I Am a Japanese Writer (12 page)
“You talk like a Parisian.”
“That’s because of Sagan. I wrote my doctoral thesis on Sagan. I lived in Paris for three years. And I still listen to tv5 to keep up. So, I was saying that since last year, we’ve begun to work on writers, painters and musicians. Our public is very hip, they are well informed and they don’t buy just anything. On the other hand they want more than just a big name—they want a mixture. They don’t like hearing about someone somewhere else first. And they’re ready to pay for the best product. That’s why we’re careful with what we propose . . . Are you still there? Sir? Sir? Are you still there?”
“I think maybe you’re part of my dreams . . . Your voice is like a lullaby.”
She laughed.“If you’re always like this, everything will be fine.”
“Why did you choose me?”
“You’re so well known here. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Yes. But I don’t live in Tokyo.”
“And I don’t live in Montreal, but here we are, talking to each other. What does it really mean to live somewhere?”
She was about to slip through my fingers once more.
“What do you want to know?”
“We want to see you . . . We will be the first to put a face to this mystery man who has provoked such passion in Japan, and I am choosing my words carefully. I don’t want to take too much of your time... Since you don’t want us to film you where you live, tell me your favorite places.”
“Why not my favorite color?”
“I’m just doing my job. We’re looking for locations for the interview. The location says a lot.”
“It would be more interesting if you didn’t see me, but only the location.”
“Very interesting. . . I’ll mention that to Dazaï. He loves everything that’s original. Excuse me, but I couldn’t help hearing a certain irony.”
“Not at all.”
“Mr. Tanizaki warned us that you would do everything to sabotage this project. At the office, we all read Basho to try to understand you. For the locations, if you could give me some ideas ...”
“Everything is in the same neighborhood. There’s a park called Square St-Louis, and across from it is the Librairie du Square, and next to that bookstore there’s a café called Les Gâteries. That’s all there is.”
“That’s on Rue St-Denis, if I understand correctly.”
“You’ve been to Montreal?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know about the place?”
“A colleague told me it’s your favorite street.”
“Then you know everything there is to know.”
“I’m just joking. I’m sitting in front of my computer, and it’s showing me everything you’re saying. Someone will call you to set up the interviews.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Kero.”
“Kero, I’m going to go back to bed if you don’t mind.”
“I was warned.”
“About what?”
“That you spend your life in bed. We would love to film you sleeping.”
“That’s a private activity.”
End of conversation.
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT
the camera has had the greatest success among the Japanese. I’ve long suspected them of not putting film in their cameras. Or, at least, of not looking at the photos once they return home from their trip. How can they tell the difference between the pictures they took and the ones their friends took, since they all take the same photo in front of the Eiffel Tower from the same angle with the same smile and even the same suit? In the photos, they all wear their cameras slung over their shoulders. A nation of smiling photographers. That kind of behavior must be hiding something. Maybe they’re stockpiling photos so that later they can get an idea of how we lived at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. The information would not be very diversified: billions of Japanese photos showing nothing but smiling Japanese. If one day we stumble upon these mountains of photos, we might well conclude that the earth was inhabited at the time solely by Japanese. There was not a single monument worth mentioning on this planet that they did not colonize. The conquest was worldwide. A universal point of view. If I want to become a Japanese writer, I had better rush out and buy a camera. But I think I’ll stick to my typewriter. At heart, though, it’s the same thing. You describe everything you see. I would like to be, not a photographer, but a cold, objective camera lens. To simply look at the person in front of me. Is that even possible?
AS IT TURNED
out, two days later a guy called from New York to rummage through the drawers of my memory. Of course he wanted to know where an idea like mine had come from. Haruki (Murakami was his last name) confided that his father was from Louisiana, a black soldier stationed in Tokyo whom, unfortunately, he never knew. His mother was working in a big sports equipment store in the center of the city when they met. He had come in to buy a basketball. She followed him through the store because of his smell. The smell of black men drove her crazy. The spices went to her head. She could spend hours with her head tucked under his armpit. But that got on his nerves. He wasn’t a violent man, but he could become irritable.
