Dany Laferriere

I Am a Japanese Writer

The beginning of all art

in the deep north

a rice-planting song

BASHO

FOR everyone who would

like to be someone else

THE FASTEST IN AMERICA

MY PUBLISHER CALLED while I was out buying fresh salmon. He wanted to know what was going on with that damned book. I’d rather talk salmon. Once, I couldn’t stand the stuff. I ate it and ten minutes later I was puking. The last time was at a friend’s place. I missed the bowl in her bathroom. I cleaned up the floor, washed my face and went back to the living room. I swore it was the last time I’d eat it. Okay, it’s not the first promise I haven’t kept. I am under no obligation to keep promises I make to myself — except the one to write this book. My publisher’s voice was acid despite all the sweetness he was trying to put into it. I can understand him. He didn’t exactly twist my arm to get me to do this book. I’d started nodding my head as hard as I could when he told me I absolutely had to write a new book. The word “new” has always frightened me a little. Why a new book? After all this time, we should know there’s nothing new under the sun. But we keep on trying. The customer always wants something new and different. I wasn’t about to get into that discussion; he knows it by heart, anyway. We talk about it every time we meet. The setting: his tiny office (one day someone will have to drag him out of there, from under the multicolored manuscripts and red books) or one of the neighborhood cafés. He’s a tall young man with eyes like globes and a disarming smile. He has a habit of running his hands through his hair, as if to brush away the clouds that have gathered there.

We hadn’t even got to the café and I’d already found the title. I’m good at titles. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. apparently told his wife, who told me (I’m talking like a journalist now), that I was the fastest “titler” in America. The fastest titler in America, sure, why not, but I wouldn’t have minded knowing in what context he said that. Vonnegut was always out of context. That was his specialty. Do we really need a context to be the breakfast of champions? Billy the Kid: the fastest gun in the West. No need for a context there. The description is complete and autonomous. Even the tone is there. Had he said it ironically? His wife didn’t elaborate. It’s like saying that’s all I’m good at— with me, don’t bother going past the title. I guess that’s better than a bad title that keeps you from reading further. You can’t imagine the number of good books that are read clandestinely because of their bad titles. In bookstores, of the rare comments I hear about a book, 90 percent are about the title. Readers often ask me how I find my titles. I really don’t know. I just sit there for a while, and suddenly the title comes to me. This time I didn’t even need ten seconds; the title was there, waiting for me at the next corner. Are you looking for a title? How did you guess? It leaped at me and stretched out on the white sheet of paper. I need to contemplate a title, to turn it every which way. Each word — no — each syllable, each letter has to be in the right spot. Whatever the book is, these words will represent it. These are the words people will see most often. For the others, they’ll have to open the cover, while these words will always be there, before our eyes. They’ll contain all the other words in the book. You don’t have to reread García Márquez’s book; all you have to do is say One Hundred Years of Solitude or Remembrance of Things Past if we’re talking about Proust (do we even have to mention his name? Doesn’t everyone recognize the title?), and all the images in the book pass before our delighted eyes like a curtain of light separating us from unpleasant reality. The time we spent reading it (the days at the café, the nights by lamplight), hidden in the folds of our memory, rise to the surface with their rich parade of unnameable sensations. A good title is a fabulous password!

When you put forward a title you like, you have to be careful. In general, publishers want to hear about the content. What is it all about? They ask stupid questions like that. But not my publisher: he leaned back from the table, a smile on his lips. I used the moment to scan some of the titles on the shelves. Nothing worthwhile there. So I casually sent mine over the heaps of manuscripts. What was it? I Am a Japanese Writer. A brief silence. Then a wide smile. Sold! We signed the contract: ten thousand euros for five little words. In my euphoria, I told the Vonnegut anecdote to my publisher. He could already picture the promo copy: “The fastest titler in America.” But we dropped the idea — too immodest. That’s the problem with Westerners: we’re too afraid of ridicule. Being ridiculous won’t kill us, but the fear of it will. The other reason we dropped the slogan was the ambiguity of the word “titler.” Most readers would have read it as “tattler” or “titter.” So really, we lacked courage. But let’s get back to the title itself. He took it in his hands as if it were a lighter in a no-smoking area. He weighed and measured it. My title passed every test. He began writing it on the nearest piece of paper. It was pretty banal, actually — except for the word “Japanese.” And that was no joke: I really do consider myself a Japanese writer.

AT THE FISH STORE

WHEN YOU’VE GOT the title, most of the job is done. Still, you do have to write the book. There’s no getting around it. I am still swimming between the title and the book. Floating. Taking the time to measure the distance to be traveled. I’m never in a hurry to get to the heart of the matter. In my head, I run through the images I’d like to see in the book. It’s important to get them to enter into your flesh, to mix with your blood, so that you can practically write with your feet — in other words, without thinking. It’s not easy to change an idea into emotion. You’re impatient, but these things take time. Time cares little for our impatience. The result is a kind of generalized anxiety that follows you everywhere, even to the fish store. The problem is, you’re not sure what that kind of monster feeds on. So you take your time. You sit on a park bench and watch the clouds go by. You watch with pleasure as a little girl plays with her dog. You examine the sky with its low belly, heavy with black storm clouds. Pretty soon you start wanting to open up that belly and see if it feeds off anxieties or images. You linger there, in a state of expectancy. Open. Anything can enter. A moment of perfect calm. You sniff the air in wonderment as a single dry leaf falls from a tree. The time that came before seems so carefree now. Nasty weather this morning. You look at people but don’t see them. You listen to them but don’t hear them. You give too much importance to small details. But what if everything begins with that detail? You take a number and join the line at the fish store. You’ve stopped listening to the people talking to you, but you’ve started paying close attention to the ones who aren’t speaking to you. You’re preparing to become everyone else.

The fishman, a Greek, touches my forearm as he hands me my salmon, skillfully wrapped in brown paper.

“Are you going to write a second book?”

I’ve written fourteen books, but he’s still stuck on the first. Twenty years have passed and he still asks me the same question. He’s not interested in my answer. On to the next customer.

On my way out, just to gauge his reaction, I tell him, “I am a Japanese writer.”

His eyes cut back to me.

“How’s that? You changed nationality?”

“No. That’s the title of my new book.”

A worried glance at his assistant, a young man busy wrapping fish. My fishman never looks at the person he’s speaking to.

“Do you have the right?”

“To write the book?”

“No. To say you’re Japanese.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to change your nationality?”

“No way… I already did that once, that’s enough.”

“You should find out about that.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, at the Japanese embassy. . Can you imagine me waking up one morning and telling my customers I’m a Polish butcher?”

“I’d think you’d be a Polish fishman, since you’re in fish.”

“Anything but a Polish fishman,” he answers, turning back to the next customer.

A guy who gives you his opinion about everything always ends up planting a seed of disquiet in your brain. I decided to call my publisher and ask him. He shouldn’t have any objections.

AN ANXIOUS SALMON

I HAVE A special way of cooking salmon. It has nothing to do with the salmon itself. What’s special is me. I put a very small amount of water in a pot with the juice of one lemon, thin slices of onion, fresh garlic, salt, pepper, hot chilis and a large ripe tomato that I crush, keeping only the juice. I boil everything together for no more than three minutes. I lower the heat to minimum and place the salmon in the sauce. Then I leave the kitchen and come back twenty minutes later to begin cooking the rice and the vegetables. But this time, I don’t leave. I stand and watch the salmon simmering. For no good reason, I start worrying. About what? About everything. Why? I can’t say. Don’t worry about my worrying. I ask questions, then answer them myself to forget I’m alone. Otherwise, I’d be dead silent. It’s incredible all the things you have to do just to maintain life. Right now, wave after wave of worry is washing in and threatening to drown me. I’m sweating anxiety. I start worrying about my mother, back home. I didn’t like the way her voice sounded the last time we talked on the phone. Her small, frail voice. I know my mother’s voice is never strong, but that time it was really alarming. That call dates back a month, but I’m only reacting now. I’ve been busy, it’s true. Busy doing what? I don’t remember. Right now, I don’t have anything to do but watch my salmon simmering. She told me she wished I had a more secure job, and that makes me sad. Now, even after my fiftieth birthday, I still don’t know what kind of writer I am. I hadn’t thought of this before, but back home, what are they going to say about me having become a Japanese writer? I watch the salmon slowly firming up. I’ve ended up communicating my anxiety to the fish. Now I’ll have to eat anxious salmon one more time. I don’t even know if the anxiety comes from starting a new book or from becoming a Japanese writer. And there lies the fundamental question: what is a Japanese writer? Someone who lives and writes in Japan? Or someone who was born in Japan and writes in spite of it (there are nations that are happy without writing)? Or someone who was not born in Japan, who doesn’t know the language, but who decided one fine day to become a Japanese writer? That’s my situation. I have to get it through my head: I am a Japanese writer. As long as I’m not that naked writer who enters the forest of sentences with no weapon other than a kitchen knife.

A POCKET GUIDE TO ASIA

I DON’T KNOW anyone from Asia. I would fall for any girl named Asia — the name makes me think of silk. “Asia” makes me think of a blade, too. One thrust and the throat is slit. A necklace of blood. A quick death is almost reassuring. I think of that continent the way a nineteenth-century explorer would. My ideas are born in my room. I did know a guy who used to hang out in Carré Saint-Louis. I never really knew where he was from. Asia is so big. Does he even know where he’s from now? When someone doesn’t go back home for so long, origins lose their relevance. What good is coming from a place if you don’t even speak the language?

“You wouldn’t be Japanese, by any chance?”

“Korea. I’m Korean.”

“Japan, Korea, isn’t it the same thing?”

He gave me a furious look.

“Still,” I told him, “I get the feeling you have something in common.”

“What?”

“Asia.”

Obviously I’m in love with the word. It’s the continent closest to America. One is too old; the other, too new. Both start with the letter A. In the presence of this flesh-and-blood human being, I confine myself to semiology. That must be my European side.

“What do you want, anyway?”

“I’d like to have a Japanese experience.”

The Korean wasn’t sure if I was serious or not. I put on my most serious face. For me, it’s easy: everything is serious, yet nothing is. That’s how I move through life. I can’t even separate what’s true from what’s false in myself. I don’t distinguish between the two. To tell the truth, all this business about authenticity bores me to death. I’m talking about the concrete fact of dying. When people start conjuring up their origins, I literally find it hard to breathe. We’re born in one spot, and afterwards we choose our place of origin.

Suddenly the guy figured he knew what I was looking for.

“Kama Sutra,” he said.

“That’s India.”

“Sure, but everybody thinks it’s Japanese.”

“I’m not everybody.”

“So what do you want?”

“Just to be in the surroundings. . The smells, the colors, the brush of fabric…”

“I know this transvestite…”

“It’s better if it’s a girl.”

“What about Chinese twin sisters?”

“I didn’t say China.”

“But all of it’s Asia, you said so yourself.”

“I’m not just talking about geography. . For me, Japan is masculine, and China is feminine. I can screw China, but Japan will end up screwing me.”

“You think you can screw China! Why not Korea?”

“Japan is more modern.”

“Workers with movie cameras.”

“So you really don’t know anyone from Tokyo?”

“If I find something, I’ll let you know.”

“Can I ask you a question? When was the last time you were back in Korea?” The question combined space and time.

“I don’t remember… I lost my passport.”

“Where do you keep your country?”

“Here, in my pocket.”

His eyes took on a strange glow. I headed for the Librairie du Square where I’d ordered a book (Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Interior). I heard someone running after me. I turned around. The Korean was standing there.

“Hey, I’m thirsty. You made me talk too much.”

“What about it?”

“Just enough for a beer.”

“You didn’t do anything for me.”

“Because you didn’t know what you wanted.”

“I want Asia. Japan, to be exact.”

I watched him dance back and forth. Some people think with their whole bodies. The possibility of a beer was doing its work.

“Okay… she’s a singer.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“I’m not guaranteeing anything. I can just tell you where she hangs out…. But it’ll cost you twenty dollars.”

I handed over the money, no questions asked.

“Café Sarajevo.”

“What’s her name?”

“Midori.”

A place and a name. You don’t need anything else to start a novel.

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.

BASHO IN THE METRO

I TAKE THE subway with Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior. I once met Nicolas Bouvier, the translator of the French version, in Toronto. We drank a coffee together. He was so full of life yet so exhausted, both at the same time. His suitcase at the foot of the table. A quick dialogue between two airports— he was running off to New York. We talked about the Aztec upper classes, who underpaid their workers and forced them to labor at least twelve hours a day on monuments that today are covered over with grass. His taxi came. His face was tanned brown and sweating. Already his mind was on his notes. The taxi rushed off through the fine drizzle. The years passed. His legend grew out of all proportion. An intimate society made him into a kind of saint. Now he has returned as Basho’s translator. I’ll read a few scraps of Basho, but never a complete text. The poet relates his trip on foot to the northern reaches of Japan. I am reading him in the subway, following his adventures in search of the Shirakawa Barrier as the Montreal metro moves beneath the city. Everything is moving. Except time: that stands still. I’m too absorbed by all this telescoping of time and crisscrossing of space to get interested in my surroundings. Except for that girl across from me, looking at me, unsmiling. Long and thin. Dark eyes — a brushstroke. Her name must be Isa. As soon as someone enters my field of vision, she becomes a fictional character. No borders between literature and life. I return to my book. Basho is preparing his final journey with extreme care. He can no longer tolerate his stifling everyday existence. Time is passing too. “The fleeting transience of life, soon to die, yet no sign of it,” murmurs the vagabond poet, without bitterness. He must get back on the road again and renew his acquaintance with the zigzags of random chance: “Not yet dead, at journey’s end, autumn evening.” He abandons everything, even what is essential. He keeps only a sturdy paper overcoat for the cold nights, a straw cape for the rain and a cotton yukata. And since he is a writer, he slips into his bag a writing-board, ink and brushes. Even these indispensable things weigh upon him. Only the self is necessary, as naked as possible. I first discovered Basho’s poetry in a page of newsprint that had been used to wrap rice. Ever since, I have sought his trace in all things. In a bookstore, I always see if there is something by Basho or about Basho. The man possessed a true science of the emotions. And he was stubborn, too. Nothing forced him to undertake a journey like that at his age, but no one could stop him once he had made the decision to go. Sora accompanied him, to free him of domestic tasks.

They set out at dawn. The next time we see him, he is in the Nasu swamplands. Rain forces them to pass the night in a thatched hut. Basho seems in fine shape. Movement is his element. He moves as the landscape changes.

I am in the Montreal subway, following the footsteps of a certain Matsuo Munefusa, also known as Basho. He was born in 1644 in Tsuge, a village close to Ueno. He admired the poet Tu Fu. Basho and Sora reached the prestigious Shirakawa Barrier, which all the old poets spoke of with great emotion. No sooner had they crossed the Abukuma River than they discovered, on the left, “the summit of Mount Bandai, whose vast height dominates the land of Aizu.” They paused at the house of a hermit who lived under a chestnut tree. Basho composed a haiku about the chestnut tree, which seemed to him more moving than the hermit. He no doubt recalled the banana tree that gave him his name: basho. The rains lasted the entire month of June.

I look up. Isa is still there. Nothing has moved but the train. I go back to Basho. Matsushima! Our travelers have long dreamed of it. Finally they are there. They head for the beach at Ojima. Matsushima leaves Basho speechless. There are islands everywhere. Everything is graceful, especially the pine trees, “dense, green and dark,” whose elegance he sings. Death caresses him near the Kitakami River, where the Koromo joins it.

The journey became ever more arduous. Thickets of bamboo, rushing streams, rocks, and, worst of all, the cold sweat along the steep path that led to the Mogami district. The two poets rested before resuming their journey. They hoped to travel down the Mogami by boat. The weather was so bad they had to wait days before taking to the road again. Peasants recognized Basho and asked him to give them writing lessons. He was moved: “Who would have thought that, during this pilgrimage dedicated to those who have gone before me, I would have the opportunity to teach my own style, and in such surroundings?” What delicacy of spirit! And here was the Mogami, whose source is the northern highlands.

Basho was always ready to point out the places along the way so that other poets might make the same journey. This is the great game we have been playing for centuries. Basho tried to show us that all poets are as one, that the same spirit moves through them. The road is the same for all, though each poet travels it in his own way. And in his own time. The train has stopped without me realizing it. Just time enough to see Isa, from behind, in the crowd of hurried travelers. Her long fragile neck. Its sad nape (I project my sadness onto her nape). The train starts moving again.

THE KISS AT THE CAFÉ SARAJEVO

I HADN’T HEARD of the Café Sarajevo, even though it’s centrally located, not far from the subway station. I prefer the subway to the bus. In the subway, you see only faces. In the bus, only landscapes. I emerge from the hole, turn left, walk into the café. Good atmosphere. Every city has at least one place like this. Anyone who has listened to Joan Baez ends up here, sooner or later. The kind of people who’ve dropped off our radar, though we wonder where they’re hiding out. They end up in cafés like the Sarajevo. I haven’t come expecting to find Joan Baez here. Or even Suzanne Vega. The wheel has turned. I’ve come for Midori, the new Japanese singer who’s on MuchMusic from time to time. I’d never heard of her, either, but ever since the Korean told me about her, I’ve seen her everywhere. You don’t know Midori? There are posters of her in the bathrooms in bars. It’s hard to tell what she really looks like from them because she’s underwater and her face is slightly deformed. She’s holding her breath. The photographer waited till the last second. Just as she was about to explode. Her eyes wide with the beginnings of terror. The pink wings of her nose diaphanous. Her throat swelling. Click. Her torso bursts free of the water. Water pouring from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Her name is whispered all over town: Midori. In every tongue. Montreal’s first Japanese star. The rocket Midori is launched: destination, Planet Bjork. Bjork—a muffled sound. A sound in water. Basho notes:

The old pond,

A frog jumps in:

Plop!

