letting them out first. Reading this book reminded me how much that alone can do.

The path that forms behind you as you walk

In a chapter on how to live in later life, I came across this line:

Someone who doesn't walk a path — the ground behind them, once they've walked it, becomes the path. — from the same book

The passage opens with the story of a film called I'll Take My Own Path, and makes the point that walking wherever you please is not the same as a path forming behind you because you walked it with intention. Looking back at my own moves — from the Japanese food business, to the acupuncture clinic, to investing, to this blog — I'd like to think I chose "my own path" each time, but the truer picture is that the path only became visible after I'd already walked it, rather than existing beforehand. I think the same applies to worries about money. Rather than worrying over the numbers themselves, shrinking the feeling of worry itself is, in my experience of investing over the years, ultimately what keeps you walking. Comparing the UK and Japanese markets over the years has felt less like searching for the one correct route and more like a continuous process of finding the path by walking it.

This illustration was created to evoke the idea that the ground behind you, once walked, becomes the path.

The practice of writing things down

In a chapter about the mirrors we use to see ourselves, one line stood out:

Most people go through life without ever thinking deeply about that. — from the same book

We can't see our own face without a mirror, Toyama writes, and literature or another person's words can serve as that "second mirror." At 66, I've started noticing more moments where a name won't come to me right away. That, too, is a kind of thing I can't see for myself. Which is perhaps why keeping this record on the blog has become another kind of mirror for me. It doesn't need replies or comments. Rather than aiming for a response, I like to think that the record simply existing there might become a small light for someone.

What "the power of a 90-year-old" points toward

Turning a wound into strength, listening to the body's signals, letting feelings out rather than managing them, letting a path form behind you as you walk, and writing to see yourself more clearly — none of this is extraordinary. But coming from someone who kept writing actively into his nineties, the words carry a certain weight. What struck me most this time is that if life in one's younger years is a solo event, life from this age onward feels more like a team sport. Family, the crops in the garden, our cat Meg, and the people reading this. The strength to carve out your own path alone is only part of it — being carried along by the people and things around you is, I think, another form of the same power.

The book I mentioned here:

Shigehiko Toyama, "The Power of a 90-Year-Old" (Gentosha Shinsho)

I'll also list the other book mentioned in this article:

Shigehiko Toyama, "Shikō no Seirigaku" (Chikuma Bunko)

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About the author

This illustration was created to evoke a writer who continued to think and write at his desk through decades of upheaval, from wartime to the postwar years.

Shigehiko Toyama was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1923. The Pacific War began while he was still at secondary school, and after passing through the Tokyo Higher Normal School, he graduated from the English department of Tokyo University of Literature and Science in 1947. Having spent his student years through the chaos of wartime and the immediate postwar period — a generation whose values were overturned from the ground up while still young — it isn't hard to see how that experience fed into his lifelong instinct to question inherited frameworks and think things through for himself. After graduating, he spent twelve years as editor-in-chief of the magazine Eigo Seinen (English Youth), before going on to serve as associate professor at Tokyo University of Education and then professor at Ochanomizu University, becoming professor emeritus there in 1989. Beyond his scholarship in English literature, he wrote extensively on the Japanese language and on how to think, and his 1983 book Shikō no Seirigaku (roughly, "The Organisation of Thought") became known as "the most-read book at Tokyo and Kyoto universities," still being read more than forty years later. The Power of a 90-Year-Old is based on an earlier book he published around the age of ninety. He practised what might be called "ageing intelligently" throughout his life, and never stopped writing until his death in 2020 at the age of 96. Read as the record of one writer who lived through the Taishō, Shōwa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras and thought seriously about what it means to grow old, this book carries a different kind of weight.