“People talk a lot about the voice, the eyes, but rarely about smell. Yet it’s so important in the animal world. I went out with black men to try to understand my mother’s obsession. What touched me most was their skin . . . Some skins are so soft. Like the skin of a mouse. When I meet a man like that, I literally melt.”
“Any man, or a black man?”
“I don’t look at any other kind of man.”
“So you’re in search of your father.”
“That’s what my mother told me. She thinks that made me into a homosexual. But I know what made me gay: a guy from Harlem, a psychopathic killer with skin as soft as a baby’s. I was the only one who knew what he’d done. I would spend hours caressing him in the darkness of an abandoned house where we hid. The mob and the cops were after him. He trusted no one except his mother and me. He used to say I was his little woman. He had to get mad to get a hard on.”
“Mad at you?”
“Not necessarily... He would fly into a rage against anyone, anything, and he took it out on me. I loved it. He would pull out his gun and tell me he was going to blow my brains out. I didn’t care as long as he fucked me. No wonder: I was in love with him.”
“He could have killed you.”
“Yet he’s the one who ended up dead. When he was killed I was in Harlem, at a friend’s place. I hadn’t seen him in a week. I missed his sweetness. Funny: the guy was violence incarnate, yet all I can remember is the softness of his skin. You can’t have skin that soft if there’s not gentleness elsewhere too. I can tell you it wasn’t always easy. . .” He sighed. “I heard a gunshot that night. That was the music of Harlem. That’s what gave life its beat—they tell me it’s changed since then. I knew right away. I said to my friend, That bullet was for Malcolm. My friend bawled me out, he told me I must have been sick if I started naming everyone who was killed in Harlem during the night. He told me to go see a psychologist, the whole thing. I burst into tears and I left. I knew where Malcolm hung out, I went there and found him in a pool of blood. He died like a dog. I cleaned him up and called his father. Then I hid and waited, and I slipped away when the father showed up. I wandered for days and nights through Harlem. I wanted to get myself killed too. I did everything I could, but death wouldn’t touch me ... Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because you can’t see me.”
“I can’t see a psychologist.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a fan of Woody Allen—that’s what my friends call me in Japanese. We have the same physique. He has a Japanese body. Try it yourself: take off his head and put a Japanese head on him, and you’ll get a Japanese filmmaker.”
“I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead. Otherwise I’ll just be talking to myself.”
“Your father is black, your mother is Japanese, and only black men attract you ...”
“But not the same way as for my mother. My mother was smell. I’m touch. Everything is concentrated in my fingertips. The story of my life is a story of electricity. If the lines don’t light up, there’s nothing I can do. But when they do, I’m a goner. Black skin in the darkness is a foretaste of hell. That skin shines brighter than any other. And some things burn harder than fire.”
“Didn’t you ever think you were black?”
“Never.”
“But your father is black.”
“YesbutI’mmymothernotmyfatherImeanI’mawomannotaman.”
He said that as a single word, without pausing to catch his breath. I heard a sharp sob. Then he gently put down the phone.
IS IT A
form of suicide or an act of war? The idea of accepting death in order to kill the greatest number of the enemy. People here have lost sight of that simple but efficient method. The body as a weapon of war. That distance from death is impressive. Guys who announce their death and don’t hide from it. Meanwhile, in the West, we’re always looking for a back alley to escape into. We’re ready to throw ourselves at death’s feet just to be spared. The idea of a last chance is written into our Western genes, and it drives Hollywood screenwriters to unlikely acrobatics in order to get James Bond out of every unbelievable impasse. We’re sure that James Bond will never die, and that’s what gives him such importance in our inner landscape. Over there, heroes are the ones who lust after death. The will to die. I discovered that wonderment around the age of twelve as every night I devoured stories of the Second World War. The kamikazes never tried to leap from the plane at the last minute, like James Bond and his kind. It was the first time I’d learned that death could be that way. Except in voodoo. But in voodoo, death often has a sexual aspect. But here was heroic death. Pure death. The modern being is the one who is killed. Who wants to take his place? That’s been the problem lately between East and West. The conflict between two visions of death. One wants to get as close to death as possible, yet without dying. The other blindly follows the straight line that leads right to the explosion. But he doesn’t intend to go up in flames alone. His death will be used to create more death. The surprise effect is strong. Boom! The shattered body.