Midori is a flat object with contours so sharp she could slice through someone’s neck and leave the head standing there for a few seconds before it fell. A necklace of red pearls. Midori is polishing her act at the Sarajevo. I sit in the darkest corner of the place. The waitress shows up a half hour later. Green tea. The café is empty. Suddenly, Joan Baez. Joan Baez can be listened to only in a café like the Sarajevo. In an atmosphere like this, I could listen to Joan Baez for the rest of my days. Leonard Cohen chimes in with “Suzanne,” the song that defined Montreal in the 1970s, halfway between passion and nonchalance. So I already know the taste of the waitress, a small black-haired girl with a ring in her nose and flashing eyes. I go back to Basho. I like the idea of the journey, but I hesitate when it comes to getting on the road. Where to? The traveler has to come back one day or other; otherwise, he isn’t a traveler. You stay in your room and await his return.

Customers start showing up. They sit with their backs to the walls. The center remains empty. The ones who like to sit in the center will show up later. Unless you arrive early, you think the room fills up in less than half an hour. But for someone who frequents small cafés, it’s not as simple as that. The customers arrive one by one. The waitress calls the owner to find out whether she ought to get an extra waitress or two. How come? There are fifteen customers in the place. How many are there usually at this time? Seven. And there’s a new guy who ordered green tea. Green tea — you call that a customer? Sure. What do you suggest? Two more waitresses. It’s your call, you know the place. She hangs up and looks at me with a big smile. I’d order another tea, but I’m afraid she’ll call in a third waitress.

I go off to the washroom. Everything is black, even the floor tiles. A regular boudoir. The posters tell you a lot about the people who go to the café. Their tastes are exposed for all to see. This is a musicians’ café. The posters tell it all. Next to a choral group that sings medieval songs is an offer to help cure your backaches through acupuncture. Yoga classes too. A charter to India to go see some guru. And there are posters of Midori. Midori is at home here. Like Air France in Paris, American Airlines in New York or Alitalia in Rome. Midori at the Café Sarajevo. A poster of her naked — out of focus. We never see her clearly. Her narrow body, straight hips, no breasts. Her sex is shaved close. Swollen. I linger in front of Midori’s sex. Then I return to the room. It’s filled to the rafters. A boxing ring. Performances. A girl made up like Nina Hagen is writhing in front of a camera. It’s chaos. No borders between the customers and the stage. Everything’s shaking. A guy grabs the mike and starts in on a speech about the price of oil on the world market. Someone else weighs in about the famine in Africa. It’s back to the 1970s with its spiritual outbursts. Someone else wants to talk about the fabulous F1 race that afternoon. He gets shouted down when he bellows that Ayrton Senna was the best who ever drove. The crowd starts shouting the name Gilles Villeneuve, a native son. No more stage, no more audience. A sea of raised arms clamors for one thing after another. Nina Hagen’s double demands a kiss from her girlfriend, who looks like Suzanne Vega twenty years ago. A universe of doubles. Vega has a boyfriend. He looked worried at first, but he’s wised up. Nina Hagen leans over and kisses him gently on his left eye. The crowd is moved but unsatisfied. Then on the right eye, with the same light touch. Everyone holds his breath. The fantasies of heterosexual guys haven’t changed since the Neolithic era. Nina Hagen acknowledges the crowd and makes a show of returning to her seat. The crowd howls in protest. Hagen gets back to her feet, taking her own sweet time. She has us eating out of her hand. A kiss doesn’t mean anything. It’s only as important as we want to make it. Vega’s double seems to want to put an end to the waiting. Hagen is in no hurry. We know there will be a kiss, but we don’t know what will happen after it. The guy at my table starts chewing his nails. Hagen bends low and kisses Vega on the neck, then on each eye. The crowd wants more. Hagen holds Vega’s head in her hands and looks her deep in the eye (we wonder what the real Nina Hagen and Suzanne Vega are doing right now). This is the longest kiss ever recorded at the Sarajevo. A kiss that lasts until Vega feels really embarrassed, until she really understands what is going on. She snaps her eyes open when Hagen’s tongue touches hers. Hagen’s furious, dominating gaze. Vega’s imploring, submissive answer. The crowd, whose expectations have been surpassed. As she keeps kissing Vega, Hagen locks eyes with the boyfriend. He gets up to leave. The crowd follows each of his steps. Hagen’s lips still on Vega’s. Vega is the only one who doesn’t know her boyfriend is leaving. Finally, Hagen surrenders her prey. Sated. Vega’s head on Hagen’s shoulder, asleep. The crowd falls silent. The guy comes back into the room. Vega wakes with a saucy smile. Once more, Hagen acknowledges the crowd (the place is full by now). We have just witnessed The Big Kiss, a Kiss Inc. production. The trio exits the café as the crowd applauds and the amateur photographers shoot off their flashes. The three waitresses are hopping.

THE NIPPON AT THE EIFFEL TOWER

I’VE NEVER OWNED a still camera. That’s because I’ve never quite figured out their purpose. If it’s just to take pictures I’ll never look at, then it has to be the stupidest invention ever. Anyway, I have one that works very well: this skull where I’ve stored fifty years of images, most of them repeated until they’ve become the fabric of my ordinary life. This day-today life made of a series of tiny explosions. An electric life. I’ve been told that these images belong to me only, and that other people can’t access them. That’s not exactly true — I can describe them with such precision that, in the end, they become visible to other eyes. Even better: I can transform these pictures into feelings. I can relate a moment without describing the people who were there, simply by bringing forth the energy that gave life to the event. In a photo, we rarely see the emotion that creates the story unfolding before our eyes. Except, maybe, in birthday photos, where we see the child’s enchanted eyes behind the lit candles. Of course, sometimes a whiff of nostalgia rises up from a picture yellowed with time, especially when almost all those who looked into the lens are dead. I keep all those photos in my head, and they have taken root there, the images falling one over the other, all wanting to surge to the front. As for the Japanese man, who never stops photographing the world: what does he see? He doesn’t even see the two elements he is trying to capture, his traveling companion and the monument that the companion is blocking out. The Eiffel Tower is there to show that this guy spent a day in Paris. But by cracking the same wide, impersonal smile in front of every monument on the face of the Earth, he is destroying the intimate nature of the moment. The Japanese man becomes as timeless as the tower itself. You’d think that the Eiffel Tower was being photographed as a backdrop for a smiling Japanese guy.

THE BJORK VOODOO DOLL

THE CROWD KEPT its eyes on the Kiss Inc. trio, who’d given the same show in Berlin, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, London and New York. I knew as much because I had seen their poster in the bathroom. There wasn’t room to add Rome, Amsterdam and Sydney. Those cities too had seen Kiss Inc.’s act; Montreal was the last on the list. The world is crawling with market systems in which people and things are bought and sold. It used to be the silk road, the sugar road, the spice road. Now we have the professional tennis circuit, the golf tour, the environmentalists and the all-powerful heads of state. Complex networks. Impossible to lose yourself in the natural world — nature’s slice of the pie keeps dwindling and dwindling. Workers have their own subway line. The line that runs from the workers’ neighborhood to the factory doesn’t change on the way back. Fifty years of round trips, looking at the same sights every day. Kiss Inc. studies fashion shows, the paths taken by rock stars who want to marry models. Kiss Inc. doesn’t move in the world of rock stars and Kate Moss, but hangs around the edges, hoping for a few crumbs. The whirlwind of fashion and music carries in its golden path a colorful, living, cool, non-conformist crowd awaiting the slightest signal from its leaders to pack up and move from the Sarajevo to Olympic Stadium, where Bjork is putting on a show. Bjork could have been at the Sarajevo. Bjork at the Sarajevo — what a poster that would have made! With Kiss Inc. as the warm-up band. But for that to happen, chance would have had to wave its magic wand. Bjork coming to town a day early because she absolutely had to see the big voodoo art show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The great masters of Haitian painting. The peasant painters celebrated by Malraux. The first worldwide show since the one organized at the Mellon, in Manhattan, in the 1950s. Bjork intrigued by voodoo. Bjork, as a little girl, receiving a voodoo doll as a gift. Bjork identifying with the doll, putting herself in the shoes of a little black girl who had to hide her doll because pleasure was forbidden. Bjork talking to the doll, and the doll answering her. Look at the strange turn of Bjork’s mouth and you’ll understand you’re not dealing with a pure-hearted, well-behaved little Icelandic girl, but a voodoo doll bloated with blood. The doll has taken the girl named Bjork’s place.

Bjork hasn’t grown an inch since. Bjork is the doll. And Bjork absolutely wants to see the show and meet the voodoo painters discovered in the 1940s. They’re still alive — how can that be? The doll’s eyes glow from deep within the shadows. Paging through a magazine, Bjork comes across an ad for the Montreal show. Is she in Paris, or London, or New York or Berlin (don’t forget Berlin), or is it Rome? A hotel room, in any case. A hotel room is a universal space. White sheets. Magic number. Incognito, Bjork chooses room 17 wherever she goes. She calls her producer and orders her to cancel the Melbourne show so she can get to Montreal in time to see the museum. The producer thinks the best solution is to extend the show so Bjork can see it. The producer gets on the line to Montreal. She speaks the name “Bjork” and is immediately put through to the curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, relaxing in Bermuda. The curator is “profoundly touched.” A call from Bjork — actually, it’s her producer, but on behalf of Bjork. He’s a fan, well, not really, his wife is, not really his wife, but their daughter. The curator stammers and stumbles. The producer, very amused, waits on the other end of the line. You never get enough of that sort of pleasure. Just the name of that tiny sliver of a woman can stupefy one of the major thinkers of modernity. Just say “Bjork.” Such an ugly sound—Bjork. So (with the right authoritarian tone), will you be extending the show for Bjork? Of course, I can’t make a decision of that sort all on my own. Not without the board of directors. What the hell? How many are there? Seven. And where are they? On vacation, as I am. Where? I have no idea, Madame. All right, leave it to me. The producer calls an agency that specializes in this kind of emergency. It’s said they could find Bin Laden, no problem, and put him on the line with George Bush. The last miracle the agency pulled off was tracking down the daughter of one of the heads of Canadian Pacific, even though she was in Tangiers and they had no clues to go on except the fact that she liked sun, sand and solitude. She wasn’t carrying her cell phone, and none of her friends knew where she was. To catch up to her, the agency contacted an enormous number of people, from the Dalai Lama to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French writer.

In no time at all, this agency gets a hold of the members of the board of directors of the Museum of Fine Arts (the famous group of seven). They will be delighted to cooperate, and all want to meet Bjork. The producer calls her. “Everything’s okay. The museum will keep the show up for you.”

PRIMITIVE PAINTERS

AND THE VOODOO painters? What are you talking about, Bjork? The ones who come with the show. We’re going to see paintings, not painters. Sure, but people don’t just want to hear my music, they want me to come and play it for them. They want to see the chef, that’s why the tv is full of cooking shows. People want to see the designer, the dress and the girl wearing the dress they’d like to wear. They want to see everything. That’s what your job is for. You make it possible for them to see me. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that. Come on, what did you think? This telephone is an extension of my ear. So I want to see the voodoo painters. I want to get to know them, one by one. Okay, whatever you like. If you think it’s just a whim, then you shouldn’t be around me. A whim? Since I started working with you, I’ve stopped bothering with the difference between what’s real and what’s fantasy. You, Bjork, you live in your fairy-tale universe, it’s normal for you, it’s solid, you can walk on it, but I have to sell it to people for whom reality means working in a windowless office eight hours a day, wearing gray suits and believing that money can buy everything, including the imagination. I have to make them see that your world is more real than theirs, and that’s why they should bow down before you, the ice princess. I know all that, just find me the painters. That won’t be easy — if they’re as important as you say, they won’t give a damn whether you’re the princess of Iceland or a clown from the Cirque du Soleil. I’m not talking about calling them — it’s the museum’s administrators you need to get to. In that case, no problem. We can work it out, Bjork. We’ll ask them to extend the show a day or two. Make it two days at least, the producer of Bjork’s international tours spits into her cell phone. All right. Bjork loves you already. The man turns red, and it isn’t the Bermuda sun. His color spreads to Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, Milan, Sydney — you never know where Bjork might be. The little girl who played dolls with a voodoo goddess, the most fearful one of all, Erzulie Dantor, can’t tell the difference between the atlas of the world and her clothes closet. She lives in a parallel universe where the days are named for cities. She doesn’t say Tuesday, she says Berlin; not Thursday, but Milan. The curator calls back. Sorry, the voodoo painters have no intention of putting off their journey for Bjork. Yes, we explained everything to them. They didn’t seem to understand what was at stake. Bjork is ecstatic. She didn’t expect any less of them. Melbourne is canceled. It’s not the first time a city has been canceled at the last moment. Melbourne is wiped off Bjork’s map. Days, like cities, can be made to disappear. The voodoo painters won’t wait for Bjork. So many of them have already died. The ones left are stars. They live in cloistered rooms, use no salt on their food, require no light and speak only to members of the staff. The museum has put seven rooms at their disposal, but they refuse to split up. A small group of men wearing hats at the far end of the room. The dim light casts shadows on the wall. Dewitt Peters, an American from Boston, a professor of English at Pétion College in Port-au-Prince, discovered them when he first arrived in Haiti in 1944. He was visiting the country when, on the road to Saint-Marc, he saw a strange painting on a door: a snake with the head of a man. It was Damballah! He entered the voodoo temple and found the walls covered with paintings, as if he had gone through a doorway that led into another world. It was the universe of Hector Hyppolite, the grand master of voodoo painting. Breton was crazy about him. The world of dreams at your fingertips. Dewitt Peters announced he was opening an art center. Rigaud Benoit, a Port-au-Prince taxi driver, was the first to cross the threshold of the center, with a self-portrait entitled Taxi Driver. A small hat riding lightly on his head. He was followed by Jasmin Joseph, the painter who painted only rabbits — fifty years painting nothing but rabbits. Jasmin Joseph and Rigaud Benoit, two beings who were perfect opposites (one was tall, thin and nervous; the other small, round and serene), never left each other’s side, and entered into glory hand in hand. One morning, a boy came looking for work, and the Center happened to need someone to sweep the floors. His job was to open up the Center every morning, once he’d swept out the building. He spent hours staring at the paintings. He decided to trade in his broom for a brush. His name was Castera Bazile. Dewitt Peters needed to see a friend in the country. He decided to go through Croix-des-Bouquets, well known for its lively market. Peters liked to visit cemeteries which, for him, were open-air museums. There he discovered the heavy crosses sculpted by Georges Liautaud. Modest graves, and such powerful crosses. The great sculptor lived close by; Peters went to see him and was able to convince him that he was an artist. That wasn’t easy, because the sculptor Liautaud was no man for jokes. One morning, Préfète Duffaut brought in his first “imaginary city.” He explained to Pierre Monosier, Peters’ young assistant, that Erzulie (or was it the Virgin, he couldn’t be sure) had unveiled the city of the future for him. At first the city was uninhabited; it took him twenty years to see people in it. In Petit-Goâve, on the road that leads to Les Cayes and the Deep South, lived a man who knew the language of roosters and painted only scenes of daily life. Scenes stolen from the market. And also, this apocalyptic triptych: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. A man who wore a straw hat, boney, agile and serious: Salnave Philippe-Auguste, a judge from Saint-Marc. He painted only jungles, a follower of the Douanier Rousseau. Here they are today, in a room at the Ritz-Carlton. They have their passports in the inside pocket of their jackets, along with their return tickets. They do not eat. They are waiting to be taken to the airport. The curator shows up with a little girl he is leading by the hand. This is Bjork, he says. Bjork sits on the bed. The curator exits, closing the door discreetly as he goes. No one moves a muscle for at least ten minutes. Then Bjork gets off the bed. She announces, “I’d like to sing you something.” Silence. Bjork begins to sing a ballad. Then a rock song. And a third, in Creole this time, without an accent. She pays her respects. A voodoo doll. Hector Hyppolite picks her up and slips her into the inside pocket of his jacket. A small black doll with slightly slanted eyes. A couple comes for the group. It’s time to leave. A white van is waiting for them in front of the hotel. They reach the airport, go through immigration and get to the security zone. Their suitcases are searched, x-rayed. The security agents discover, on Hector Hyppolite’s person, a statuette of Bjork sculpted from ebony. The statuette will find its rightful place in a temple in Croix-des-Bouquets. Midori is already considering becoming a voodoo doll like Bjork. It’s the only way to be a star without dying.

