I Am a Japanese Writer

CLOSED EYELIDS

ALL THIS, AND I’ve never been to Japan. But is that really necessary? I use only the clichés (the myths and photos) you find in women’s magazines. I keep an enormous pile of them by the window. You do your research any way you can. I’ve noticed, as I page through the magazines, that Japanese women are obsessed with their eyes. A horizontal line. They’ve been convinced their appearance isn’t chic. But I can spend hours trying to guess what’s being dreamed up behind those half-closed eyelids. A slumbering animal — or one that’s pretending to sleep. I had a crash course with Midori and her gang. They moved effortlessly in front of the camera with no thought for me. Are they real Japanese women? No doubt they’d be spotted right away in Tokyo. That old obsession with authenticity. The fake overtakes the real on the international market. Authenticity is for hicks. The rich were the first to buy cheap jewelry and act as if the originals lay quietly in a safety deposit box at the bank. It doesn’t cost much and looks almost exactly like the real thing. Since we always give the rich the benefit of the doubt, they just have to say it’s real to make it real. Their words are worth their weight in gold. The owner of a Japanese restaurant was complaining on TV recently about having to invite students to come in and eat for free, because no one would patronize his establishment if there weren’t any Japanese customers. I left right after Midori’s show was over. Anyway, the group (a bass player from Montreal who plays with underground bands passing through Les Foufounes Électriques, a black woman vocalist who adds a jazzy side to the show, and Midori herself) was heading to Toronto for two shows there. It was an interesting cultural cross-section (a Japanese woman, a black New Yorker and an Australian), but it had no influence on the style of music they played. Interesting— but no more than that. A little disappointing. Except for Midori, who has something that hasn’t completely bloomed. Afterwards, I walked through the Montreal streets and came to that store that sells women’s magazines for twenty-five cents apiece. I leafed through them, and whenever I saw an article about Japan or, better, about Japanese women, I bought it. I had to take a taxi because I had bought too many. I put the pile of magazines on the bed. I was making tea just as the landlord started banging on the door. He wanted his rent. I gave him his money without complaint. Normally, we discuss the issue down to the smallest detail. And I never capitulate on the first day of negotiations. So he didn’t expect to be paid right away. He was disarmed, his jaw dropped to the floor. Then a doubt crossed his mind, and he gave me that suspicious look I know so well. He looks at life with distrust, as if it were a counterfeit coin. Death seems more honest to him. You pay for the funeral, you buy a spot in the cemetery: everything that involves order and money reassures him. You buy, you sell, everything has a price. He’d actually come to issue an ultimatum: “Tomorrow last day.” And now he had his money in his hand. He didn’t even count it the way he usually did (his way of humiliating me). He disappeared down the stairs. His bent neck told me he was counting. I dreamed that some juvenile delinquent hiding in the stairway would try to steal the money. He’d rather be killed than hand over the cash. Which is what will happen one day. I went back to my tea. Lying down, I leafed through the magazines and noted down scenes and names whose sound and spelling I liked. I lined them up: Eiko, Hideko, Fumi, Noriko, Tomo, Haruki and Takashi — for Takashi it took me a while to make up my mind, because I also liked Kazuo. Maybe it’s different to a Japanese ear. That’s when I started building the coterie around Midori. The dream of a novel. Everything takes place behind my eyelids as I’m taking a nap. It was going along fine until I started thinking that someone would have to die. Why? No particular reason. It was going too well. I had to intervene and shatter the rhythm to make the story truly mine. It’s always important to appropriate the story. For literature to truly exist, books would have to be anonymous. No more ego, no more personal intervention. You’ll see. That’s when I removed Noriko from the group. Now I have to face the problem of time. The novel’s fundamental issue. For a person’s life as well. When are we going to die? To the question, “Tell us about yourself, Jorge Luis Borges,” he answered, “What can I tell you? I know nothing about myself. I don’t even know the date of my death.” I know when Noriko will die, but I can’t let on. I have to obey the rules of suspense. We have to keep the reader alert. I don’t know why. It’s an insult to the art of writing. If the reader can’t stay awake to read a book he himself decided to read, then let him fall asleep. I don’t see why I should start pulling on his heartstrings, just to make him listen to me. Okay, there’ll be a death. It will be my only concession to the genre. For the rest, the reader will just have to figure it out. If not, there are other books out there. If he persists, he’ll end up with a book that has neither rhyme nor reason. I can hear my publisher. Too much information in too little time: it damages the fluidity of the sentences. The reader won’t have time to digest it all, it goes too fast, you’ll lose what’s most interesting about your style (but what’s most interesting about my style?). You can’t show the workings of the mechanism too much either, or make your voice heard above the characters’. We hear you everywhere, you do all the voices. That’s true, but it’s only a sketch. When I start writing, I’ll make sure to distribute the roles and divide up the dialogue time. I just need to respect a certain balance. I can see the story more clearly; what I’m missing is the perspective. A good reason to write a book like this. I wonder what it all means. And why all this uproar? There’s uproar in the book, and uproar about the book too. And I haven’t even gotten off the couch yet. Well, human beings always make noise. As long as they like a commotion, there will always be novels. I’ve created a universe and I have no intention of sharing it. I have a few girls’ names, a title, some voices, a city I know only too well, and another that I don’t know at all. I don’t need anything else to write a novel.