Ecce homo.
The dead body in the West was sacred even before Mary, with exemplary gentleness, received the body of her beloved son. The body is reclaimed, embalmed and perfumed, then placed in a box and buried in the ground. Every precaution is taken to forestall its decomposition. The cemetery too is protected. Inflicting indignities upon a body is on a par with incest: a major taboo. The dead body occupies a quarter of our minds. And death itself fills up the rest. There is so little space left for life. The shattered body, unrecognizable. No further chance for farewells. Everything happens at the moment of the explosion. When we die of a heart attack, the heart carries off the rest of the body with its death. In an explosion, everything goes at once. The entire body dies at the moment of death. But with the stupefying progress of medical science, the brain can die while certain parts of the body remain in perfect shape. If it weren’t for that little short in the brain, some corpses would walk to the cemetery under their own power.
I HAVEN’T BEEN
sleeping well lately. It isn’t easy to sit in front of your typewriter, doing nothing, when you know that someone on the other side of the world is suffering the same pains you are. In this case, it’s my publisher. He can’t write the book for me, though he’d like to. That would spare him an ulcer. All he can do is wait. I once saw a Kurosawa film that perfectly explained the publisher’s function. It was about the shogun who must not move while the battle is taking place. The arrows whistle past his ears but he says nothing and moves not at all. He sits motionless. Impassive. And so my publisher determines the outcome of the battle of writing through his powerful immobility. I feel his presence most strongly when he doesn’t appear.
“Hello!”
“It’s your publisher.”
“I was thinking about you.”
“I’m in Stockholm for a colloquium about Andersen.”
“But he’s Danish.”
“The Danes hate Andersen because he made them look like monsters who would let a poor little girl die of cold. I don’t know how I got caught in this mess. Even when I was a kid I hated Andersen. The worst nightmares in my life came from reading “The Little Match Girl.” I ended up in this business because of that fairy tale. It ruined my life. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t written by someone who was moved by the poor little girl’s fate—oh, no, it was written by a sadist, a pervert, a bastard, a sick man.”
“Okay,” I said to slow him down, “don’t get carried away, it’s only a colloquium. Stop stewing in your room and go out and get a drink somewhere.”
“There’s not even a bar in this hotel. I got back an hour ago, completely exhausted by some wordy bitch who kept beating me over the head with her damned Andersen.”
“You won’t escape him where you are. There must be a whole tribe of Andersen specialists where you’re staying.”
“I’m afraid so... I called the front desk and asked what floor the bar was on. No bar, sir. Why not? You can drink in your room if you want to. You can drink in your room, but not in a bar. The guy probably thought I was an alcoholic. We argued back and forth for a while, then I lay down on the bed with my clothes on.”
I’d rarely heard him so wound up. Andersen, plus the fact that he couldn’t have a nightcap in a quiet corner of a bar, in the shadows, must have disturbed him deeply. People have their habits. But why go if you hate Andersen so much? Probably for the free booze, and a little convention fling.
“There must be a bar somewhere, I’m sure. Those northerners really know how to drink.”
“The nightcap is drunk at the hotel,” he said categorically.
“I’m in full agreement.”
“So I fell asleep and slept a half hour. Then I woke up and went to smoke a cigarette by the window and look at the town—otherwise I wouldn’t have seen any of it. I went back to bed with a pile of manuscripts. I put two pillows behind my back and my head, and I got ready for a sleepless night. That’s what I like to do most of all: read manuscripts in a hotel room. That’s why I say yes to these trips. Those books were written just for me—or at least it seems that way. If I don’t like them, they won’t exist.”