"I don't want to be useful, so I aspire to be a mathematician or a literary figure."

"I aspire to be a mathematician or a writer because I don't want to be useful." I recently came across someone boasting this. Perhaps, in essence, my choice to major in French literature despite entering the science department was similar. Masashi Wakashima, who switched from aspiring to mathematics to English literature, said that since childhood, he found everything in daily life tedious, but mathematics seemed like a clean world, free from the grime of humanity. I certainly had similar feelings myself.

My fascination with mathematics began around the second or third year of junior high school. The books on topology and set theory that I picked up, trying to act more mature than I was, revealed a world of astonishing wonder beyond rigorous logic. The realization that logic and astonishment could be intertwined is a feeling I will never forget. "The madness of the mathematician and the logic of the poet"—this is a phrase dedicated to a French writer, but at the time, I had indeed discovered a different world where "madness and logic" equally reigned. There seems to be debate about whether mathematical objects are real or conceptual, but whether they are real or conceptual, I had absolutely no interest in topics such as the relationship between mathematics and nature or its application to social phenomena. Since I wasn't paying attention to people or society, I must say that at that time, I had absolutely no aptitude for a literature degree.

Choosing literature over mathematics was a decision I reached after much deliberation over several years, from high school through university entrance exams to the final selection of my major. I don't think writing about my meandering journey here would be of any help to anyone choosing their career path, so I'll refrain. I will simply say that I came to feel a decisive dissatisfaction with mathematics. Mathematician and writer Masahiko Fujiwara wrote that while mathematics and literature both deal with "beauty," they differ greatly in whether or not they encompass "death" or "time." I think I was drawn to literature because, at that age, I finally began to feel the obvious fact that life is finite.

However, and this is perhaps obvious, there is a vast difference between enjoying a literary work that contains "death" as a reading experience and studying it academically. If you want to deeply understand mathematics, you will be prepared to practice it academically, but when it comes to engaging with literature, "researching" it not only doesn't seem like the only way, but it even felt like the attitude to be avoided the most. What exactly are "literary figures"—writers aside, those called researchers—doing with literary works? When I first entered university, although I sometimes saw the names of "literary figures" in reference to literary critics and translators, I had no idea what kind of "research" they were doing, nor did I want to know.

Perhaps because I had formed my intellectual foundation by viewing rigorous mathematics as the model for "scholarship," any other field—whether biology or economics—seemed like a "pseudo-scholarship," and I developed an unwarranted sense of absurdity and contempt for ostentatious academic pronouncements. This was a lingering aftereffect of mathematics. However, what I learned when I ventured into the realm of "literature" was that, thanks to the many people who engage with literature in ways different from researchers, such as creators, critics, and editors, and accomplish meaningful work, research is not the only thing that is considered important. A field where scholars don't hold a dominant position is probably quite rare among the many academic disciplines that make up a university.

As seen in the opening statement, mathematicians and literary scholars are often perceived as being indifferent to the idea of "usefulness." While I myself don't believe that literary studies are useless, I can't help but feel embarrassed and suspicious about insisting that my own work is "useful." On the other hand, in recent years, universities have increasingly demanded "useful" research. I don't really understand what the university authorities mean by "usefulness"—does it mean bringing money to the university, or improving the lives of ordinary people? But I can't help but think about whether the humanities, not just literary studies, can even positively embrace the value criterion of "usefulness." Because we can't readily comply with the demand to "do useful research," the study of literature has become uncomfortable amid the thirty-year-long frenzy of reform surrounding universities.

Now that I've spent more time immersed in literary studies than I did in my youthful aspirations for mathematics, I sometimes contemplate the meaning of academic pursuits at university, in a different context than the "choices" I made in my youth. I wonder if the mathematicians I admire are also struggling in the world of mathematics, a pure world untouched by worldly concerns, which I didn't choose back then. Is mathematics better suited than the humanities to absurd criteria like "universities that make money" or "university rankings"? Wise mathematicians seem to take the criterion of "usefulness" very broadly, and they appear to maintain a stance of purely pursuing their own interests rather than short-sighted results, reasoning that it's fine if their work is used in science hundreds of years from now, or that interesting problems produce results with a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, I hear that mathematics is not easy in terms of positions and research funding. No matter what choices I made, it may have been my destiny to struggle in a world that demands usefulness.

Even so, what I'm grateful for, living quietly in the Faculty of Letters, is that there are still places within the university that try to distance themselves from meritocracy and competition. Sometimes I wonder if it's okay to not want to be useful at my age, but there are so many useful people and useful things in the world, so I guess there's no need for me to force myself.