OBJECTS

TINY, WELL DESIGNED objects, made for the eye and the palm, have spread across the planet. They attract the skin, beg for an absentminded caress, the kind you might give the cat. The cat is a living object. We know the hand’s taste for the black, oblong object. How to touch the heart of an object? Is it an issue of volume or body? Extreme pleasure is bound up in this comfort. At its center, each object contains a miniscule object with the same configuration. An object at the heart of the object. Its hard core. Empty. A step into the void. Tropics. My gaze has been conditioned by tropical fruit. Round, colorful, perfumed and edible. With a nut in the center. A fruit that will become one with our body loses its mystery. Whereas our relation with the object can’t go beyond the surface. The object penetrates us, but we can’t touch its heart. It is as impenetrable as a samurai. Yet the object spreads and gives us the illusion of warm contact. There are so many of them that we have stopped paying attention to their presence. With no modesty, we undress in front of objects. We eat as they look on. We quarrel in their presence. We have sex right in front of them. And we keep devising more objects, which end up, in turn, sculpting our lives. More and more frequently, living bodies must use objects to touch. The domination of the object in our sexual lives is undeniable; the emergency rooms at hospitals have seen their share. Japan is frantically fabricating handsome objects that have no function. Why? So we’ll fall in love with them? Is there a greater plan behind it all? Do the new objects ready to invade our shores intend to replace our pets? We need to rethink our relationships with the mineral world. The animal and vegetable realms are losing emotional ground. As for the object, it never grows old. I always carry my own personal movie camera on me; it is the only object that knows how to see.

THE MIDORI GANG

AFTER THE SHOW, I go with Midori and her gang to an opening on Sherbrooke Street, across from the Museum of Fine Arts. Just girls: Eiko, Fumi, Hideko, Noriko, Tomo and Haruki. The courtesans of Princess Midori. Along with an androgynous photographer by the name of Takashi — so flat he reminds me of a lighter in Kate Moss’s palm. Midori looks at the big banners hanging along the columns of the museum, advertising the primitive painters show.

“I’d like to see that show.”

“Didn’t you read in the paper what happened to Bjork?” asks Hideko, leaning so close to Midori that she brushes her ear.

Everyone in the group knows that Midori has the most sensitive ears. They are the seat of all her sensations.

“Don’t you ever do that to me, you understand?”

Midori turns on her.

“Do you understand, Hideko?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. . Why are you making such a big deal?”

“She’s right, Midori,” Fumi says.

An observer paying the slightest attention would understand quickly enough that in this princess’s court, the same intrigues take place as in any other. Midori is the sun around which revolve the seven planets, giddy and sad. So giddy and so sad that I wonder if I’ll be able to tell the difference. You don’t see the tears that flow inside them, but you do hear their manga laughter. I’ve spent endless hours looking for signs that might distinguish one from the other. They never stop orbiting, which makes it hard to pin them down. Above all, this is a group. You can’t study one member until she breaks away a little. I film them in my head in cinema-verité style. A short black-and-white film. Distant, discreet, I film them from my point of view. No editing. And no hesitation about using my imagination to fill in the conversations I’m too far away to hear, or the hidden emotions. We all do that. Takashi is leaving tomorrow to do a photo essay on Yoko Ono, whom Midori calls “yesterday’s grandmother,” but we know he’ll be back. No one ever leaves the group for long. Yoko Ono has a weakness for nubile young boys, but “Widow Mao” (razor-sharp Eiko’s name for her) has no chance against Midori. Midori: a “fresh talent,” the writer Ryu Murakami called her, in a long article in the New Yorker about the next generation of pretenders to Yoko Ono’s throne. Her voice makes you think of Basquiat’s first graffiti in the New York subway: both crude and sophisticated. Tomorrow begins the duel between Midori and Yoko Ono as seen by Takashi. He’ll photograph Yoko Ono. He hopes to bring back a lot of new information about Yoko and lay it at Midori’s feet. The widow knows she’s being spied on. Every young Japanese woman is working to crack the mystery of Yoko Ono in the hopes of dethroning her. Ono is the goddess of discord. The woman who has survived it all. Thanks to her, we’ve understood that hatred is an emotion sometimes more durable than love. Takashi will get a close-up view of how she has fought off the hatred of every Beatles fan in the world. She told Ryu Murakami that she’s still holding fast, “halfway down the slope.” Her position protects her from the herd of noisy, average talents. Midori is situated between Bjork and Yoko Ono. Murakami concluded that there are three groups of artists: a small group with exceptional talent, a very large group with enough talent to survive, and a third group, much smaller than you’d think, of really mediocre people. The public, interested only in what is rare, often prefers a lowgrade artist with a good agent over a middle-grade artist with just as good an agent. According to Ryu Murakami, our era likes everything that is rare — even if it’s bad.

A POISON KISS

RIGHT NOW, a little drama is being acted out in the left corner of the room, by the window. Midori has no idea what happened to Bjork. Since information is at the heart of power, she’s pretending to know. Never show your hand until you must. It takes nerves of steel to stay in the circle. You have to know how to keep quiet. No one gets close to Midori easily. I have observed the crafty politics of space that surround her. One at a time, the girls revolve around her light. Hideko nearly burned her wings a little while back. She got too close to Midori. There’s no flow chart. Each must decide where to place herself in the hierarchy, and what risks she’s willing to accept to keep her spot. A single surprised or scornful look from Midori, and the imprudent adventuress is dismissed from the circle. That happened to Haruki, who spent the rest of the evening trying to win back her place. Tomo is her last recourse. They carry out lengthy confabulations. Zoom in: Tomo talking to an evasive Midori. Tomo is her bodyguard. She sleeps at the foot of her bed. Every afternoon she trains as a wrestler at the Park Avenue Y. Close-up on Takashi’s face. He’s telling me every detail about the life of the group. Takashi loves wearing makeup, and this lets him go wherever he wants. He travels in both worlds. In fact, there is only one world, since men talk about women and women talk about women too. For the last three years, Takashi has been photographing the lives of women’s washrooms. Makeup, gossip, tears. Naked faces. Tomo lives for Midori, who hardly ever looks at her. You don’t look at the one looking at you. Tomo suffers, but in silence. She’d even defend Midori against herself. Midori is a perfectionist who sometimes sinks into depression. The other girls know they must never say anything about Midori when Tomo is around. Takashi points to a girl lighting a cigarette. Fumi is the most brilliant of them all; she speaks eight languages fluently and is doing her doctorate on Françoise Sagan. She has read everything Sagan has written, and knows every detail about her life — a real expert. You’ll see, Takashi told me, Midori will never confront her in public. She’s the mind behind her shows. She’s a quick thinker, but she can be nasty too. Noriko could tell you more about that. Who’s Noriko? The girl sitting on the floor, back against the wall. Listen, you won’t be able to recognize them after just one meeting. It took me a whole week. They don’t look that much alike, do they? No, but they move in a pack; you think you can tell them apart, and suddenly they melt into a single person. They have their periods at the same time. Noriko is pretty interesting, you’ll see.

By suggesting I talk to Noriko, Takashi gave me an idea: draw Midori’s portrait by talking to the girls. Never to her. Midori is a black hole that sucks in everything around her. Every electron is free as long as it stays in the magnetic field. Noriko is Fumi’s scapegoat. Tomo, Midori’s guardian angel. Hideko touched Midori’s ear, that fragile, perfect instrument (I got a close-up of that scene). Takashi going click, click, click. He never stops. He’s at one with his camera. Midori is considering doing a show about a photographer no one ever sees. According to Midori, the photographer is the true witness of our times. Takashi is obsessed with the napes of their necks. For a time, that’s all he photographed. Noriko tells me about Takashi, though Takashi pointed me in her direction first. She whispers in my ear that Takashi is a toxic, jesting little god with a rancorous heart. What? Her eyes look frightened. She urges me over to the window to bestow further confidences in a voice so low I can’t hear anything. What? I ask gently. Midori is in love with Eiko. No one knows, not even Eiko. Noriko laughs silently. She takes my hand and holds it longer than necessary. I feel my bones melting. My body, without structure, is about to slip to the floor like a dress. I pull my hand away and rush off to the bathroom. Don’t tell me I’ve been caught in the net of one of these vampirettes! Noriko watches me. I feel the intensity of her gaze on the nape of my neck. I follow Takashi without thinking and end up in the girls’ bathroom. In the mirror I spot Midori kissing Hideko. Takashi is dancing around them. The flash goes off. Midori smiles at me in the mirror. Hideko hasn’t noticed me yet. Midori passes Hideko, still in a fog of ecstasy, over to Takashi, who is too thin to hold her up. He tries every possible position to keep her standing. It looks like a scene from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I take her off Takashi’s hands and set her down gently on a cushion next to Fumi. I sit with the camera still running. Fumi tells me Midori will eat only a certain kind of fish, whose flesh contains a poison. Just enough to lightly paralyze the lips and tongue. Midori keeps a bit of fish in her mouth, then chooses a girl to kiss. They all avoid Midori’s lips. Hideko is the only one dumb enough to fall for it. A long hetaera kiss. Now Hideko is lying languorously on the cushion. Her eyes unfocused. A vague smile. The poison lasts only a few minutes. Midori bends and strokes her hair.

EIKO'S ENDLESS BACK

I GO BACK into the bathroom and discover Midori conversing with Takashi. His eyes are overly bright — the result of his last hit of heroin.

“I’d like to tell you something about Bjork…”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No. Why?”

“Are you sure? Because the girls like playing jokes.”

“What kind of jokes, Midori?”

“If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then I guess you don’t interest them.”

“I see…”

Midori glances past me, over my shoulder. I turn and see Eiko applying her makeup in the mirror. Eiko’s endless back reminds me of a stand of bamboo. All Midori’s energy is drawn into the nape of Eiko’s neck. Midori tries in vain to resist. In the mirror I catch Noriko watching Midori watching Eiko. You can read all of it in Midori’s face, drowning in one final wave of feeling. Midori, a master in the art of revealing other people’s secrets, is unmasked. Her face naked. Our very own Marquise de Merteuil, caught in her own game. In her armoire, each drawer is dedicated to a girl she has seduced. She keeps underwear, letters, miniature red daggers (she has an entire collection), inexpensive perfume (to make sure no one else wears it) and a black notebook in which everything is recorded, from the first gaze to the farewell kiss. Midori is always the first to leave. One night, Takashi slipped into Midori’s room and spent hours reading passionate letters written by girls who kept announcing their imminent suicide. The letters all shared the same morbid preoccupations. These girls adore toying with the idea of death. In Takashi’s opinion, they’re just bursting with so many useless tears, because suicide is a man’s business. As for death, a young virgin gives herself only to the bravest of samurai. Japanese identity has been built on trashy romanticism. Midori, face to face with Eiko. The light is so dazzling Midori has to close her eyes. She stands straight, motionless. I hold my breath. Captivated, Eiko watches Midori move towards her.

CRISSCROSS

I DELIVER MIDORI to Eiko to trap Fumi. Fumi, whose heart is black with bitter passion and revolt, who dreams only of ending Midori’s reign. Fumi is secretly in love with Noriko. Hideko discovered her secret by keeping a small notebook where she noted all of Fumi’s underhanded actions for an entire year. Noriko was the victim of a good number of them. Hideko began by noting the circumstances in which the barbs were launched. She also noted the positions of the characters at the time the action took place. The atmosphere that held sway before she turned to Noriko and jabbed a banderilla into her back. And, of course, who laughed first? All of it written down, day by day, for an entire year. Hideko spent the long winter nights committing all this to paper. The work necessitated a good grasp of mathematics, which Hideko does have, since she’s doing her master’s at McGill. One evening, Hideko finally discovered the equation that would allow her to conclude without a doubt that Fumi was in love with Noriko. There is one constant: Fumi shoots her poison arrows at Noriko every time Midori seems interested in her, every time she turns to speak to her, touch her or even smile her way. Fumi then quickly moves to ridicule Noriko, who lowers her head. Fumi knows that Midori holds losers in contempt. Then Fumi quickly takes up position between Midori and Noriko. For a long time, Hideko thought Fumi was in love with Midori and simply wanted to eliminate a rival. Hideko had the idea of noting down the movements that followed and discovered that Fumi always arranged it so that Haruki came and placed herself between her and Midori. It took a while before Hideko understood that Fumi didn’t want Midori, but Noriko. By giving herself to Midori, Eiko brought down the house of cards. The center was emptied of its substance. Why did Hideko act that way? Whom did she want to destroy, besides Fumi? End. The credits roll. Ending a film with a question mark is not recommended. Which means we won’t see this one anywhere but the Museum of Fine Arts — on a rainy day. There are too many characters for the producer’s liking. Better cut them down to three. Who will make the cut? Midori, Eiko, Noriko. Or Midori, Fumi, Hideko. Or Midori, Tomo, Haruki. I know three is a good number, but I had a group in mind. A complete cluster of girls — an adolescent fantasy. You know that in a group, the girls who don’t say anything are as important as the ones who are front and center. The space between the girls, the time granted to each — this is the director’s work. Haruki is no less important in his eyes than Midori. And if Midori is in the foreground, that’s only because there is a background. Overly dense, you say? True, I could have singled out each girl with a particular detail. A color, a sign, whatever. But I film the same way I look at a film, and I get bored if the descriptions go on too long. I like it when things start fast, even a little disorganized, and at the end, a certain flavor lingers. I like to dally over the more pleasant scenes, which can open up the short film. And since all Japanese girls look the same to Westerners, I figure no one will see the difference anyway. So don’t strain yourself.

THE HUMAN MACHINE

I GO INTO this crummy restaurant on Boulevard St-Laurent. I sit down at the back with my Basho book, which I’ve been reading non-stop. The waitress shows up immediately. She’s wearing an embroidered “Suzie” on her breast. Her eyes are empty. A fat green vein runs along her neck from her right ear to her shoulder blade. She must have done more than one job in the district. A lot of women in the neighborhood have been through the same thing. Most of them started as teenage girls, leaving their narrow-minded little villages for the highway leading over the bridge to Montreal. They end up unemployed in the city, then they find work waitressing, then unemployed again, then waitressing, then prostitution. They won’t go much further. Lower, yes. There’s always room for lower. They find a way to have at least one child, and send it back to their mothers in the country — the only real gift they can give them. Some money too, but that’s only at the beginning. The mother will hide the money at the back of the cupboard and never touch it. It will be there for her funeral or maybe her daughter’s. Her daughter who, in the end, will have only one choice: slit her wrists or take the last bus for Rimouski or Sept-Îles. There’s a third possibility — trying to swim in this shark tank. I turn briefly to Basho as he bends over a cherry tree.

Basho examined this small tree that had already started to flower. It is always astonishing to come upon life in certain places. Buffeted by winter’s glacial winds, it did not forget to flower in the spring. What courage! It seemed to be alone, neglected by all — except Gyoson, who wrote a stanza to honor the glory of solitary cherry trees.

Suzie slaps down a cup of coffee on my table.

“I only drink tea, Ma’am.”

Her cold eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean?”

“We don’t serve tea here.”

She stalks off and I go back to my reading. I dip in and out of the book. I open it, I read a stanza or accompany Basho for a time, then close the book again. Lost in my dream. Basho has this ability to be immediately alive, every time. Here, only Whitman has the same energy. Now I’m back in sync with Basho. Just as I feel my backache returning, I come upon this passage where Basho is complaining about the same pain. Often, pain allows us to recognize another human being.

A terrible day! His backache has returned. This is the first time he has complained about it. Just after Sakata. The heavy air, the rain, worst of all the humidity. But, as he says himself, “Enough of that.” He pushes on despite it all and stops in front of the “Send-Back-the-Dog” which wears its name so well. He cannot wait to be inside the inn and asleep. But two women and an old man are chatting away in the next room, and it proves impossible to rest. Finally, sleep comes, but too late. Tired again this morning.

I order a hamburger. That’s what you do if you want to go unnoticed in America. The service is efficient here. A big empty expanse, except for a few grayish customers lost in the decor. It smells of wet carpet and cold sweat. At the bar, the waitress is talking with a young dishwasher. Her laughter is strange, a mixture of nervousness and malevolence. A stooped-over man has been trying to talk to them. They pretend they don’t know he’s there, they don’t even bother to turn their backs on him. Someone standing right in front of you but who doesn’t see you. Deep and endless indifference. As if people had no link with one another: the heavy reality of the end of the afternoon. Everything’s gone to hell since the siesta disappeared from our sundials. The human machine is not made to be awake and alert for eighteen hours straight. A time of rest is essential. Industrialized society did away with the siesta and cranked up the machine further. To keep up, you have to use drugs. All kinds of drugs. Suzie is on both cigarettes and coffee. It’s free for her here.

Basho imagines foot travel as a way of washing the dirt of reality from his skin. Haiku is just a cheap bar of soap. I’m still with Basho when she plops herself down in front of me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I’m finishing my fries.”

“What are you reading?”

“Basho.”

A suspicious look.

“Who’s he?”

“A Japanese poet.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“No.”

“You Japanese or something?”

“What do you think?”

“Are you a cop by any chance?”

“Hardly.”

“’Cause we’ve had the cops here three times this week. Ever since that business at the Dog Café. We’ve been in the Red Light since 1954…. Get the picture?”

We size each other up for a while.

“Why would I be a cop?”

“People come here to eat. . In ten years, I’ve never seen anyone with a book, let alone a Japanese book.”

