Self-Portrait Abroad

tokyo, first impressions

You arrive in Tokyo the way you arrive in Bastia, from the sky. The plane flies in a long arc above the bay and aligns with the runway to touch down. Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.

Chrisitan Pietrantoni, incidentally, a Corsican friend of Madeleine’s — I will call Madeleine Madeleine in these pages to help me get my bearings — promptly got in touch with me to arrange a meeting in a Tokyo café and fill me in on what had been happening back in the village. The very day after my arrival, hardly leaving me the time to unpack my bags, he called me up in my hotel room while, dressed in a white shirt and small blue cardigan of the sort worn by retired teachers (a New Year’s gift from my parents), I sat on the bed in my socks flipping through a sports magazine and awaiting the imminent arrival of a journalist who was coming to interview me. Seated at a round table right next to me in the room was Mr. Hirotani of the Shueisha Publishing House, who since the beginning of my stay had been alternating with Mrs. Funabiki as companion and confidante, guide and bodyguard, and who I perceived out of the corner of my eye in a perfect suit and tie, his face grave and attentive, busying himself arranging in a vase a bouquet of flowers I’d been given. He was grappling with five purple and white flowers (the Anderlecht colors, I’m not sure if it was intentional), whose position he altered incessantly to compose a harmonious bouquet, regularly starting over again from scratch, changing here the position of one flower, there the position of another, looking more, it seemed to me, like a thug from a film by Godard than a connoisseur of Japanese floral arrangement. And as I continued to observe him discreetly, lazily turning the pages of my magazine while voluptuously crossing and uncrossing my stockinged feet on the bedspread, the telephone rang out in the room. Dropping his flowers on the carpet, Mr. Hirotani dashed to the telephone in a single bound. Putting his arm over my head he seized the phone on the bedside table and gave a discreet, courteous pull on the cord which had inopportunely got twisted around my neck and shoulder. Strangling me for an instant while trying to get it untangled, he took the cord cautiously in both hands, passed it over my head and answered the telephone with an apologetic look. My head raised, I tried to guess who he could be talking with, someone from hotel reception or the publisher, perhaps the journalist we were waiting for from Yomiuri Shimbum. Standing there beside me he listened gravely, mechanically retying the knot of his tie. Yes, he said, yes. It’s for you, he said, handing me the receiver: Christian Pietrantoni.

I made a date with Christian Pietrantoni for two days later and, after a first missed meeting one night in a South American bar in Roppongi, he came to fetch me one morning at the hotel. Taking off our coats we walked side by side in Tokyo under the island sun before stopping at a modern, insipid, and impersonal café. Although it was pastis time we contented ourselves with a green tea, and, while young girls ate at the next tables in a cacophony of chopsticks and Japanese voices, Christian Pietrantoni, sitting across from me, perfectly indifferent to the surrounding atmosphere, filled me in on the latest news from the village. He told me what Nono and Nénette were up to, the Albertinis, the Antomarchis, what do I know. I wondered what source he had for all his information (perhaps he had correspondents in other Asian capitals?). Accompanying me back to the hotel he gave me what was no doubt one key to the mystery when he let on that he had a subscription to Corse-Matin. Before saying good-bye we promised to meet up again soon, in Ersa or Tokyo, London or Macinaggio, then shook hands vigorously the way Westerners do in front of hotel entrances.

I had strange experiences with my hands in Japan. I don’t know if it was because of the hotel I was staying at, the types of material the building had been constructed from — the fact, for example, that its doorknobs were mostly made of metal and not wood — or whether the cause of all these little irritations had more to do with my wool cardigan (a New Year’s gift from my parents)…nevertheless, each time I was about to take hold of a doorknob or press an elevator button, I got a shock of static electricity. But enough of personal matters.