I Am a Japanese Writer

THE MIDORI GANG

AFTER THE SHOW, I go with Midori and her gang to an opening on Sherbrooke Street, across from the Museum of Fine Arts. Just girls: Eiko, Fumi, Hideko, Noriko, Tomo and Haruki. The courtesans of Princess Midori. Along with an androgynous photographer by the name of Takashi — so flat he reminds me of a lighter in Kate Moss’s palm. Midori looks at the big banners hanging along the columns of the museum, advertising the primitive painters show.

“I’d like to see that show.”

“Didn’t you read in the paper what happened to Bjork?” asks Hideko, leaning so close to Midori that she brushes her ear.

Everyone in the group knows that Midori has the most sensitive ears. They are the seat of all her sensations.

“Don’t you ever do that to me, you understand?”

Midori turns on her.

“Do you understand, Hideko?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. . Why are you making such a big deal?”

“She’s right, Midori,” Fumi says.

An observer paying the slightest attention would understand quickly enough that in this princess’s court, the same intrigues take place as in any other. Midori is the sun around which revolve the seven planets, giddy and sad. So giddy and so sad that I wonder if I’ll be able to tell the difference. You don’t see the tears that flow inside them, but you do hear their manga laughter. I’ve spent endless hours looking for signs that might distinguish one from the other. They never stop orbiting, which makes it hard to pin them down. Above all, this is a group. You can’t study one member until she breaks away a little. I film them in my head in cinema-verité style. A short black-and-white film. Distant, discreet, I film them from my point of view. No editing. And no hesitation about using my imagination to fill in the conversations I’m too far away to hear, or the hidden emotions. We all do that. Takashi is leaving tomorrow to do a photo essay on Yoko Ono, whom Midori calls “yesterday’s grandmother,” but we know he’ll be back. No one ever leaves the group for long. Yoko Ono has a weakness for nubile young boys, but “Widow Mao” (razor-sharp Eiko’s name for her) has no chance against Midori. Midori: a “fresh talent,” the writer Ryu Murakami called her, in a long article in the New Yorker about the next generation of pretenders to Yoko Ono’s throne. Her voice makes you think of Basquiat’s first graffiti in the New York subway: both crude and sophisticated. Tomorrow begins the duel between Midori and Yoko Ono as seen by Takashi. He’ll photograph Yoko Ono. He hopes to bring back a lot of new information about Yoko and lay it at Midori’s feet. The widow knows she’s being spied on. Every young Japanese woman is working to crack the mystery of Yoko Ono in the hopes of dethroning her. Ono is the goddess of discord. The woman who has survived it all. Thanks to her, we’ve understood that hatred is an emotion sometimes more durable than love. Takashi will get a close-up view of how she has fought off the hatred of every Beatles fan in the world. She told Ryu Murakami that she’s still holding fast, “halfway down the slope.” Her position protects her from the herd of noisy, average talents. Midori is situated between Bjork and Yoko Ono. Murakami concluded that there are three groups of artists: a small group with exceptional talent, a very large group with enough talent to survive, and a third group, much smaller than you’d think, of really mediocre people. The public, interested only in what is rare, often prefers a lowgrade artist with a good agent over a middle-grade artist with just as good an agent. According to Ryu Murakami, our era likes everything that is rare — even if it’s bad.