Irreplaceable Me

4/5 ( ratings)

Hello to all my friends in the United States!

In America I’m known as the inventor of KenKen, but my real job is teaching mathematics to elementary school students. Today, in 2014, my classroom is located near Tokyo Station. I’m the only teacher and I only hold classes on Saturdays and Sundays. My students range from third to sixth grade, with a limit of 20 per grade. My third-graders spend a full year solving puzzles before moving on to mathematical problems. In fact, I originally developed KenKen as a puzzle for them.
So why did I decide to write Irreplaceable Me? Because it makes me sad whenever I read articles about young people who commit suicide. When I was in my teens, I thought about dying all the time. I didn’t think my life was worth very much, and I was sure I’d be dead before twenty. The only thing that kept me from killing myself was the sense that I was at rock bottom—that it couldn’t get any worse—and that it would be a shame to end it all there. I figured I could always die later after reaching the next level. I started university, moved in with a family that ran a newspaper distributorship, and started a new life. Soon I was too busy to think about dying.

I wrote this book because I want to help young people who are anxious about the same things I was as a teenager to feel better about themselves and to think twice before committing suicide. There’s nothing wrong with anxiety; positive anxiety helps you grow. But negative anxiety can make your heart grow dark, and drag down your self-esteem, and ultimately make you want to disappear. These days I’m full of positive anxiety, and the thing I’m most anxious about is how to keep growing.
Since establishing my classroom in 1993, I’ve developed all sorts of puzzles and math problems and published many books. At the end of 2013 I was all alone in my classroom, thinking how I’d done just about everything I thought I could do and wondering what to do next, when all of the sudden the words, “New York” popped into my head. This was a bit of a surprise at first, but no matter how much I thought about it no other options came to mind.

So I plan to move my classroom from Tokyo to New York in February 2015. I hope you’ll welcome me warmly, but in the meantime, I’m sending Irreplaceable Me along ahead.

Tetsuya Miyamoto