I Am a Japanese Writer

THE HUMAN MACHINE

I GO INTO this crummy restaurant on Boulevard St-Laurent. I sit down at the back with my Basho book, which I’ve been reading non-stop. The waitress shows up immediately. She’s wearing an embroidered “Suzie” on her breast. Her eyes are empty. A fat green vein runs along her neck from her right ear to her shoulder blade. She must have done more than one job in the district. A lot of women in the neighborhood have been through the same thing. Most of them started as teenage girls, leaving their narrow-minded little villages for the highway leading over the bridge to Montreal. They end up unemployed in the city, then they find work waitressing, then unemployed again, then waitressing, then prostitution. They won’t go much further. Lower, yes. There’s always room for lower. They find a way to have at least one child, and send it back to their mothers in the country — the only real gift they can give them. Some money too, but that’s only at the beginning. The mother will hide the money at the back of the cupboard and never touch it. It will be there for her funeral or maybe her daughter’s. Her daughter who, in the end, will have only one choice: slit her wrists or take the last bus for Rimouski or Sept-Îles. There’s a third possibility — trying to swim in this shark tank. I turn briefly to Basho as he bends over a cherry tree.

Basho examined this small tree that had already started to flower. It is always astonishing to come upon life in certain places. Buffeted by winter’s glacial winds, it did not forget to flower in the spring. What courage! It seemed to be alone, neglected by all — except Gyoson, who wrote a stanza to honor the glory of solitary cherry trees.

Suzie slaps down a cup of coffee on my table.

“I only drink tea, Ma’am.”

Her cold eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean?”

“We don’t serve tea here.”

She stalks off and I go back to my reading. I dip in and out of the book. I open it, I read a stanza or accompany Basho for a time, then close the book again. Lost in my dream. Basho has this ability to be immediately alive, every time. Here, only Whitman has the same energy. Now I’m back in sync with Basho. Just as I feel my backache returning, I come upon this passage where Basho is complaining about the same pain. Often, pain allows us to recognize another human being.

A terrible day! His backache has returned. This is the first time he has complained about it. Just after Sakata. The heavy air, the rain, worst of all the humidity. But, as he says himself, “Enough of that.” He pushes on despite it all and stops in front of the “Send-Back-the-Dog” which wears its name so well. He cannot wait to be inside the inn and asleep. But two women and an old man are chatting away in the next room, and it proves impossible to rest. Finally, sleep comes, but too late. Tired again this morning.

I order a hamburger. That’s what you do if you want to go unnoticed in America. The service is efficient here. A big empty expanse, except for a few grayish customers lost in the decor. It smells of wet carpet and cold sweat. At the bar, the waitress is talking with a young dishwasher. Her laughter is strange, a mixture of nervousness and malevolence. A stooped-over man has been trying to talk to them. They pretend they don’t know he’s there, they don’t even bother to turn their backs on him. Someone standing right in front of you but who doesn’t see you. Deep and endless indifference. As if people had no link with one another: the heavy reality of the end of the afternoon. Everything’s gone to hell since the siesta disappeared from our sundials. The human machine is not made to be awake and alert for eighteen hours straight. A time of rest is essential. Industrialized society did away with the siesta and cranked up the machine further. To keep up, you have to use drugs. All kinds of drugs. Suzie is on both cigarettes and coffee. It’s free for her here.

Basho imagines foot travel as a way of washing the dirt of reality from his skin. Haiku is just a cheap bar of soap. I’m still with Basho when she plops herself down in front of me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I’m finishing my fries.”

“What are you reading?”

“Basho.”

A suspicious look.

“Who’s he?”

“A Japanese poet.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“No.”

“You Japanese or something?”

“What do you think?”

“Are you a cop by any chance?”

“Hardly.”

“’Cause we’ve had the cops here three times this week. Ever since that business at the Dog Café. We’ve been in the Red Light since 1954…. Get the picture?”

We size each other up for a while.

“Why would I be a cop?”

“People come here to eat. . In ten years, I’ve never seen anyone with a book, let alone a Japanese book.”

“It’s only a translation.”

The young dishwasher calls out: “Suzie!” She waves in his direction, she’ll be right there.“You can finish your fries, then you’re gone.”

“I didn’t know this was a private club.”

“I serve who I want to…. and you’re bothering the customers. Look, Réjean got up and left. The people you see have been coming here for at least twenty years. This is their last stop before the street. I have to protect them. . Can you understand that?”

She goes over to the cash register where an old man has been trying to count his change for the last fifteen minutes. She grabs the coins off the counter and throws them into the cash drawer. The person who doesn’t count will always have an advantage over the one who does.

While I was locked in conversation with Suzie, the restaurant filled up with threatening shadows. Silent men, colorless and odorless. As they eat, they look up and shoot me glances that are neither curious nor mistrustful. What name can I give that look? I feel like I’m being sized up by someone who already saw the film and didn’t like it. Apparently our smell is what bothers them, the odor of ambition, since they are completely devoid of it. Meanwhile, we’re still making plans. Our plans are a mixture of money, will and clichés. What do they smell like? They have lost their smell. They’re at the end of the line.

Basho reaches Tsuruga with Tosai. The sky a clear, hard blue. But the innkeeper tells them the weather could change at any time. Hard to believe that this beautiful sky could fill with black threatening clouds at any moment. Yet that’s what happens. The innkeeper was right; he knows his country.Basho will not see the full moon on the Bay of Tsuruga, the secret goal of his journey.

As I go out the door, I turn and see Suzie’s satisfied smile, her false teeth sparkling white. I understand that she never wanted me here in the first place. Not again!