I Am a Japanese Writer

LIFE ON YOUR FEET

IT’S A FIGHT to the finish between time and space. The space police help identify you (Where do you come from?). Cannibal time eats you alive. Born in the Caribbean, I automatically became a Caribbean writer. The bookstore, the library and the university rushed to pin that title on me. Being a writer and a Caribbean doesn’t necessarily make me a Caribbean writer. Why do people always want to mix things up? Actually, I don’t feel any more Caribbean than Proust, who spent his life in bed. I spent my childhood running. That fluid sense of time still lives inside me. Every night I dream of the tropical storms that made the sweet, heavy mangoes fall from the tree in my childhood yard. And that cemetery in the rain. The dragonfly with translucent wings seen for the first time on an April morning. Malaria that decimated my village and stole my first love, the girl in the yellow dress. And me, feverish every evening, reading Mishima under the covers, with no one around to tell me who Mishima was. I don’t remember whose books those were, but they were still in good condition. What were they doing in my sleepy little town? Which of my five aunts had a flirtation with Yukio? Was he the favorite writer of one of the young suitors who passed through the house? You never know how a writer comes into a family. I read him to escape the prison of the real. But I did not seek refuge in Mishima— literature was never a refuge for me. Neither did Mishima, I imagine, write to stay in his own house. We encountered each other elsewhere, in a space that wasn’t either of our houses, a space that belonged to imagination and desire. And here I am, thirty-five years later, caught again in the fury of adolescence. If time is circular, if the Earth revolves around the Sun, I’ll just stay right here and wait and the Mishima years will pass before my eyes.

Please understand, I was never obsessed with Mishima. As a teenager, I came across one of his novels at the back of some old cupboard along with a bottle of rum. I began with a long gulp of liquid fire. Then I opened the book (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) and a swarm of buzzing vowels and consonants flew into my face. They had been waiting forever for a visit. In a case like that, you don’t start classifying. You don’t look that gift horse in the mouth. Mishima’s book didn’t say to itself, “Well, well, here’s a good old Japanese reader.” And I didn’t look for a kindred spirit, recognizable colors or a shared sensibility. I dove into the universe that was set before me the way I dove into the little river not far from my house. I hardly even noticed his name, and it wasn’t until long afterward that I realized he was Japanese. At the time, I firmly believed that writers formed a lost tribe and spent their lives wandering the world and telling stories in all languages. That was their sentence for some unnameable crime. Hugo and Tolstoy were convicts. I found no other explanation for them having written those voluminous novels I devoured each night, in hiding. I imagined them with their feet in chains, seated next to an enormous inkwell carved out of rock. Which is why, later, I was reluctant to write thick books. I didn’t want to frighten children.

I don’t understand all the attention paid to a writer’s origins. Because, for me, Mishima was my neighbor. Very naturally, I repatriated the writers I read at the time. All of them: Flaubert, Goethe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Kipling, Senghor, Césaire, Roumain, Amado, Diderot — they all lived in my village. Otherwise, what were they doing in my room? Years later, when I became a writer and people asked me, “Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a Frenchlanguage writer?” I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.