I Am a Japanese Writer

FRENCH KISS

AS I SIT down to my souvlaki, the only Greek invention since democracy (I’m saying that just to bug my landlord), I wonder why Japanese modernity has been in such demand since the end of Mao’s reign. Of course, there’s the boom in Asian images, not to mention Japan’s ability to turn everything it touches into a cliché, a cliché about which we know almost nothing — to the point that we sometimes wonder if cliché is not a contemporary version of Greek myth. Did the Greeks call their ancient clichés Greek myths? The French kiss exists everywhere but France. When the French kiss, do they make sure their tongues never touch? In North America, when tongues touch, that’s a French kiss. I always thought it was a spontaneous act among all human beings. I remember the terror I felt before my first kiss. What if she devoured my tongue? It was my choicest cut of meat, and here I was, blindly trusting her with it. “Give me your tongue” doesn’t have the same meaning in the North as it does in the South. My mind wanders down every path. I’m not going to start putting up barriers, especially when I’m reflecting on the crumbs that fall from Pascal’s table. The cliché stands far above morals. It is there, round, mysterious, eternal. It smiles upon us. No personal use of a cliché is possible, except to return it to its sender. Everyone knows that Negroes are lazy. Now there’s a cliché. When a white man works too much, we say he’s working like a nigger. Everything stops. The cliché travels through time and space as fast as lightning. When it stops, it creates a silence. I look out the window and see three young women in a hurry. One of them looks like Fumi. It is Fumi. I recognize her dark smile. Fumi told me she was doing her work-study in a restaurant not far from here. She turns around at the last minute. No, it’s not her. On the sidewalk, a Japanese tourist is shooting away at our Greek cook. I always wonder: what does he see? To find out, you’d have to become Japanese.