A still frame from Sakura no Toki, showing two of the story's main characters, Naoya and Kei, as children. The borders of the image fade to white, as though in recollection. Kei is pointing aggressively at a smug looking Naoya.

Sakura no Toki: An Early Introspection

I picked up Sakura no Toki because I heard it has something to say about art. Two chapters in, it has mostly lived up to that promise.

In many ways, I’m woefully unqualified to comment on this game. My eyes glazed over, as Shizuryū waxed poetic about dirt, and recited a glossary of potters (of whom I still can’t tell fictional from real). I admit I skimmed, as Naoya gave a group of horny teenage girls a step-by-step guide to lithography. I haven’t even read Sakura no Uta, the game to which this is a sequel, for heaven’s sake! Not to mention I’m no good at sculpting, nor drawing, nor painting, nor instruments… none of the things the game has so far elevated as arts.

Yet from a young age, the allure of those things have kept an ember glowing in my heart. At my most innocent, I think I wanted to be an artist: I took private lessons; I went to an arts school; my friends were artists. The ember was growing into an uncontrollable fire, and I let myself drift on its wind.

It was only as I surrounded myself with the arts, however, that I realized I was competing against people whose talent and skills were already unattainably beyond mine. I tried at first; I tried my hand at working harder than anyone else to make up the difference. But soon, I realized that not only did I lack the skills, I also lacked the motivation. Whatever had driven those people so far ahead of me, would be the very same thing to push them further and further beyond.

Maybe that’s why Naoya’s apparent strength in the second chapter, as he describes his own lapse in motivation, before being surpassed by a peer, and finally moving beyond that person, challenged me to my core. It felt like the story was asking me:

“If the prodigy can move on from the loss of the very thing that defined him; if he can re-frame his relationship with art, then why can’t you?

As much as the question stung, it forced me to confront a shame that had long been simmering beneath the surface. I always blamed myself for my lack of motivation. I always managed to convince myself with excuses for not practicing or developing core skills, but whenever a recital or big project came up, moreso than anything else, the nervousness I felt was from guilt, and the guilt I felt was from knowing that I didn’t put enough time or energy into the thing I was pursuing.

“How can I claim to like something so much, when I can’t be bothered to do it?”

“How can I feel this bad about being behind, and still not muster the strength to catch up?”

By tearing open these old wounds, Sakura no Toki has forced me to re-evaluate. Naoya, as he recounts, struggled with lost motivation, but he doesn’t beat himself up over it. The controlling factors were clearly elsewhere. His motivation wasn’t lost ex nihilo—it was lost by a great loss. His world was shifting, and he was changing.

On reflection, I was changing, even if my life was less dramatic. I was bouncing from thing to thing like any child. My motivation wasn’t separate from any of that; it wasn’t something I had unique power over. It was the very fire that had led me to the arts, and as a fire does, it faded as soon as there was nothing left to burn. There’s no strength in stacking ash, and what made me strange wasn’t a lack of motivation; it was that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t leave this particular charred field behind.