“It’s only a translation.”

The young dishwasher calls out: “Suzie!” She waves in his direction, she’ll be right there.“You can finish your fries, then you’re gone.”

“I didn’t know this was a private club.”

“I serve who I want to…. and you’re bothering the customers. Look, Réjean got up and left. The people you see have been coming here for at least twenty years. This is their last stop before the street. I have to protect them. . Can you understand that?”

She goes over to the cash register where an old man has been trying to count his change for the last fifteen minutes. She grabs the coins off the counter and throws them into the cash drawer. The person who doesn’t count will always have an advantage over the one who does.

While I was locked in conversation with Suzie, the restaurant filled up with threatening shadows. Silent men, colorless and odorless. As they eat, they look up and shoot me glances that are neither curious nor mistrustful. What name can I give that look? I feel like I’m being sized up by someone who already saw the film and didn’t like it. Apparently our smell is what bothers them, the odor of ambition, since they are completely devoid of it. Meanwhile, we’re still making plans. Our plans are a mixture of money, will and clichés. What do they smell like? They have lost their smell. They’re at the end of the line.

Basho reaches Tsuruga with Tosai. The sky a clear, hard blue. But the innkeeper tells them the weather could change at any time. Hard to believe that this beautiful sky could fill with black threatening clouds at any moment. Yet that’s what happens. The innkeeper was right; he knows his country.Basho will not see the full moon on the Bay of Tsuruga, the secret goal of his journey.

As I go out the door, I turn and see Suzie’s satisfied smile, her false teeth sparkling white. I understand that she never wanted me here in the first place. Not again!

THE NEGRO'S DEFEAT

THIS WILL BE the most difficult thing to decode. First we’ll have to agree on the meaning of the word “smile.” I have a thousand questions about it. What does a smile mean for them? Is it an expression of the face or the mind? What importance do they grant it when they’re at home or elsewhere? Can you smile all by yourself, in your room? If that’s ever happened to me, I’m not aware of it. How many can you execute in a day? I feel as though I’m slowly slipping into a universe where I need to use a language whose grammar escapes me completely. What is a smile worth? I have no idea. What is its function? Do we smile to hide or to reveal something? I wonder if a real smile is given only when we are unaware of it. How is a social smile done? Can it be practised in front of a mirror? Each of the girls in Midori’s group seems to have a particular smile. What would be the difference between Eiko’s and Fumi’s smile? Midori rarely smiles. In any case, I feel it’s a weapon. The British have tried to conquer the world with their stiff upper lip and their umbrellas. The Japanese, with a wide smile and a camera. The Louvre rakes in a bundle with Mona Lisa’s smile. No one laughs in the West. Smiling gives power. Laughter declares the Negro’s defeat. I spend entire days trying to learn the Japanese smile. A smile removed from the face.

A SUNDAY IN THE PROVINCES

MY BODY IN the bath. My mind on the ceiling. Once in a while they unite. And I come to the surface at the point of drowning. A spasm of life. I gasp for breath. Rub my thighs, arms and face hard, awakening the waterlogged cells. I have left the world of water; now I am in the world of air. Bent, my hands over my face, I try to recover my spirits before joining Basho on the road. I write the word “road” and immediately think of Kerouac — an automatic response. Basho did it centuries before he did, and on foot. But now he is on his own, without his friend Sora.

Sora, recovered now, was waiting for him in Osaki.Basho was so celebrated in Osaki that he felt as though he were attending his own funeral. Etsujin danced. The young disciples were joyful. Everyone at the samurai Joko’s house.Basho seemed to have regained fresh strength. It’s always strange to see someone in such good health when you know they’ve been dead for so long: the triumph of the mind.

I watch a sunbeam’s progress across the floor. The telephone close by. I like to read in the bath. I’d always rather read than write. I see myself walking the sunny streets of my childhood, holding my grandmother’s hand. A Sunday in the provinces. A man sitting quietly on his gallery in front of a large table covered with books, all of them open. He was leaning over them, as if contemplating a rich and varied buffet. He moved from book to book with equal excitement, a gourmand. Nothing around him seemed to matter, nothing outside of those appetizing dishes. He seemed so far from us, so beyond our reach — we could see him, but he was obviously elsewhere. My grandmother whispered to me, “He’s a reader!” Right away I thought, “That’s what I’ll do when I grow up. I’ll be a reader.” In the few photos from my teenage years, I always have a book in my hand. Even in the pictures of me talking with my classmates. The ones I run into now remind me of that habit of mine. There was no way, it seemed, to communicate with me. I always had my nose in a book. I have a photo that shows me lying on the floor, reading, with my mother in the background, ironing my school uniform. It must have been a Sunday afternoon. My mother must have urged me to go out, to the square or to the movies with my friends, but I wanted only to read. Back then, neither the sun nor the moon nor girls interested me. Only the journeys that books could provide. I could never get enough. I dreamed that, one day, I would enter a book and never come out. It finally happened with Basho.

IN THE BATH

THE TELEPHONE RINGS.

“Hello? Hello?”

No answer. I put down the receiver next to the towel, keeping the book open with my left hand. I carry out the operation carefully, so I don’t get the book wet. Without leaving my city, without even leaving my neighborhood (except to get something to eat at a restaurant or spend the evening with a gang of liberated Japanese girls), I accompany a poet-monk step by step on his last journey. A young man who sets out on the road — that’s nothing. A man at the end of his life, who can calculate the risks involved, that’s something else entirely.

The telephone goes off again. I can say “Hello” all I want, nobody answers. I hear someone breathing on the other end of the line.

Finally, a small female voice murmurs, “I was sitting near you in the subway three days ago.”

“Who are you?”

“I was sitting on your side of the car, and you were reading Basho.”

I can’t make the connection between the voice and the face. I was expecting an Asian accent.

“Oh, now I remember…”

“No, you’re mixing me up with the Chinese girl across from you that you kept staring at.”

“That happens all the time,” I tell her. “You look at someone, but the whole time someone else is looking at you and you don’t even know it.”

“She was Chinese, but I’m Japanese. That’s normal, since you were in Asiatown.”

“How could you tell she was Chinese?”

“My mother is Korean and my father is Japanese, so I know about that kind of thing. If she isn’t Korean or Japanese, that means she’s Chinese.”

I hear her laughter.

“What about the way they laugh? Is there a difference?”

“Not really. On the other hand, the Japanese vagina is diagonal, but the Korean is horizontal. I don’t know about Chinese girls, if they’re vertical. You see, we’re all very geometrical.”

I laugh. “It’s funny, you don’t have any accent at all. You talk like you and me.”

That really set her off laughing. A regular belly laugh. Admit it, it’s pretty strange that despite these migrations all over the planet — people can’t or won’t stay in their home countries — an accent is still the thing that determines someone’s place on the social ladder, more than race or class. An accent speaks for race and class. An Asian girl speaking English with a French accent is a strange hybrid.

“Do you know Basho?”

“A little.”

“Do you like him?”

“No.”

I have no further questions.

“Then why are you calling me?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Across the street from your place, standing on the sidewalk.”

“How did you get my phone number?”

“I saw your name on your mailbox and I called Information. They gave me your number. It’s that simple.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing… Nothing at all.”

“Come on up, we’ll see. The door is open.”

“I’ll be right there.”

The girl is determined! Something isn’t right about this business. Since when does a young woman have to make the first move? Still, I’m not dreaming. Have things changed while I wasn’t looking?

Basho had scarcely rested at all after this endless journey, nearly 2,340 kilometers in five months. Sora went with him to Ise, where he had family — we were at the sixth day of the new moon. Basho wanted to attend a ceremony, the Transporting of the Relics to a new sanctuary. For one last time, he took up his walking stick with the firm intention of eating the clams at Futami-ga-Ura. He would have to leave Sora once and for all, and the thought saddened him. Basho composed a poem to mark the occasion. Sora left to keep from crying.

Must I choose between Basho and the woman who is about to show up? Between the past, with its fascination, and the present, so warm, so true, so alive? Both attract me, but can I keep them both? That is my dilemma. I slip beneath the surface of the water. The present is already coming up the stairs.

LA PETITE MORT

I CONCENTRATE ON what I am doing without paying attention to anything else. But from time to time, another human presence decides to manifest itself. And here is one now, compact, before me, demanding my presence in this space and time we share. And I’ve got the phone cord wrapped around my arm. When I talk, I have this obsession with playing with the cord. I don’t know how I’ve managed to tie so many knots in it. I must be pretty nervous. My sole objective, right now, is to keep from getting water on my precious book. I lifted my left hand from the bath to answer the phone while, with my right, I kept the book away from the drops of water. Two towels helped me perform this delicate operation. One is on the floor; the other, on the basin. Sometimes, but not always, I can talk to someone on the phone without interrupting my reading. It gives a kind of depth of field to the conversation. It’s not that I recommend doing two things at once in order to go faster; in these sped-up times of ours, I’d rather slow down. But I did it once, by accident, really, and I discovered that each activity gave depth to the other. My phone conversation with my contemporary renewed my vision of an author who lived long ago. I always prefer dead writers — they stay younger longer. Death preserves us. So here, on the one hand, is Basho (1644–1694), and on the other, this girl, about whom I know virtually nothing, neither her date of birth nor that of her death. We are all but ignorant when it comes to people we see every day, whereas we know too much about the dead. But why would a girl I saw in the subway, and with whom I hardly exchanged a single look, go to such lengths to find my phone number and, once she’d found it, call me? I guess there are days like that.

Basho wanted to put forward the idea that life is a journey without end. His first trip was to visit his mother’s grave with his friend Shiri. Later, he undertook a second journey, to contemplate the full moon at the Kashima Shrine. And now, here was his last. He would travel again but never undertake anything like this. This kind of trip can be made once in a lifetime. A traveler spends his time saying his farewells. Borges believed that men invented the word “goodbye” because they knew they were “mere ephemeral details.” That is the traveler’s lot.

I finished Basho’s travels to the north of Japan only to discover that the sly monk was still traveling within me. The inventory of my inner landscape provided by a vagabond poet. My veins were the pathways he traveled, alone (“Wayfarer” will be my name; first winter showers). The girl appeared. I hadn’t moved from the bath. She sat down behind my head like a psychoanalyst.

“Do you read all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Even when there’s a woman in the room?”

“Sometimes…… If I feel comfortable, then I read.”

“And you feel comfortable now?”

“Yes.”

“How is that?”

“I feel you’re familiar.”

“And you’ve never seen me. . No, no, don’t turn around. You can look at me afterwards.”

“After what?”

“Close your eyes.”

I did. I heard the rustling of fabric. She was undressing. I pictured myself in the subway again. The Chinese girl across from me. And Basho in my head. The people around us were like shadows. I heard her step into the water.

“You can open your eyes, but only when I tell you to.”

“Is this a game?”

“No. I don’t play games.”

She caressed me, but without gentleness. An angry caress.

“It’s the first time I’ve touched a man.”

“We like it gentle too.”

She laughed, embarrassed.

“Sorry… I thought your world was violent.”

“We’re in the realm of generalizations. You’re making love to a man for the first time, and I’m making love to an Asian woman for the first time.”

“Be quiet now.”

She made love to me. I just happened to be there. A body available and responsive. In water.

“Can I open my eyes now?”

“Not yet. Let me get dressed.”

She stepped out of the bathtub and slowly got dressed: a striptease in reverse. My ears took in everything. The voyeur must keep his eyes closed. I expected no less from an Asian girl. Then I opened my eyes. Noriko stood before me.

“Noriko!”

“I’ve been following you for three days. I’m exhausted…”

“Why? Why me?”

She sat down heavily.

“I’m. . I’m horribly jealous. All Midori talks about is you since you left. What did you do to her? She’s completely changed. She’s talking about leaving too.”

“Maybe she wants to focus herself again.”

“That’s not it….. You’re a devil. I’m sure you did something to her. She’s broken in two. If she doesn’t find herself soon, she’s going to leave.”

“A little traveling never hurt anyone.”

“You fool! What she calls traveling is really. . She’s in a dangerous place.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. And you think she’s in love with me?”

“Not at all. But you’ve ground her into dust and scattered her ashes through the city. For three days I’ve followed you. You wander like a demon. There’s no logic to it. You stop for no good reason. You talk to people you don’t know. You turn left when you should turn right. You are the demon that has struck down Midori. I used to belong to Midori. She owned my heart, my soul and my spirit. You have turned all that to ash. Without her I’m nothing. I hate you…… What happened to Bjork will never happen to Midori.”

She stopped, completely out of breath.

“I’m exhausted now.”

She fell from her chair without a sound. I got out of the water, picked her up and carried her to the bed. She weighed nothing at all. I watched her a moment as she slept, like a child, her tiny fists clenched.

THE FINAL LEAP

A SHARP NOISE awoke me in the middle of the night. The window was open. The sound of the wind. I ran to see what was happening. Noriko, stretched out on the sidewalk, was lying in a pool of blood. On the table, she’d left a letter for her mother in a stamped envelope — so she had planned her suicide by coming here. She bequeathed her earrings to Midori and, in an angry scribble, wrote these words: A song for Midori. She could have been carrying this letter for days or weeks, seeking a reason to kill herself. Or a place to do it. We didn’t know each other. Our paths crossed. She didn’t want to get the other girls involved, or burden Midori’s conscience. But nor did she want to do it in some unconnected place that would deprive her death of any link to the group. By killing herself in my house, she sent a message to her girlfriends. Why had she made love to me? Her last time. Was that the real message she sent Midori? To make love to a man was taboo in her group. Noriko transgressed at the last possible moment. A final doubt: was it really a transgression? Maybe she’d imagined she was making love to Midori. But she knew very well I wasn’t Midori. Maybe, but I didn’t know she was Noriko. Look at it from another point of view. In the exchange, Noriko is me. And the Noriko on top of me was none other than Midori. That’s how she pictured the love scene. In the bathtub, with Midori on her. She would keep her eyes closed, too fearful of Midori’s gaze. It would have paralyzed her. She finally united with Midori. Just before the final leap.

A SONG FOR MIDORI

THE POLICE SHOWED up an hour later. The questioning began with a straightforward accusation. I had my work cut out for me. What was a Negro doing with an Asian girl in this filthy room in a seedy neighborhood? I didn’t know what to say. First they accused me of being her pimp. Then they questioned me at length about the Asian connection which, apparently, is taking on big proportions in Montreal. Finally they cast their eyes on the table and saw Noriko’s earrings and the letter addressed to her mother. The evidence was examined before being slipped into a small plastic bag.

On his way out, one of the two policemen told me, “That letter’s what got you off. We were sure you threw her out the window.”

It was clearly an expression of regret.

They looked me right in the eye. I suppose it was their way of adding a last helping of intimidation. The hardest part was behind me. It had happened so fast. But death would not go away. It was a suicide. She must have explained everything in the letter to her mother, which could have been her way of clearing my name, since she knew I’d had no part in her troubles. And what was the point of having at least three separate levels of meaning in her game? The letter was obviously not written to her mother, but the police. And, certainly, to Midori.

“What’s going to happen?”

“We’ll call you if we need you.”

I’d heard those words more than once during my glorious career as a seasonal worker. No one ever called me back. I wanted to be polite all the same.

“I never knew the police took such care.”

“It’s the new policy. We have to be civil to the civilians.”

They left, and I went back to bed. I couldn’t get that sharp cracking sound out of my head, the one Noriko made when she hit the sidewalk.

One of the policemen actually did call back. He told me Noriko was from Vancouver, and that they’d been looking for her. She had escaped from a psychiatric hospital in Toronto. Her parents were Japanese workers who had come to Canada just three years earlier. She had invented a twin sister for herself, completely different: Tsuki. As gentle as Noriko was, Tsuki was violent. Which one had I had? Sweet Noriko — that’s for sure. But who killed her? The other sister, maybe. Both were in love with Midori. Tsuki had enough time to leave a note on the table, requesting that the earrings be sent to her mother. She scribbled these words at the bottom of the page: A song for Mother.

FRENCH KISS

AS I SIT down to my souvlaki, the only Greek invention since democracy (I’m saying that just to bug my landlord), I wonder why Japanese modernity has been in such demand since the end of Mao’s reign. Of course, there’s the boom in Asian images, not to mention Japan’s ability to turn everything it touches into a cliché, a cliché about which we know almost nothing — to the point that we sometimes wonder if cliché is not a contemporary version of Greek myth. Did the Greeks call their ancient clichés Greek myths? The French kiss exists everywhere but France. When the French kiss, do they make sure their tongues never touch? In North America, when tongues touch, that’s a French kiss. I always thought it was a spontaneous act among all human beings. I remember the terror I felt before my first kiss. What if she devoured my tongue? It was my choicest cut of meat, and here I was, blindly trusting her with it. “Give me your tongue” doesn’t have the same meaning in the North as it does in the South. My mind wanders down every path. I’m not going to start putting up barriers, especially when I’m reflecting on the crumbs that fall from Pascal’s table. The cliché stands far above morals. It is there, round, mysterious, eternal. It smiles upon us. No personal use of a cliché is possible, except to return it to its sender. Everyone knows that Negroes are lazy. Now there’s a cliché. When a white man works too much, we say he’s working like a nigger. Everything stops. The cliché travels through time and space as fast as lightning. When it stops, it creates a silence. I look out the window and see three young women in a hurry. One of them looks like Fumi. It is Fumi. I recognize her dark smile. Fumi told me she was doing her work-study in a restaurant not far from here. She turns around at the last minute. No, it’s not her. On the sidewalk, a Japanese tourist is shooting away at our Greek cook. I always wonder: what does he see? To find out, you’d have to become Japanese.

