I Am a Japanese Writer

THE PARK

I TRY TO avoid the part of the park where the guys who’ve just come back from cherry picking in B.C. hang out. They all wear the same red, scraggly beard, and stare out from the same pale, irresponsible eyes, and contemplate the same dirty fingernails with a mixture of surprise and pride. Most of them are kids from cushy Montreal suburbs (Saint-Lambert, Repentigny, Beloeil or Brossard) who want to play at migrant worker, a dog-eared copy of a fat Steinbeck novel in their back pockets. Last year they were still reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, dreaming of a three-day blow downtown, once they’d assured their mothers they’d be staying with a cousin. Later they’d move on to Kerouac, carry him out to Vancouver in a night train on the Canadian Pacific Line, before launching into Bukowski and pitchers of draft beer. The beginning of a long fall. Theirs isn’t the first generation of misguided kids to hang out in the park — the previous ones shot up on Burroughs and heroin. I even witnessed the days when the boys read Steppenwolf and the girls always had a copy of Gibran’s The Prophet in their bags. This is a literary park, where young people learn how to live through books. I sit down on a bench near the little kiosk that sells flowers and watch the girls in their spring dresses risking their lives to cross the street on the red light — they have every privilege. Which causes a small acceleration in the blood of the male drivers, who are already in heat. This city’s slow striptease begins in April — this isn’t the first cluster of bare-legged girls they’ve seen. The girls kick off their shoes at the first touch of grass, they race with the local dogs, then they end up with those guys who, in monotonous voices, tell endless travel stories that end up giving everyone a headache. With the money they’ve made doing odd jobs out west, they buy dogs to help keep them warm during the winter. A young man is sleeping in a quiet part of the park with a half-dozen pure-bred dogs around him. The problem, apparently, is how to feed them. Those dogs can eat a horse every day. Another guy is leaning against a tree like a pensive warrior. They are like an army camped down for the night. The poet Gaston Miron brushes past, determined, ruminating over the latest poem he wrote, his powerful alligator jaws chewing away. He is going to go see Françoise the bookseller, a friend to starving poets and young novelists who’ve won their first prizes and have already been forgotten. The whole neighborhood is literary, completely different from my old working-class district in the east. One morning I left the factory behind, having decided to take my time in life. I read, I write, I am a flâneur. I hardly know anyone at all, except the Korean who shows up every time I think about him.

“Did you see Midori?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

A brief silence.

“Okay… Someone else showed up.”

“I know,” he said, turning away.

It’s important to keep the myth alive. As it turns out, I happened to be reading a wonderful little book on the subject by Paul Veyne, the great historian of the Greco-Roman world: Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? Veyne writes cold— that is, without having smoked anything illicit. “There was a time when poets and historians dreamed up royal dynasties out of whole cloth, complete with the name of every potentate and his family tree. They were not counterfeiters, nor were they in bad faith. They were simply following the usual way of the time of reaching the truths they needed.” I’m into it up to my ears. I’ll create something, then I’ll believe in it afterwards. I can’t get along without those girls. They’re more alive than the ones I see in the street. They’re devouring my whole life. I only have thoughts for them. I’m drowning in their world. I see them when I wake, I feel them, as if they have captured me whole. They are there in the shadows of my room with glowing eyes, awaiting just a single word in order to take hold of my imagination. I write the name Midori. I know it’s true; everyone I’ve talked to about her can see her too. Just the way they can see Fumi, Noriko, Hideko, Tomo, Haruki, Eiko and Takashi. I should leave them before they take over my days. So far, I’ve been able to keep them in the space of my nights. If they ever break into the day, I’m finished. I’d better defend the little bit of light I have left. So, farewell to the world of the night, and to solitude.