I Am a Japanese Writer

A FORGOTTEN SECRET

WHAT GOOD IS a secret if it lies hidden in the deepest reaches of a person? Can it be forgotten? Is it a secret if you forget it? Where do forgotten secrets go? And what is a secret anyway? A thing you want to shout from the rooftops but know you can’t. A virus placed in quarantine. It doesn’t only belong to the one who keeps it. Where can it be hidden? Somewhere in your body. But not in the heart; there are already enough passions crowded in there. Bury in it your flesh. The famous promise never to reveal it. One of the two holders of the secret has given it too great an importance, while for the other it’s just an everyday story. The one whose secret it is ends up reactivating it in the other’s mind. Because a forgotten secret is a danger. It can burst forth at any moment in the middle of a wine-fueled conversation. By trusting another person with your secret, you give him absolute power over you. But you bind your fate to his as well. And so the secret has a sexual aspect. Someone gives himself to another. Agrees to be naked. Lets that person enter his private being through the back door. The narrow gate of the ass. You don’t hide your secret in your heart, but in your ass. Hence that cry of despair, just before talking: “I’m in deep shit!” What you really want is to drag the other person into your shit. We’re behind the scenes — the obscenes. Where everything seems truer. Whereas actually, the ceremony is extremely codified. Nothing is more rigorously governed than the atmosphere of a secret. You don’t reveal a secret without a ceremony. You set up a meeting because it’s not done over the phone. You choose a quiet restaurant (or a bedroom). It takes all kinds of time before you get to the real subject. The one receiving the secret has to wait until the other agrees to talk about it. It’s a long process and silence plays an important role. The more banal the secret, the longer the waiting time. True, we don’t know who is passing out the gold stars here. Then you test the other person to see if he’s worthy of the secret. Even if it’s your best friend. You have to know what a secret is in order to hear one. You don’t confess to a murder or an act of incest every day. Since it’s often something that touches the ego, you have to make sure the other person won’t laugh at you, or say, off-handedly, “Oh, that’s nothing,” then confide that he slept with his mother. That’s not elegant: one secret must never cross paths with another. Yet some derive pleasure in watching them touch each other. One secret always hides another — the one that you really do want to hide. There are layers of secrets. When everything is secret, you wonder what’s left that’s really secret. Something spontaneous, perhaps.