A PING — PONG GAME

WHAT DO YOU know, it’s blinking. Two messages from the Japanese consulate. Already — those Japanese are fast! I called back immediately. A certain Mr. Tanizaki would like to speak with me. However, this Mr. Tanizaki has gone out to lunch with his superior, Mr. Mishima (they don’t mess with the hierarchy here). Actually, all I got was a machine that gently reminded me that the staff was not in during lunch hour, and would not be returning before two o’clock in the afternoon. I was to call back later, after mealtime. I did call back. They asked me to wait a minute. I heard my name spoken. It was the first time I’d been able to pick out my name in a Japanese conversation; it was like a salad to which someone had added a new ingredient. The next thing I knew, a rather nasal voice was speaking to me.

“Are you the writer?”

“Sometimes.”

“I am Mr. Mishima, but I’m not the writer. I am the viceconsul of Japan, and I would like to meet you.”

“For any particular reason?”

“I cannot discuss it on the telephone.”

“Next Wednesday, at the café Les Gâteries, at noon. . Is that all right with you?”

“Of course. But why there?”

“Why not?”

Silence answered me.

“Fine. . At the café Les Gâteries, Wednesday at noon. I’ll be there.”

I don’t know why, but I figured it was important to insist on that café. I set the time and the place for the meeting. You have to take the initiative in cases like this. I’d seen how it worked in The Godfather, the Coppola film. You set the place, you get there well ahead of time, you hide the gun in the bathroom, behind the toilet. But why the silence? It’s true, there are always periods of silence during this kind of telephone conversation. Sudden stops sometimes destabilize me. Absence of noise is not necessarily silence. And what is silence for the Japanese? Emptiness in a conversation does not have the same meaning in all cultures. Of course it’s not emptiness at all, but a subterranean conversation (we speak to ourselves as we talk to the other person). We hear the silence when both conversations stop at the same time. It’s like a Ping-Pong game: you have to wait until your adversary returns the ball. And if he doesn’t do it with a smooth rhythm, brief spaces where nothing is spoken occur. Sometimes it isn’t an accident. These days, you still meet professionals who can play silences on three levels: the short, the long, and the embarrassing silence. Since I couldn’t analyze his, I suddenly fell silent. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting me to stop so suddenly. In any case, he seemed to freeze (which happens when the body falls silent at the same time as the mind), and then I heard him murmur, “I will come with my assistant, Mr. Tanizaki. I hope you will not mind.”

I had made immoderate use of silence. That weapon can blow up in your face. “Not at all.”

“If anything concerns you in any way, for one reason or another, you will please tell me, sir.”

I had forgotten that style of politeness. One fact is always hidden behind another. Behind silence is politeness. Behind politeness — often cruelty.

“There’s no problem.”

Another lengthy silence (it was his turn now), though the onus was on him to thank me and hang up. Didn’t he know it was up to the person who called to put an end to the conversation? Was he, a diplomat, somehow unaware of this code? I decided to end things myself.

“Thank you for your call. I look forward to meeting you.”

Dead air, as if he were busy signing documents.

“Yes, I will see you soon.”

I heard a brief click, the kind that might betray that someone else was listening in on the conversation. Not being in the same room as Mr. Mishima, he couldn’t execute a fully synchronized sign-off. A tenth of a second too soon. It could have been his assistant, Mr. Tanizaki.

DO YOU LIKE SUSHI?

I OFTEN CHANGE hiding places in order not to be identified with one particular spot. I cover my tracks. A moving target in a dazzling city. That should tell you just how disappointed I was when Mr. Mishima changed our meeting to a Japanese restaurant, rejecting my small, intimate café on Rue St-Denis where you can see without being seen. I hadn’t created all these identity displacements just to end up in a Japanese restaurant with Japanese people. In any case, that tells you a lot about the capacity of people to imagine the world, even those who are paid to be more curious than the rest of us. For them, the universe is narrowed down to their mental space and their petty diplomatic chicanery. They intend to die in the spot where they had their first shit. As you can see, I’m in a foul mood this morning. God! All that for nothing. I’m pissing and moaning but it’s far from over. And here I’d pictured our meeting in a restaurant other than Japanese. Chinese, for example. A Japanese guy in a Chinese restaurant is more interesting. And in a Korean restaurant — that’s practically subversive. There are so many sushi bars these days, they must sprout up overnight. How would I recognize two Japanese businessmen in a room full of Japanese businessmen? Two moon-shaped faces were shooting wide smiles in my direction from the back of the room. The same black suits, the same haircuts, the same smiles. Which was Mr. Mishima? Where was Mr. Tanizaki? I decided not to try telling them apart.

They both rose at the same time.

“I am Mr. Mishima, Japanese vice-consul. Officially, I am the cultural attaché, but I have no well-defined responsibilities. At the consulate, everyone does what he can. I am embarrassed to receive you so modestly.”

Nervous laughter.

“And I am his assistant, Mr. Tanizaki.”

“Please sit down,” Mr. Mishima told me.

Maybe it was Mr. Tanizaki who actually said that; I wasn’t paying attention to individual identity. I sat down. I wasn’t going to wait for their permission. Though actually, Mr. Tanizaki (or Mr. Mishima) monitored my seating arrangements with obsessive concern; he seemed on guard for the slightest detail that might compromise my comfort. He was like an entomologist slipping a black insect into a handsome lacquered case. Black was the establishment’s prime color. The tables, chairs, plates and tablecloths were black, while the knives and forks were red. Quite suddenly, Mr. Mishima demanded we be moved to another table. Since all the tables were taken, he wanted to change places with me. I had to assure him I was just fine where I was. But he wasn’t satisfied. He turned to Mr. Tanizaki, who immediately jumped to his feet to give me his seat, which offered a view of the street. Okay, okay. The charades continued until Mr. Mishima was completely convinced that everything had been done to ensure maximum comfort for me. I knew this was his courteous, Asian way of making me feel welcome, but it really wasn’t my style. Maybe they were expecting me to make a similar effort; I had no idea. No — they’re the thousand-year-old refined culture, whereas I represent savage young America. I sucked in my stomach, jammed my knees together and hunched my shoulders in order to enjoy the small space allotted to me. A compact kind of happiness. I looked around the place and saw it was designed for a certain size of person, as if they wanted to discourage larger formats — black American basketball players, for example.

“Do you like the restaurant?” Mr. Tanizaki asked me.

“It’s fine,” I said, in a neutral tone.

“I am happy it pleases you,” Mr. Mishima said, smiling. “Other places of this kind have no resemblance to a real restaurant in Tokyo.”

That’s another thing I detest: authenticity. A real restaurant. Real people. Real things. Real life. Nothing more fake than that. Life itself is a construct.

“Do you like sushi?”

“No.”

I decided to keep my bad mood a while longer. They looked totally lost. It’s true, if the guest doesn’t like sushi, his tastes can cause problems in a Japanese restaurant.

“I don’t like fish.”

Which is completely untrue.

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Mishima, astonished that anyone could dare not to like fish. But he did his best to hide his disappointment.

“I’m not allergic to fish, and I’m not a vegetarian. I just can’t agree with the idea of eating fish. In my opinion, it’s just not a good practise.”

“Fortunately, Japanese cuisine offers more than fish,” Mr. Mishima said in a quiet voice.

“In any case, we would have found something else to eat,” Mr. Tanizaki chimed in quickly.

ARE YOU A WRITER?

I ORDERED SOUP. Another silence settled in. I don’t have the nerves of steel this kind of game demands. I decided to get right to the point — which is, apparently, contrary to the rules of proper Japanese behavior.

“I had no idea the Japanese consulate was aware of my humble existence,” I said, in vague imitation of their obsequious tone.

I heard a peal of authentic laughter, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from Mr. Mishima or Mr. Tanizaki. Was one of them a ventriloquist?

“My assistant heard about you.”

“Really?”

“Are you a writer?”

“Not right now.”

They laughed.

“Are you writing a book?”

“Yes and no.”

“We are very interested in your book.”

“And that’s why you decided to investigate me?”

Synchronized laughter.

“No, we are not investigating you, sir. Nor can we do such a thing. It is all we can do just to read the newspapers. There are only three of us in the cultural sector. Tokyo is interested in economic aspects: there are seventeen agents in that area. We are not a priority, you understand.”

It wasn’t news to me that literature doesn’t count for much in the new world order. Third-world dictators are the only ones who take writers seriously enough to imprison them on a regular basis, or even shoot them. The waiter arrived with our order. How was I going to get out of this wasps’ nest? Four or five Japanese businessmen swooped past and conversed with Mr. Mishima on a subject that demanded smiles and cascades of laughter. I didn’t catch a thing because they spoke threequarters of the time in Japanese, and the rest in English — their Japanese wearing a strong English accent and their English equally weighed down with Japanese. They pretended not to notice I was there. Maybe they just didn’t see me. Some people speak only one language, and others have radar that picks up only one kind of person: people of their own religion, class and race. That behavior is found in all societies. Finally they scattered, one at a time, with lighter-than-air steps and brittle laughter — as if they were performing a musical comedy.

“And the poets?”

A moment of surprise. I always ask after the poets.

“Do you write poetry?”

“No.”

“Do you like poetry?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We know you are fond of our great poet Basho.”

“How do you know that?”

“You read him wherever you go.”

“You’ve been following me!”

“Please do not be alarmed, sir.”

“Listen, I have other things to do.”

“My assistant Mr. Tanizaki is an eminent translator.”

“You want to translate my book?”

“We would love to,” said Mr. Tanizaki. “Though I am no more than a humble teacher.”

“It’s easy. You contact my publisher…”

“We are speaking of your latest book, of course.”

“What latest book?”

“The one you are writing, about Japan.”

“I never write about anything but myself.”

Mr. Mishima and Mr. Tanizaki exchanged quick glances.

A moment of panic in Mr. Tanizaki’s eyes. Now I could see the difference between them. Mr. Tanizaki is the one who’s always afraid. The reason lies in the hierarchy.

“Isn’t there some sort of relationship with Japan in your new book?” Mr. Tanizaki ventured, timidly.

“Besides the title, of course,” Mr. Mishima put in.

“My Japan is invented and concerns only me.”

Mr. Tanizaki sighed in relief.

“We would like to help,” said Mr. Mishima calmly.

“Even if I haven’t even written the book.”

They grew lively all of a sudden, and their masks began slipping out of control.

“We know you have not yet transcribed it onto paper, but it is in your head,” said Mr. Mishima knowingly.

“For once Tokyo is interested in one of our projects,” Mr. Tanizaki added quickly. “If you wanted to visit Japan. . We have an excellent guide to help you follow in Basho’s footsteps. We can organize a tour that will take you on the road our poet took 250 years ago.”

“But I don’t want to visit Japan… What kind of idea is that?”

“This is the perfect season for a trip,” Mr. Mishima said smoothly.

“You are a true artist,” Mr. Tanizaki summed up. “Your clear and open-minded answers have proved that. Of course we would not want to disturb you too much…”

“Allow me to say, all the same, that the consulate of Japan and its personnel would be only too happy to serve you in any way in order to ensure the success of your literary project,” declared Mr. Mishima, vice-consul of the Land of the Rising Sun. He was a second away from calling it my “literary mission.” This was getting out of hand. If I surrendered the slightest authority over my work to them, even just a single comma, they would write the book for me. Behind their obsequious manners was an iron will. Whatever the reason, they wanted to control this book.

“We understand that artists hate it when governments want to involve themselves in their work,” Mr. Tanizaki added quickly, giving me a conspiratorial wink. “Naturally, you are completely free to say whatever you wish about Japan. I have been reading your books. I went right to the bookstore after I heard your declaration.”

“What declaration?”

“I was truly touched when I heard you come out and say, in the middle of that North American shopping center, that you were a Japanese writer.”

“I am not a Japanese writer. I’m writing a book called ‘I Am a Japanese Writer.’ That doesn’t make me a Japanese writer.”

“Excuse me, I’m a bit lost. Mr. Tanizaki, who is a specialist in literature, will surely understand what you mean.”

“Absolutely! That’s when it becomes interesting. It opens every possible perspective…”

“Unfortunately, I have to go — I have another appointment,” I said, getting to my feet.

The two of them stood up so abruptly they almost knocked over the table. There were endless expressions of regret. I left with my soup untouched. I watched them for a moment from the street. They were talking so adamantly I thought they would come to blows.

MANGA DEATH

THE EMPEROR REPRESENTS time immemorial, that fabulous Japanese treasure that cast the author of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea into a state of vertigo. Mishima was so moved by the Emperor’s personification of time that he offered him his own death as a rhetorical flourish. He committed hara-kiri on November 25, 1970 in the company of his young lover. Perhaps death is sweeter when your eyes are fastened on the nape of a man’s neck, offered up to your gaze, or when the object of your desire finishes you off. Mishima wanted to eliminate the present by establishing Japan in the future perfect, a tense that lives only in grammar books. Fascists are obsessed with rules, which allow them to intervene in the passage of time. In the real world, the past can be bought with a single currency only, and that is death. One’s own death. What a strange bird that Mishima was! Interesting, but a little nutty around the edges. There’s something manga about hara-kiri. Mishima should be reread in the context of graphic novels. The whole world witnessed the scene on TV. Mishima immediately became a rock star, the first writer whose death was filmed according to his wishes. And so he was able to steal the thunder from his old master Kawabata. Kawabata might have won the Nobel Prize, but Mishima came to represent Japan itself. Watch out for intellectuals who lift weights until their eyeballs pop out. This double potency (a refined mind in a muscled body) can go to a person’s head. An intellectual who can put you down for the count will always end up haranguing a crowd, sleeves rolled up and bathed in sweat. Mishima’s crowd didn’t show up that day, though he wanted his death to lift up the nation’s youth. Youth, rising to its feet, singing the pure song of the people. Mishima’s crowd was sitting in front of the tv set. The seated crowd. The “sitting men” who provoked such disgust in Rimbaud. Mishima refused to accept the new values Japan had adopted after Hiroshima, and he wanted to return the Emperor, the last guardian of Time, to his former glory. But by trying to legitimize the Emperor, Mishima himself became the Empire of the Rising Sun for the length of time it took him to die. The shepherd who counts his sheep is also the guardian of sleep. Now that Mishima is dead, Japan sleeps on.

PLATO AND THE LANDLORD

I EXIT DOWN the fire escape to avoid the landlord, since I owe him two weeks’ rent. He’s Greek; hence my little jokes about the necessary relationship (even a philosopher has to eat) between Plato and souvlaki. He doesn’t know who Plato is. As a man of the sea, he’d likely be more interested in Ulysses. I couldn’t care less whether or not he knows who Plato is. I’m just trying to right the balance of power. He’s got me with money; I’ve got him with the mind. The fact that I know Plato doesn’t help me in any way whatsoever in our weekly confrontations. They come around much too fast. I’m supposed to pay the rent every Thursday, which I do at exactly ten minutes before midnight. That’s still Thursday, as far as I can tell. Then I settle in with Tolstoy in the bathtub. Only a guy on unemployment who’s paid his rent can read War and Peace without skipping any of the descriptions of the landscape. I’d add to this short list of marathon readers the secretaries who plough through Stephen King’s massive bricks with shawls around their shoulders because of the Arctic cold that reigns in the downtown office towers. Most people prefer slimmed-down books. “No more than two hundred pages or I won’t even crack the book,” a celebrated literary critic recently declared on German television. I belong to that group of people who don’t watch tv, but who can’t stop quoting it. It’s like a Chinese proverb: you can make it mean anything you want. You know that nobody can watch tv in every language, twentyfour hours a day. But let’s get back to the urgent business of me marshaling some resources this evening in order not to indispose my landlord. Sometimes I forget to pay the rent by avoiding my place on Thursday nights. I spend the evening in some crummy bar, watching the clock and imagining my landlord turning in circles like a caged beast. But when I do have the cash, I make a great show of my presence. I make a racket going up the stairs. I dance all by myself, making sure I’m right above his head, since I know he often stands by the window. On my seismograph, without even seeing him, I can trace his slightest movements. He always holds out for a while before knocking on my door. I open up and, before he can say a word, I trot out a quotation from Plato, ancient Greece’s intellectual superstar. He doesn’t know who I’m talking about; he figures Plato must be one of those bums who hang out in the park across the street. But the landlord is Greek, he must have heard Plato’s name at least once in his life. I’m almost proud of knowing a Greek who doesn’t know who Plato is. Besides, I can’t stand all that propaganda about Greek philosophers— give me an enigmatic Japanese poet any time.

“I won’t be able to pay you until later,” I tell him, not batting an eyelash. “Plato will be dropping by any minute now to pay back a debt.”

