I Am a Japanese Writer

METAMORPHOSES

MIDORI PACES the room, then locks herself in the bathroom. Cocaine. I know she’ll turn circles in here for hours like a caged beast, banging away on the shutter release. I saw her do the same thing at a party at her place. She comes out of the bathroom, her eyes glittering, her nostrils flaring, as if she’s been fucking.

“Can I take a few pictures while we talk?”

She photographs me as if I were an object, or some insect.

“The first thing I did was call a girlfriend who’s super plugged in to the Tokyo theater scene. She knows everything about me. There’s nothing crazy I do that she doesn’t know about. We met in Vancouver. Later we hooked up in New York, at Columbia, where I was taking an acting class and she was studying to be a critic, and that’s where we really got close. She told me Kara seemed really interested in some story about a black guy in Montreal who thought he was a Japanese writer, and that he was following the story in a magazine where they compared you, or so Kara said, I don’t want to get it wrong, to the character in that Kafka story who woke up one morning, completely metamorphosed. I hadn’t known anything about it. . I was knocked out. I told him the black guy had lived at my place and that I’d never suspected. . I looked totally clueless! Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“Midori, there’s nothing to say. It’s all a misunderstanding. I just said I was going to write a book. They asked me what the title was and I told them. That’s all.”

“And what is the title?”

“‘I am a Japanese Writer.’ But that’s only the title.”

“Oh, man! You couldn’t have picked a better time. They’re into this really big identity debate over there, and all of a sudden you come up with a book like that.”

“There is no book — that’s what I’ve been explaining to everyone.”

“That doesn’t matter. They’re completely obsessed with identity, I’m telling you.”

“I don’t give a shit about identity.”

“So you say, but then you write a book with a title like that. What does that mean?”

“It means I did it to get away from the whole business, to show that borders have disappeared. I was tired of cultural nationalism. Who says I can’t be a Japanese writer? No one.”

“That’s exactly where the debate gets interesting. In Tokyo, a lawyer has claimed he can get an injunction against your book.”

“Midori, look at me. Look me in the eye: there is no book.”

“I’m telling you who’s saying what in Tokyo, and you keep coming back with Montreal stuff. I need work. Now I have a photo contract, and afterwards, who knows, maybe I’ll do something in film. I could sing. For an American girl or a French woman, it’s easy to make a name in Japan, but if you’re a Japanese girl living overseas, you’re screwed.”

“Sure. But you just told me you didn’t want to live in Japan.”

“That changes if Kara is calling, and it’s a short-term project. The latest news, my girlfriend told me, is that this lawyer got on tv and said that the word ‘Japanese’ belongs to the Japanese government, who should bestow it only on its legitimate citizens. Not anybody can become Japanese just because they want to. And another lawyer who wanted to be smart — it was a televised debate with a bunch of lawyers — asked whether a serial killer from some other country could publish a book called ‘I Am a Japanese Serial Killer.’ That would sully Japan’s reputation. That show was on a real popular channel, and it set off an uproar among the Japanese right.”

“‘The Japanese right’? Aren’t they all on the right?”

“If you go there, be careful, the issue is no laughing matter for them. Some nationalist publishers, the ones who publish mostly ‘novels of the soil,’ signed a manifesto not only to protest against your book coming out in Japan, but anywhere in the world.”

“They’re crazy!”

“The funniest thing is, a major critic from the biggest daily paper in the country said that the reputation of all Japanese writing would be in danger if your book turned out to be bad. With that title, it’s as if the writer had become — and I quote— ‘the Japanese writer par excellence.’ Foreigners might well avoid Japanese literature if they don’t like your book.”

“I didn’t say I am the Japanese writer. I said I am a Japanese writer. It could be good or it could be bad.”

“I can see you don’t understand Japanese nationalist sensitivities. And a black man on top of it… That’s what interested Kara. And here I am.”

“You know the book hasn’t been written yet.”

“But its impact is real. People might be disappointed if you wrote it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t care about their feelings. Why does this guy want pictures?”

“Kara doesn’t want any real contact with you. For him, the whole thing’s a fantasy. In the end, he might turn you into an eighteenth-century samurai. He does what he wants to. He’s an artist. My girlfriend told me she’s seen him a lot lately, she knows him real well, and that’s all he talks about. He calls up everybody at two in the morning and goes on and on about it. He thinks there’s some kind of connection with the guy who ate the Dutch girl. For him, it’s all about metamorphosis. It has nothing to do with sex or cannibalism. The eater wanted to be something different — another gender. You want to be something else too.”

“Maybe Japan wants to be something else as well.”

“No. Japan just wants to be Japan. That’s the saddest part of it.”

Midori took a few more shots.

“Okay. I’ve got enough. I have to go.”

She hasn’t said so much as a word about Noriko.