I always come out with long sentences when I talk to him. The less verbose the person is, the more pompous I become. I can’t stand taciturn people. They’ve got nothing in their heads: reactionary peasants, all of them — or old farts, if they happen to live in town. The landlord retreats, since only money interests him, whereas my wealth is in words. I can pay him his rent in words right on the spot, all the way to the end of the year. Ten minutes later, I hear him racing back up the stairs, no doubt suffering from a fit of panic — my crowns, my crowns!

“That friend of yours, that guy, he’d better pay you,” he stammered, out of breath.

“What guy?”

“Your Plato guy.”

“Play-doh is for kids. I’ve gone beyond that, haven’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Play-doh. If you ask me, it’s just occupational therapy. It keeps your hands busy and your mind empty. Like your worry beads.”

He took a step closer to me. He knew he was being insulted but he didn’t know exactly how.

“Play-doh, Plato — for you, it’s all the same.”

“Have you gone crazy?”

“I wouldn’t tell you if I had, would I? It’s up to you to decide if I’m crazy or not. Maybe so. . Maybe not. . Maybe so. . Maybe not.”

I started dancing circles around him. He stalked off, more furious than before. People who are always furious impress me; I imagine them giggling to themselves on the sly. I have to find some way of spying on him when he’s alone in his room. Drill a discreet hole in the floor. I picture him sitting on the bed, watching a vhs tape of some old match between young Greek boxers who’ve been dead forever. One of them must come from his village. . Maybe he’s a former folk dancer. I imagine him dancing, sweat running down his face. His legs: he is all legs. They are the heart of Greek folk dancing. My Zorba is dancing, his eyes straight ahead. Beneath his heels, the earth. At his feet: his people, his culture, his cuisine, his music and his woman. I can mock him all I want, he always has the last word. Sooner or later, I’ll have to fork over the dough. Plato can’t argue with that immutable fact.

HIDEKO'S SECRET

IT’S ALWAYS THE same thing. You think you’ve finished, then you have to start all over again. The imaginary producer wants a final scene. Why? The film’s too short. Besides, you don’t end a film with a question, he told me. Who says so? Money. Even imaginary money is irresistible. Where was I, again? Hideko’s secret. What’s her secret? Shame. The shame of loving a woman no one else loves. We start off by seeing her the way everyone else does. She’s ugly. She’s the one who must always sacrifice herself. Her sexuality is buried so deep she’s even stopped masturbating. She couldn’t find her sex if she tried. To masturbate, you need to imagine yourself with someone else, to take him against his will, or make him take you, kiss you, and this is an operation that demands a minimum of self-esteem. She doesn’t have it. Neither does she have any malevolence or ambition. She is a tree waiting to be watered. Nothing sexy about that. She knows nothing about power, and less about seduction. I’m not talking about Hideko, of course, but about the woman she loves. Her secret, her shame. Unlike her, there are those made beautiful by evil — like Lucretia Borgia, who tormented my teenage years. Evil is a strong spice. Hollywood has taught us that truly evil women are those who thirst after power. But first, they must be beautiful — like Fumi. Black hair, eyes like pools, full lips. Fumi doesn’t waste any energy. She will seduce only to get closer to the throne. Otherwise, she uses her mind. Unfortunately, the other girls do the opposite: they wear their ability to seduce down to the nub and keep their intelligence under wraps. The machine grows rusty, and they lose their resources at the very moment they need them most. Fumi is the most careful of them, as hard-working as an ant. Cinema, once again, has shown us the evil heroine’s detailed preparations for the big seduction scene. She unties her hair and it falls freely down her back. A flowing river. Her makeup is subtle; the evil heroine knows just what to do. She appears to pay no attention to her intimate apparel or to the shades of color she applies to her skin, but, in fact, she knows every perfume and every jewel on the market, the poetry of fabrics and the temperature of colors. She dresses elegantly, but without ostentation. The final touch is the makeup she applies to her soul. She becomes resplendent with goodness, and we pray it will be real. No man ever rejects her. A solution from above (the arrival of the angel of purity) always appears at the last minute to save the married man or the virtuous wife. No one ever points out that the femme fatale was already holding her conquest in her arms, and that he or she was already elsewhere, on the island of temptation. The ugly woman whom power tolerates at its side is quite different from this heroine. She plays the same role as the court jester. Sleepless Hideko, wandering down the hallway, comes upon Tomo in her room. The door is half-open because of the heat. Tomo doesn’t know she’s there. Hideko watches her reading Mishima—The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The strange story of a young counterfeit monk who finds himself in the presence of the Golden Pavilion, a marvel of balance and grace. The young monk refuses to share the universe with the Golden Pavilion, and decides to burn it to the ground. Hideko knows the story; it was her mother’s favorite book. Then this strange event occurs: Hideko falls suddenly in love with Tomo. Hideko retreats to her room, clutching her belly. She lies down on the floor and waits for sleep that does not come that night. What’s happening to me? And why me? Did it all start with my mother falling in love with a Mishima novel? Hideko scolds herself: no matter what, she must hide this weakness. Fumi, the black terror, must never know. She must be silenced before she can speak. And don’t imagine that an event like this could escape Fumi’s piercing eyes.

That’s when Hideko swore she would discover Fumi’s secret. If ever Fumi were to unmask her — and she would not hesitate to expose her, Hideko, naked, in plain sight of all — she would reveal Fumi’s secret as she fell. It would be her final act of revenge. But how could she hide her disarray? By replacing the monstrous feelings she had for Tomo with a more normal, acceptable emotion. She concentrated all her attention on Midori. No one would suspect she preferred Tomo to Midori. No one but Takashi. Takashi, a pervert who loved only what was ugly, monstrous, dirty and disgusting — Takashi would have chosen the young monk over the Golden Pavilion. Once, he compared himself to an ashtray. Why not a garbage can, which seems dirtier? You can find anything in a garbage can, even good things, but you can do nothing with ashes. They are the end of matter. Takashi discovered Hideko’s secret one evening when he was smoking on the balcony and the girls were going out clubbing. They were getting into two taxis. He saw Hideko hide behind a tree to avoid getting in next to Midori. Midori can’t stand having Tomo too close to her. Tomo loves her and cares for her, that’s all right, but let her keep her distance. Hideko got into the other taxi, the one Tomo was taking. Just before, she’d tried in vain to change places with Fumi, to be closer to Midori. What tipped Takashi off was that she’d been downstairs long before Fumi; she could easily have had the seat next to Midori. Takashi understood that Hideko was playing a game. She had orchestrated the scene so carefully that she must have had a goal: to be next to Tomo. Takashi smiled. Two days later, he confronted Hideko in her room, and she burst into tears and told him everything. Her mother. The Golden Pavilion. Her disgust and attraction for Tomo. She had been fighting all her life, unable to locate the enemy who lurked behind a mask. Her sexual attraction for ugliness. Unformed beings, the rejected, the excluded. They excite her. Takashi took her in his arms and comforted her. That night, he opened up a new universe for her. She was not alone. Millions of people were like that. The fact of being ugly or beautiful has nothing to do with our desires. They are two parallel universes. We see ourselves only in other people’s eyes, despite our best efforts. Takashi explained to her that we risk rejection at the hands of those who are disgusting and ugly, the monsters, as much as with any other group. All the other person has to do is feel our interest — and he can’t not feel it— and he becomes inaccessible. Desire is the distance you must cover between your thirst and the fountain that retreats the more you travel towards it. The night grew cool. Hideko’s body seemed to soften. Her eyes closed. A smile bloomed on her lips. Takashi closed the door softly and returned to his room.

THE PARK

I TRY TO avoid the part of the park where the guys who’ve just come back from cherry picking in B.C. hang out. They all wear the same red, scraggly beard, and stare out from the same pale, irresponsible eyes, and contemplate the same dirty fingernails with a mixture of surprise and pride. Most of them are kids from cushy Montreal suburbs (Saint-Lambert, Repentigny, Beloeil or Brossard) who want to play at migrant worker, a dog-eared copy of a fat Steinbeck novel in their back pockets. Last year they were still reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, dreaming of a three-day blow downtown, once they’d assured their mothers they’d be staying with a cousin. Later they’d move on to Kerouac, carry him out to Vancouver in a night train on the Canadian Pacific Line, before launching into Bukowski and pitchers of draft beer. The beginning of a long fall. Theirs isn’t the first generation of misguided kids to hang out in the park — the previous ones shot up on Burroughs and heroin. I even witnessed the days when the boys read Steppenwolf and the girls always had a copy of Gibran’s The Prophet in their bags. This is a literary park, where young people learn how to live through books. I sit down on a bench near the little kiosk that sells flowers and watch the girls in their spring dresses risking their lives to cross the street on the red light — they have every privilege. Which causes a small acceleration in the blood of the male drivers, who are already in heat. This city’s slow striptease begins in April — this isn’t the first cluster of bare-legged girls they’ve seen. The girls kick off their shoes at the first touch of grass, they race with the local dogs, then they end up with those guys who, in monotonous voices, tell endless travel stories that end up giving everyone a headache. With the money they’ve made doing odd jobs out west, they buy dogs to help keep them warm during the winter. A young man is sleeping in a quiet part of the park with a half-dozen pure-bred dogs around him. The problem, apparently, is how to feed them. Those dogs can eat a horse every day. Another guy is leaning against a tree like a pensive warrior. They are like an army camped down for the night. The poet Gaston Miron brushes past, determined, ruminating over the latest poem he wrote, his powerful alligator jaws chewing away. He is going to go see Françoise the bookseller, a friend to starving poets and young novelists who’ve won their first prizes and have already been forgotten. The whole neighborhood is literary, completely different from my old working-class district in the east. One morning I left the factory behind, having decided to take my time in life. I read, I write, I am a flâneur. I hardly know anyone at all, except the Korean who shows up every time I think about him.

“Did you see Midori?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

A brief silence.

“Okay… Someone else showed up.”

“I know,” he said, turning away.

It’s important to keep the myth alive. As it turns out, I happened to be reading a wonderful little book on the subject by Paul Veyne, the great historian of the Greco-Roman world: Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? Veyne writes cold— that is, without having smoked anything illicit. “There was a time when poets and historians dreamed up royal dynasties out of whole cloth, complete with the name of every potentate and his family tree. They were not counterfeiters, nor were they in bad faith. They were simply following the usual way of the time of reaching the truths they needed.” I’m into it up to my ears. I’ll create something, then I’ll believe in it afterwards. I can’t get along without those girls. They’re more alive than the ones I see in the street. They’re devouring my whole life. I only have thoughts for them. I’m drowning in their world. I see them when I wake, I feel them, as if they have captured me whole. They are there in the shadows of my room with glowing eyes, awaiting just a single word in order to take hold of my imagination. I write the name Midori. I know it’s true; everyone I’ve talked to about her can see her too. Just the way they can see Fumi, Noriko, Hideko, Tomo, Haruki, Eiko and Takashi. I should leave them before they take over my days. So far, I’ve been able to keep them in the space of my nights. If they ever break into the day, I’m finished. I’d better defend the little bit of light I have left. So, farewell to the world of the night, and to solitude.

THE TROJAN WAR

I SEE A guy going by with three souvlakis tightly wrapped in transparent paper. I know what his problem is. He goes there to see Helena. She’s the reason I rented this room across from the park and next to the bookstore. She’s the landlord’s daughter, and a waitress at Zorba’s. Helena’s game is so subtle it took me a hell of a long time before I could make the link between the souvlaki and my horrible nightly heartburn. When she can, she sits at the back of the restaurant, by the bathroom. She’s never in a hurry; she takes all the time she needs to cast her big dark eyes on you. And then you’re paralyzed. At the beginning, I was dumb enough to think that, at last, my charm was having an effect on her. Since she moved so slowly, I pictured myself as the patient fisherman. Until the day I understood that I was the fish wriggling on the end of her line. I’ll never know what made me get up in the middle of the night and go out to buy a souvlaki without a prescription. Her eyes are so dark you think it’s midnight when it’s noon, but all she has to do is turn her face in your direction and dawn breaks anew. I’d do anything to hear the sound of her voice.

“Nice day, don’t you think so?”

Not a word of reply.

“I always have the lamb souvlaki. That’s because I don’t like chicken.”

A pause.

“Maybe I should try the chicken. What do you think?”

Silence.

“I know your name is Helena. I live across the street. Your father is my landlord.”

She goes back to her spot without a word. There’s only one way to get her to come back.

“I’d like another souvlaki, please.”

She’s like one of those dealers who never give you the crumb of attention you crave.

“It’s to go.”

Unhurried, she slips it into a brown paper bag. I didn’t even want the first souvlaki, and now I’m stuck with a second.

“See you soon.”

She goes back and sits down without an answer. The down on the back of her neck. A bandage on her left elbow. I cross the park again, by night, with the moon hidden by leafy trees. Basho inhabits me fully.

A guy stops me.

“I’m hungry… Why don’t you give me your souvlaki?”

I hand it over. He looks me in the eye to keep me from leaving.

“Not so fast! At least give me the chance to do my spiel.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“That’s no reason, man.”

He starts dancing circles around me, pretending to wave a tomahawk above his head. He’s no more Indian than I am.

“Okay, that’ll do.”

“You know something, man? Everybody calls you Mr. Souvlaki.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re not the only one who’s taken the bait.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I sold my dog last summer, just to see Helena… To see her, you have to buy at least one souvlaki,” he says, wolfing down mine. “Now I don’t have a penny left. . and I’m addicted to souvlaki.”

He takes a step towards me. He smells like onions.

“This one, my friend, is the souvlaki that broke the camel’s back…. If you go there one more time, you’re a dead man.”

“Is that a threat?”

He starts laughing.

“No, man, she’s the drug. She’s the baddest dealer going, she’s worse than any pusher. You’ll start buying souvlakis and end up throwing them away, into the garbage. All of us here feed off them, you know. We’re not going to start complaining. We dumpster-dive like pigeons and we fish out the souvlakis Helena’s customers throw away. You won’t get a smile out of her before 356 of them. She won’t answer you when you say hi until 1,823 souvlakis.”

“Where do you get those figures?”

He pulls out a tiny notebook where everything is written down in pencil.

“Look. . Here you are. . Since the beginning of the week, you’ve bought eight souvlakis, and it’s only Wednesday. Last week you went into Zorba’s eighteen times.”

“Why are you counting people’s souvlakis? What does it matter to you if I eat souvlaki or not?”

“I have your chart too. . Look, it shows an even progression. You even go there late at night. If you want my opinion, you’ll start picking up the rhythm next week….. Look, Réjean is already at thirty-six souvlakis a week and climbing. In two weeks he’ll hit fifty. He could even beat Leblanc’s record, which was fifty-three before he had his accident. You’re not up with the leaders yet, but it won’t be long.”

“Are you telling me those guys had something to do with her?”

“They were Agamemnon’s army, coming to free her.”

“Now what are you talking about?”

“See that guy over there with the six dogs? That’s Achilles. No joke, he took that name. And that guy who looks like he’s thinking, over by the tree? That’s Ulysses. They’re all here. Ajax too. Our gods accompany us.”

“What did you do for a living before this?”

He smiles.

“I knew you were going to ask me that. I was a teacher, just down the hill. I taught history to teenagers. I used to go through the park twice a day and not notice a thing. One day a kid who could have been one of my students sold me some heroin. I wanted to have the experience. I figured that, since it was only an experiment, it wouldn’t change me. But it wasn’t an experiment — it was reality. One day I just didn’t see the point of going in to teach anymore. What could I teach those kids when I didn’t know anything about life? I bought myself a sleeping bag. It was the only thing I needed. I settled in under that tree across from Helen of Troy… Now, I have to go and sleep.”

He curls up on a bench. He makes me think of Basho. To live beneath a tree. To change your life. Could I do it? I watch him for a minute, then decide to go back to salmon. There is no danger at the big fish market at the next corner.

Any minute now, night will fall and the park’s fauna will change. The girls from the tourism school will go home and be replaced by young prostitutes who, most of them, are former students from the same school, the big building across the way whose only interest is the subway station underneath it. The souvlaki-eaters will be replaced by coke dealers. The businessmen from downtown will drive in slow circles around the little park under the watchful eye of the policeman, who gets a percentage for every customer — not for every car, the way it used to be.

A DISH OF SPAGHETTI IN FRONT OF THE TV SET

I HEARD HURRIED steps in the stairway behind me. I was already fumbling for my keys.

“Didn’t Plato show up?”

“What Plato?”

His face grew dark.

“My rent.”

“You’ll get it…”

“I want it today!”

“But Mr. Zorba…”

“My name isn’t Zorba.”

I’d never seen him in a mood like this.

“We still have time.”

That drives him crazy every time.

“I don’t feel like chasing after you all night.”

“You’ll get your money, like every week.”

“Well, I didn’t get it this week.”

Poor guy — the fear of being ripped off! I can hardly put him off even a half day. Once I went to New York with friends, and he didn’t get his rent until three days later. That look of his! He went back down the stairs, murmuring peasant curses between his teeth. I opened the door, placed the rent money on the table, pulled off my clothes and got into bed. I had time for a little snooze, and I’d be up before he returned. That doesn’t happen every day. I even had time to make a spaghetti sauce out of garlic, onions and green peas, then eat it in front of the tv set as I watched an old Columbo episode. I discovered some low-rent wine in a bottle lying under the table — enough for one glass. Lucullus receives Lucullus. I sat down to the left of the set; I was both audience and antenna. The old TV and I know each other well. Actually, it’s more like a radio, since I can make out only vague shapes, though the sound is still good. The TV is perfect for Metropolitan Orchestra concerts, if you like that sort of thing, which I hate. Sometimes I listen, hoping for a miracle. Most of the time its gray eye stares at me in dumb accusation. Zorba is only good for demanding his money. Every time I ask him to get a better television, just to bug him, he acts like he doesn’t understand me. He can broadcast, but he can’t receive.

THE COP'S NIGHTSTICK

A KNOCK AT the door. It’s eleven o’clock. I won’t give him his money until ten minutes to midnight — not a second before. Those ten minutes are his tip. Another knock. Someone’s insistent. He knows I’m here. Okay, I’ll open up. Two cops. They barge in without wiping their feet. They begin a minute inspection of my room without bothering to tell me who they are (though I can clearly see that), or what they want, which I can’t know without their help. When it comes to the police, you just have to wait. And that’s what I do. I sit down. Downstairs, the landlord must be going nuts. Not only does he hate the police the way all immigrants do, but he’s wondering if he’s going to get his rent if something happens. The cops move around my place like they own it. They look this way and that. They open the dresser drawers and come upon a pair of women’s panties which they start playing with in the crassest kind of way. They go to the window, speaking to each other in low voices. I sit and wait patiently. Sooner or later they’ll have to talk to me. And here they come: now they’re standing in front of me. Two cops and a black man in a crummy room in a bad part of town in Montreal — the scene is set. The oldest of the two comes so close to me his knee brushes my thigh. Suddenly the room starts smelling like shit.

“Let me tell you how it goes,” the older one says. “You’re her pimp. She shows up to give you her money. You do some coke together. Then all of a sudden she really gets on your nerves, I can understand that…. What I don’t get is why you threw her out the window when you could have got rid of her down the stairs. A little fall downstairs wouldn’t bring me running. . But you were too stoned to know the difference, am I right?”

I don’t answer. He turns to the younger cop, who is gaping in amazement at his seamless demonstration.

“That’s thirty years of experience, kid…. Now let’s run him in, I’ve got other things to do tonight.”

I don’t stir from my chair. I know this is only the beginning. I’ve seen too many episodes of Columbo. The young cop (if it isn’t his first day on the job, it’s his second) moves towards me, ready to handcuff me. If this really is about the Hideko business, that happened days ago. If they had the slightest suspicion that a murder had been committed in this apartment, the whole neighborhood would be sealed off. And they wouldn’t have sent these two assholes (a young one and an old one), but a whole army. These two have just dropped by to see if there isn’t any coke on the premises. Just don’t move— that’s all I have to do. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything. On the other hand, I’m starting to have serious doubts that any of this has even happened. As Paul Veyne reminds us, “truths themselves are simply imagined stories.” For him, what is imaginary can become reality. I could have been drunk and brought a woman back here with me, and then she threw herself out the window, and I fell asleep afterwards. The next day, with the fragments of images that lingered in my head, I dreamed up the whole story. It’s true that I did go to see Midori at the Café Sarajevo, but I didn’t feel well, and I left after the Kiss Inc. show. Instead of walking home, which would have calmed my nerves and my stomach, I took the subway. The closed-in atmosphere didn’t help. I was reading Basho with my eyes on the Chinese girl across from me. I lost consciousness as I was leaving the train, and she had the presence of mind to catch me before I fell. Aren’t I building a new story because of the police? Did she come back with me? I have no idea. But something did happen. The morning after my illness, I stole the landlord’s newspaper in front of the building, and that’s when I saw the girl’s body on the sidewalk — right under my window. On page one. The shock of seeing yourself publicly involved with death. Death is a misunderstood star. It wears dark glasses in order to go incognito. It attracts everyone’s eye. In an instant, a nobody who dies becomes a somebody. Maybe I was too quick to conclude that she’d fallen from my window, just because she was lying underneath it. I was thinking like the police, who see murder wherever they go. For every murder, they need to find fifteen suspects. And never the right one. So I’d better think fast. First of all, this is not a fiction film. Next, which death are we talking about? Maybe Zorba pushed the beautiful Helena out the window. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, right? But I don’t think it’s a good idea to embark on that kind of discussion with two cops on a Thursday night.

The young cop starts pushing me to one side to slap on the cuffs.

“Now, wait a minute,” the older one says. “You have to wait till he goes along with my little demonstration. . You got something to say?” he threatens me, moving in closer.

He’s turning up the heat. I can see in the young cop’s eyes that he feels the difference too. He doesn’t know what might happen in this room either.

“I already talked to the police.”

“And who the hell are we?” he bursts out.

He rolls his nightstick along my thigh. We move into the sexual mode, the most dangerous part. The slightest reaction could be taken as a provocation.

“I mean the two other policemen who were here the night of the accident.”

“Hey, there, not so fast! It’s up to me to say whether there was an accident or not. In my book, there was a murder, and I’ve got a suspect.”

“They took the earrings and the letter…”

“What letter?” asks the young cop, who knows nothing about the case.

“The letter she wrote to her parents.”“Are you trying to insinuate that the Montreal police would steal jewelry from a whore?” he challenges, pushing his nightstick against my penis. The nightstick is an extension of his hand. The young cop notices his little game and immediately turns red.

“They put everything into a little bag,” I continue, paying no attention to the sexual game.

“Slap the handcuffs on him,” he says, looking me in the eye.

I don’t move. They push me again. At the last minute the older cop puts a stop to the ballet. A real burlesque. Meanwhile, I’m still somewhere in ancient Japan. I’m no longer part of the circus unfolding before my eyes.

“Now you’re going to show me where you hide the coke.”

“I don’t do coke.”

He moves on me again. As close as he can, with his nightstick. It’s becoming an obsession.

“I’m talking about the coke you sell.”

“I don’t sell coke, either.”

I’ve made the mistake of answering too quickly. We’re in dialogue mode. I had better slow down, and fast. The cop keeps moving closer, which makes his young partner uncomfortable. Don’t worry, in a few years he’ll master the art of playing with black men’s penises with his nightstick. And he’ll fondly remember his first lesson.

“What with you selling coke. .” Now he picks up the rhythm. “The neighbors are complaining.”

I don’t answer. He pushes my thighs apart with his leg. He is so close all I can see is his stomach (he’s in good shape for an old guy) — though, from the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the younger guy. A look of interest has replaced his discomfort.

“Where do you hide it?”

A pause. Rhythm is everything here. Interrogation demands a special tempo. Too quick, and you’re in confrontation mode. Too slow, and you’re impertinent. Discreetly, I tap my right foot to the rhythm, which creates a light but insistent pressure on the policeman’s thigh.

“Screw you!”

And he hits me in the shoulder. The young cop is worried. You’re not supposed to hit a citizen who represents no apparent danger. He tells himself that if he doesn’t react, he’ll become an accomplice. His career has just started. He’s wondering what is happening. I can see that in his worried mouse eyes. The older cop heads for the bathroom. He slams the door on his partner, who was following after him. The older cop spends a while there. I hear the water run. The younger cop gives me a look, trying to understand what has just happened. A neutral face. A young guy who just joined the force. A lot of times, young kids from the country have no idea how big-city cops act. They’ve never seen blacks or Arabs in their part of the world.

“Where do you come from?”

He hesitates.

“Gaspé.”

“I’ve been to Trois-Pistoles.”

His face brightens.

“My mother’s from Trois-Pistoles. . What’s happening? Why did he hit you?”

“No idea.”

We heard the toilet flush. The cop came out, a big stain on his pants.

“I got soaked,” he said with a sheepish look. “Let’s go. I got a desk full of paperwork to do.”

I understand then that his little raid has been a personal initiative. He saw the file with my address. He came here to intimidate me, knowing that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to complain.

THE TIME OF THE MIMOSAS

SOME PEOPLE OWN their time: “I’ve got all day.” Others are owned by it: “I don’t have the time.” Then there’s the “lost time” of the suicide. Mishima refused to enjoy the time that was rightfully his, not wishing to abuse the instinct to conserve. The worldly man’s need to conserve frightened him. The adventurer Morand tried to go faster than time. Spur on the horses! Desire is an excellent compass. The more you desire something, the shorter time seems. Unless you’re waiting for a phone call from a woman you met the day before. In Tokyo, a place I’ve never been, time is kept in pretty little lacquered cases. If you want three days, they will sell them to you. For money? No. You can pay for time only with other time. They will sell you three gray days for two sunny days and one sad night. Or an hour for one fresh kiss. I would like to buy Japanese time with mimosas running with rain. Basho makes you think he is traveling outside of time.

THE WEATHER GIRL

I TURNED ON THE TV. Actually, I just bumped up the sound, because I never turn the set off. I remember an old Hungarian immigrant I met at the airport when I first got here. He insisted on giving me this piece of advice: “Here, in America, you never turn off the television.” I’ve been proving him right all these years. I want to see everything without really looking. I did some channel-surfing and came across Midori dressed as the Weather Girl. She was on a local cable channel I never watch. I don’t know anyone on it. People watch tv to see the people they’ve seen on other channels. Virtual socializing. They feel less alone. It’s a busy world out there. People arriving, people leaving. New faces that hope to be the latest on the scene. Others come on only at dinner, then disappear. Actually, they end up somewhere else, on shows I don’t watch. Sometimes you can spot them when you’re doing your TV window shopping, and you’re amazed to see them in some less desirable district. Some of them have frayed collars. Ah, times are tough. All it takes is one small intellectual breakdown, and they end up with the hoi polloi and those hayseed stars with their loud ties. That is, if they don’t fall all the way down to the circus acts, guys who laugh when some woman gets beat up or want to send all the immigrants back where they came from. The former star host who discovers that the fall, when it comes to TV, can be endless.

“We haven’t seen you much lately, sir.”

“I’m around,” replies the former host with a thin, cathoderay smile.

“I liked watching you. . Are you coming back with a new show?”

Since he never left the screen, the question comes as something of a surprise. He wonders for a brief moment whether it’s worth telling a total stranger the sad story of his fallingout with his bosses, the resulting years in court.

“Please excuse me, but I have some errands to run.”

“Of course, I understand. . There’s no one like you on tv anymore, it’s really too bad.”

“Thank you.”

He disappears into the milky landscape of a screen without pictures. The stranger grabs him by the sleeve, as if they’re in some vaudeville comedy.

“Just a minute, sir… Tell me your name again, would you? It’s for my wife, you know, otherwise she won’t believe me when I say I met you.”

The years spent making a name. Forgotten already. TV death. Everything depends on the audience. The critics, the prizes, the congratulations, none of that matters anymore. Only one thing counts: that they pronounce your name right. Even a name as easy as Leo can take years for people to get into their heads. First they have to wipe all the other Leos from their memory — and that can include close relations. He’s the only Leo now, the one and only.

The number of channels is out of control. One channel is dedicated to nothing but the Second World War, and Hitler is on it so often I call it the Nazi Channel. Another gives the weather, twenty-four hours a day. What’s the weather like today? I don’t care. I watch everything, undiscerning. You don’t judge TV; you watch it. The way you watch a wall. Some refuse to leave, and that causes a traffic jam of failures. It’s impossible to disappear completely now, like in the old days when there were only two channels. Nowadays, before you hit absolute bottom, there are several stages of impact-softeners. A gentler fall. From A to Z. You start your real descent at F. The slope is steeper after L. You land on your S. From then on you hit the channels where you have to pay with your flesh and blood; you accept the surgeon’s scalpel for an extreme makeover. Some starlets will go under the knife live for three miserable points of market share. Channel U, Channel V, Channel W. Z is for zombies: people dressed in black whose voices are barely audible. Forget about ever making it back to the surface. If you want to prolong your descent, there’s always the third world. In any case, Midori looks great in her colorful kimono with sticks in her hair. It’s a disguise; normally she wears jeans and a T-shirt. By dressing up as Japanese, she is less herself. Midori as a Japanese woman is not really Midori. Anyway, Midori doesn’t interest them: all they want is a geisha. Midori, I suppose, needed the money. Or maybe her agent sent her there for the experience, to get used to the camera. She gives us the weather until next Thursday — I’d like to hear it for the rest of the year. What if her prognostications are wrong (it’s like being at the racetrack) and it’s sunny next Thursday? Tomorrow, she’ll predict the weather until Friday. Every day erases the memory of the day before. The weather report can’t be associated with journalism. You can’t fact-check the weather, you can only observe it. Notions of truth and falsehood are not at issue here. It all depends on magic, superstition and inflated hopes. Strangely, the weather report is more respectable than the horoscope. Lonely drinkers use both in bars downtown, on Thursday nights, to try and pick up girls. It’s fuel for conversation. Now Midori is smiling at the camera for the first time. That’s her weak point: she never smiles. It won’t take long before the viewers start to complain. That’s why they watch the weather on tv. Otherwise, the radio would be good enough. On TV, we want someone who will smile at us no matter how lousy the weather will be the next day. The future must be bright. I should write a letter to the station to balance out the hateful hordes who will surely point out Midori’s exotic appearance: the first unsmiling Weather Girl. You don’t mess with the weather — not in this country of intense and endless cold. Giving the temperature is like being a doctor providing a diagnosis. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Midori or someone just dressed as a Japanese woman (the problem with being a foreigner is that you’re not allowed to play anything but folklore). I’ll mention Midori’s absent but elegant smile. Now I’m writing letters to the tv. I’d better go to bed.

I get up to lower the volume. He’s still there with his frozen smile and his collapsed hat.

“It’s Leo.”

“What?”

“You asked me my name.”

THE SORROWS OF MR. TANIZAKI

EVER SINCE OUR aborted meeting, I’ve been running into Mr. Tanizaki every time I step outside. At the fish market, of course, but also at the bakery and the wine store. It’s as if he’s making sure to be in my path while pretending to avoid me — as if I were the one following him. Sometimes he waves to me discreetly. Always a smile pinned to his face. I feel like I’m in a Polanski film, Rosemary’s Baby. I come back from my errands and discover my mailbox full of Japanese underground magazines. In the evening I watch tv (the Japanese cable channels) or eat dinner — sometimes both at once, sometimes neither. I stare at the ceiling. Sometimes I read, and it’s always the same book. I open it and find myself in a Basho haiku. That’s where I’d like to live: in a line of Basho poetry. The telephone makes me jump. It always rings at the same time; it’s taken me a while to figure that out. When I pick it up, I hear Japanese voices, very young voices, often against a background of strident music. Rock, sometimes heavy metal. Judging from the kind of music and the uproar, the calls are coming from the latest hip discotheque. As soon as I say something, the voice on the other end of the line apologizes in English and immediately hangs up. Sometimes I wait more than a minute before saying anything. I listen to the music, I overhear the conversations — always in Japanese. No one ever speaks to me directly.

At noon the other day, a meal showed up that I hadn’t even ordered. When I tried to pay the bill, the young Japanese delivery boy told me it was taken care of. I ended up with dishes I’d never tried before. No challenge there — I know next to nothing about Japanese cuisine. I only know that they consume an incredible quantity of fish. Actually, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard about Japan, since I haven’t bothered to do any research. I’m a flawless mimic. My ear picks up everything. My eye sees all. And my mouth swallows it whole. For the last few weeks, they’ve been careful to deliver meals containing no fish.

Finally it got to be too much. I dressed and went to the shopping center where I immediately spotted Mr. Tanizaki, choosing a bottle of wine.

“What do you want? What’s going on? What do you want from me?”

He began stammering in a strange cocktail: half English, one quarter French and one quarter Japanese, all on ice with a twist of lemon.

“But. . but. . I don’t understand what you are talking about,” he finally said.

“This is harassment.”

He changed color three times: yellow, green, then red. A parrot — I just knew it.

“I… I… I don’t understand.”

“What you’re doing is illegal, you know.”

The word nearly made him faint dead away. “I’m being harassed,” I went on, unaffected by his embarrassment. “I feel like someone’s always spying on me. And the person I seem to see every time I go out is you.” “Me?” he asked, pretending to be surprised. “Yes, you, Mr. Tanizaki.” He was sweating abundantly. “Can we get a coffee?” he stammered, and pointed to a little restaurant a few doors away.

We went and sat down. A coffee for him, tea for me.

“I’m listening,” I announced, without giving him time to compose himself.

“Believe me, I am very sorry.”

We stared at each other for a while. This time I held out. He lowered his eyes.

“I was a literature teacher in a high school in the Tokyo suburbs. My brother-in-law is an important person in the government. I was tired of teaching. He found me this job. The problem is, the job doesn’t exist. I have worked in every section of the consulate. I have been everyone’s assistant.”

“And?”

“And when I heard that you were writing a book about Japan…”

“Listen, I’m not writing about Japan, I’m writing about myself. I’m Japan. How many times do I have to repeat it? I thought you understood.”

“I understood that you were not necessarily a Japanese writer… But the word Japan is in the title.”

“I can choose any title I want.”

“The title intrigues us very much.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

He took a deep breath.

“I work for a cultural magazine in Tokyo. I’ve been writing about this story for some time now, adding a little bit extra, of course. . You know that the Japanese are very interested in questions of identity.”

“But you are a people with a long history…”

“Sir, all peoples have long histories. Otherwise they would not exist. There is no spontaneous generation, am I right?”

“Okay.”

A silence settled in.

“It began after the defeat. The fact that we lost the war. . the humiliation the Americans publicly subjected our Emperor to. We are very proud, you know. We had built everything upon our pride. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have had to build everything on our weakness. . This desire for power that refuses to leave us. . So we simulate a strength we no longer have. Do you understand?”

“What do I have to do with that?”

He began sweating again. He repeated my question before answering it.

“And now someone comes along who claims he is a Japanese writer… I know, I know, you did set the record straight. I announced that in my country. All right, it was in a small journal. Everyone was so fascinated: a foreigner who is not particularly impressed by all the objects we produce, or all the fish we pull out of the sea. I told them you don’t even like sushi, and that intrigued them. Nor are you interested in our yen, or our geishas, or anything else.”

“Now don’t put words in my mouth! I have nothing against your yen. As for the geishas, we’ll see about that.”

He laughed heartily.

“You are interested in what is most fragile and intimate: our poetry. I told my countrymen about you and Basho.”

He stopped suddenly, overwhelmed by his own monologue. “I also pointed out that you are black… which brought out one of the unpleasant aspects of my country.”

“How is that?”

I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I like to play dumb.

“They took it as a terrible insult.”

“I don’t see how that could be insulting. I don’t consider being black an insult.”

He laughed uncomfortably.

“Yes. . of course. . Let’s just say that certain people, fortunately not everyone, believe that the country has fallen pretty low if we have to pay a black man to take on the identity of a Japanese writer.”

“What is this crap? No one’s paying me anything! It has nothing to do with Japan! This is my business!”

There — I’d finally become angry. Not because of the racist color the whole business had taken on, but because of the attack on my freedom as an artist.

“Of course, but you must understand them. When they discovered I was working at the consulate…”

“Did you tell them I was being paid, yes or no? You haven’t paid me anything!”

He wallowed in endless excuses. Considering he excused himself when he was in the right. . He was practically drowning in his own sweat. I wondered if he would commit hara-kiri, right here, with the butter knife.

The waitress brought my tea. She must have been seventy years old. I felt embarrassed for her. Waitressing is a student job. Students do it to pay their tuition, unless they strip for businessmen, downtown, on Thursday nights.

“What’s with all the plotting? The phone calls late at night, the magazines, the meals that show up — you’re behind all of it, right?”

He was gripping the knife tightly in his fist. The veins in his neck were rising and falling.

“I’m doing it for my column. There are people interested in this story. They would like to know how you can become a Japanese writer if you know nothing about Japan.”

“And that’s why you’re trying to feed me a little Japanese culture.”

“I’m only trying to direct your curiosity to something besides the clichés about Japan. You’re enthusiastic about this ancient Japan they keep beating us over the head with. As if we had nothing else to offer. . We would like Western artists to get interested in today’s Japan, not just in geishas and cherry trees. Young Japanese aren’t interested in Basho, you know.”

“They’re interested in America, and I’m not interested in them.”

“What would interest you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I would like to be able to help you.”

“Anything but that… On the other hand, yes, there is one thing. I’d like to know where the phone calls are coming from. I like the atmosphere. I’d like to drop in there some evening.”

Mr. Tanizaki looked chagrined.

“I’m afraid you can’t. It’s a game my readers thought of. They’re calling you from a discotheque in Tokyo.”

“What’s the game?”

“Whoever can keep you on the line longest wins. Now, I am sorry, I came here to buy wine, there is a small reception at the consulate this evening. If you could come, it would give us great pleasure. It would, in fact, be a honor for us.”

For a moment he hovered in a position that was halfway between sitting and standing. Too much in a hurry to wait until I got up, but too polite to get up before me. In the end I stood, which allowed him to go on his way.

AMERICANIZE/JAPANIZE

THEIR WARRIORS WORE colorful costumes and applied violent makeup. After the Americans defeated them, they became Americans. One way of absorbing those damned Yankees. A double culture: their own and that of the conqueror. Which explains the monstrous success of the double hamburger. The Japanese produce the best one-hundred-andten-pound Elvis doubles. In certain small villages, you can meet highly educated jazz fans. Or John Lee Hooker without the wounds of racism. Bob Dylan without the silliness of the 1960s. Marilyn Monroe without the antidepressants. They do for stars what Las Vegas does for the world’s monuments. Copies made while you wait. The young Japanese girl’s insatiable appetite for American gadgets. She talks fast, breaks off words so quickly she cuts them in half. Since time refuses to lengthen, she shatters language into an incomprehensible mishmash. She devours the world, speaks it, breaks it, transforms it, hoping to turn the defeat into victory. She wants to secretly penetrate the heart of American desire to change it into desire for Japan. Americans will never become Americans again because they don’t realize they’re already Japanese. And here I dreamed of becoming a Japanese writer — I wonder what’s hiding behind that label. And most of all, where such an obsession could have come from.

EGO ZOOM

OVER THE PHONE, his voice was suave, his language impeccable, with a slight accent I couldn’t quite place.

“We’ll need a day, no more.”

“A day out of my life! I don’t have that kind of time to give to someone I don’t know.”

“Excellent! Bravo! Thank you very much! Ah, if only you knew…”

“What did I say that was so special?”

“We’ve been searching for a title for our profile all week, and right away, the first thing you say… A day out of my life— a perfect title! We’ll put the rest in the subtitle: I don’t have that kind of time… Whatever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We are at your disposal: a day out of your life, no more. We’re based in New York. What do you say we arrive Wednesday and spend Thursday together?”

“What will we do?”

“What else — a documentary about you.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean? Didn’t Mr. Tanizaki say anything to you?”

One of those silences.

“Okay… do I get to choose?”

“Of course.”

“Friday.”

“Fine. But we have to set up the day before. Don’t worry about anything.”

“Now you’ve got me worried.”

“We’re a very small crew. No more than three. And we won’t break anything in your house.”

“You won’t shoot in my house.”

A lengthy silence.

“In that case we’ll film on the street. Someone will call you for the details. Thanks again for the title.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dazaï.”

“Like the writer?”

“Like the writer. My mother knew him. See you soon.”

It’s not often that someone is in more of a hurry than I am to get off the phone. This young man, for that reason alone, struck me as remarkable. And then there was his impeccable way of speaking. (I love this old fart way of assessing everyone, giving out points.)

Two days later. A small voice woke me up. A feeling like a mouse had crept into my dreams. I often dream of animals that speak to me.

“My name is Kero. We are doing a ‘Zoom’ on you next Friday.”

“Who are you?”

“Dazaï didn’t call you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Japanese television…”

“Oh, yes.”

“You scared me. . We are coming Thursday. Everything must be ready beforehand.”

“Where are you calling me from?”

“Tokyo. That is where we are based. We do portraits in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan, but more and more we are going to faraway places like Dakar and Montreal. You see, we are everywhere. We do a lot of fashion programming, that’s why we are doing Paris.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the way people have of calling you from anywhere in the world and babbling like a brook. I talk only to Diderot and my landlord. Which makes me wonder why he hasn’t been by yet to demand the rent money. As I daydream, Miss Kero keeps on talking.

“Are you still there?”

Amazing she could feel my absence. How do they know when your mind has been wandering? Is there something, a sound, that signals that you’re elsewhere? Even talkative types know when you’re daydreaming. I’d better stop asking and answering questions in my head. That’s the curse of the solitary man.

“Yes, go ahead.”

“Thank you very much. . I was saying that we only do ‘Zooms’ on major designers and top chefs in the nouvelle cuisine movement. You know, in Japan, we adore everything new. We love creativity, and we are always on the lookout for the latest trend. Why? We hate being caught in a situation of ignorance. We want to be up to date…. But if I am talking too much, you will tell me.”

“You talk like a Parisian.”

“That’s because of Sagan. I wrote my doctoral thesis on Sagan. I lived in Paris for three years. And I still listen to tv5 to keep up. So, I was saying that since last year, we’ve begun to work on writers, painters and musicians. Our public is very hip, they are well informed and they don’t buy just anything. On the other hand they want more than just a big name — they want a mixture. They don’t like hearing about someone somewhere else first. And they’re ready to pay for the best product. That’s why we’re careful with what we propose. . Are you still there? Sir? Sir? Are you still there?”

“I think maybe you’re part of my dreams. . Your voice is like a lullaby.”

She laughed.“If you’re always like this, everything will be fine.”

“Why did you choose me?”

“You’re so well known here. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Yes. But I don’t live in Tokyo.”

“And I don’t live in Montreal, but here we are, talking to each other. What does it really mean to live somewhere?”

She was about to slip through my fingers once more.

“What do you want to know?”

“We want to see you. . We will be the first to put a face to this mystery man who has provoked such passion in Japan, and I am choosing my words carefully. I don’t want to take too much of your time… Since you don’t want us to film you where you live, tell me your favorite places.”

“Why not my favorite color?”

“I’m just doing my job. We’re looking for locations for the interview. The location says a lot.”

“It would be more interesting if you didn’t see me, but only the location.”

“Very interesting. . I’ll mention that to Dazaï. He loves everything that’s original. Excuse me, but I couldn’t help hearing a certain irony.”

“Not at all.”

“Mr. Tanizaki warned us that you would do everything to sabotage this project. At the office, we all read Basho to try to understand you. For the locations, if you could give me some ideas…”

“Everything is in the same neighborhood. There’s a park called Square St-Louis, and across from it is the Librairie du Square, and next to that bookstore there’s a café called Les Gâteries. That’s all there is.”

“That’s on Rue St-Denis, if I understand correctly.”

“You’ve been to Montreal?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know about the place?”

“A colleague told me it’s your favorite street.”

“Then you know everything there is to know.”

“I’m just joking. I’m sitting in front of my computer, and it’s showing me everything you’re saying. Someone will call you to set up the interviews.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Kero.”

“Kero, I’m going to go back to bed if you don’t mind.”

“I was warned.”

“About what?”

“That you spend your life in bed. We would love to film you sleeping.”

“That’s a private activity.”

End of conversation.

THE COLDEST EYE

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT the camera has had the greatest success among the Japanese. I’ve long suspected them of not putting film in their cameras. Or, at least, of not looking at the photos once they return home from their trip. How can they tell the difference between the pictures they took and the ones their friends took, since they all take the same photo in front of the Eiffel Tower from the same angle with the same smile and even the same suit? In the photos, they all wear their cameras slung over their shoulders. A nation of smiling photographers. That kind of behavior must be hiding something. Maybe they’re stockpiling photos so that later they can get an idea of how we lived at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. The information would not be very diversified: billions of Japanese photos showing nothing but smiling Japanese. If one day we stumble upon these mountains of photos, we might well conclude that the earth was inhabited at the time solely by Japanese. There was not a single monument worth mentioning on this planet that they did not colonize. The conquest was worldwide. A universal point of view. If I want to become a Japanese writer, I had better rush out and buy a camera. But I think I’ll stick to my typewriter. At heart, though, it’s the same thing. You describe everything you see. I would like to be, not a photographer, but a cold, objective camera lens. To simply look at the person in front of me. Is that even possible?

SOFT SKIN

AS IT TURNED out, two days later a guy called from New York to rummage through the drawers of my memory. Of course he wanted to know where an idea like mine had come from. Haruki (Murakami was his last name) confided that his father was from Louisiana, a black soldier stationed in Tokyo whom, unfortunately, he never knew. His mother was working in a big sports equipment store in the center of the city when they met. He had come in to buy a basketball. She followed him through the store because of his smell. The smell of black men drove her crazy. The spices went to her head. She could spend hours with her head tucked under his armpit. But that got on his nerves. He wasn’t a violent man, but he could become irritable.

“People talk a lot about the voice, the eyes, but rarely about smell. Yet it’s so important in the animal world. I went out with black men to try to understand my mother’s obsession. What touched me most was their skin. . Some skins are so soft. Like the skin of a mouse. When I meet a man like that, I literally melt.”

“Any man, or a black man?”

“I don’t look at any other kind of man.”

“So you’re in search of your father.”

“That’s what my mother told me. She thinks that made me into a homosexual. But I know what made me gay: a guy from Harlem, a psychopathic killer with skin as soft as a baby’s. I was the only one who knew what he’d done. I would spend hours caressing him in the darkness of an abandoned house where we hid. The mob and the cops were after him. He trusted no one except his mother and me. He used to say I was his little woman. He had to get mad to get a hard on.”

“Mad at you?”

“Not necessarily… He would fly into a rage against anyone, anything, and he took it out on me. I loved it. He would pull out his gun and tell me he was going to blow my brains out. I didn’t care as long as he fucked me. No wonder: I was in love with him.”

“He could have killed you.”

“Yet he’s the one who ended up dead. When he was killed I was in Harlem, at a friend’s place. I hadn’t seen him in a week. I missed his sweetness. Funny: the guy was violence incarnate, yet all I can remember is the softness of his skin. You can’t have skin that soft if there’s not gentleness elsewhere too. I can tell you it wasn’t always easy. .” He sighed. “I heard a gunshot that night. That was the music of Harlem. That’s what gave life its beat — they tell me it’s changed since then. I knew right away. I said to my friend, That bullet was for Malcolm. My friend bawled me out, he told me I must have been sick if I started naming everyone who was killed in Harlem during the night. He told me to go see a psychologist, the whole thing. I burst into tears and I left. I knew where Malcolm hung out, I went there and found him in a pool of blood. He died like a dog. I cleaned him up and called his father. Then I hid and waited, and I slipped away when the father showed up. I wandered for days and nights through Harlem. I wanted to get myself killed too. I did everything I could, but death wouldn’t touch me… Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because you can’t see me.”

“I can’t see a psychologist.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a fan of Woody Allen — that’s what my friends call me in Japanese. We have the same physique. He has a Japanese body. Try it yourself: take off his head and put a Japanese head on him, and you’ll get a Japanese filmmaker.”

“I’d like to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead. Otherwise I’ll just be talking to myself.”

“Your father is black, your mother is Japanese, and only black men attract you…”

“But not the same way as for my mother. My mother was smell. I’m touch. Everything is concentrated in my fingertips. The story of my life is a story of electricity. If the lines don’t light up, there’s nothing I can do. But when they do, I’m a goner. Black skin in the darkness is a foretaste of hell. That skin shines brighter than any other. And some things burn harder than fire.”

“Didn’t you ever think you were black?”

“Never.”

“But your father is black.”

“YesbutI’mmymothernotmyfatherImeanI’mawomannotaman.”

He said that as a single word, without pausing to catch his breath. I heard a sharp sob. Then he gently put down the phone.

KAMIKAZE

IS IT A form of suicide or an act of war? The idea of accepting death in order to kill the greatest number of the enemy. People here have lost sight of that simple but efficient method. The body as a weapon of war. That distance from death is impressive. Guys who announce their death and don’t hide from it. Meanwhile, in the West, we’re always looking for a back alley to escape into. We’re ready to throw ourselves at death’s feet just to be spared. The idea of a last chance is written into our Western genes, and it drives Hollywood screenwriters to unlikely acrobatics in order to get James Bond out of every unbelievable impasse. We’re sure that James Bond will never die, and that’s what gives him such importance in our inner landscape. Over there, heroes are the ones who lust after death. The will to die. I discovered that wonderment around the age of twelve as every night I devoured stories of the Second World War. The kamikazes never tried to leap from the plane at the last minute, like James Bond and his kind. It was the first time I’d learned that death could be that way. Except in voodoo. But in voodoo, death often has a sexual aspect. But here was heroic death. Pure death. The modern being is the one who is killed. Who wants to take his place? That’s been the problem lately between East and West. The conflict between two visions of death. One wants to get as close to death as possible, yet without dying. The other blindly follows the straight line that leads right to the explosion. But he doesn’t intend to go up in flames alone. His death will be used to create more death. The surprise effect is strong. Boom! The shattered body. Ecce homo. The dead body in the West was sacred even before Mary, with exemplary gentleness, received the body of her beloved son. The body is reclaimed, embalmed and perfumed, then placed in a box and buried in the ground. Every precaution is taken to forestall its decomposition. The cemetery too is protected. Inflicting indignities upon a body is on a par with incest: a major taboo. The dead body occupies a quarter of our minds. And death itself fills up the rest. There is so little space left for life. The shattered body, unrecognizable. No further chance for farewells. Everything happens at the moment of the explosion. When we die of a heart attack, the heart carries off the rest of the body with its death. In an explosion, everything goes at once. The entire body dies at the moment of death. But with the stupefying progress of medical science, the brain can die while certain parts of the body remain in perfect shape. If it weren’t for that little short in the brain, some corpses would walk to the cemetery under their own power.

THE PUBLISHER OF STOCKHOLM

I HAVEN’T BEEN sleeping well lately. It isn’t easy to sit in front of your typewriter, doing nothing, when you know that someone on the other side of the world is suffering the same pains you are. In this case, it’s my publisher. He can’t write the book for me, though he’d like to. That would spare him an ulcer. All he can do is wait. I once saw a Kurosawa film that perfectly explained the publisher’s function. It was about the shogun who must not move while the battle is taking place. The arrows whistle past his ears but he says nothing and moves not at all. He sits motionless. Impassive. And so my publisher determines the outcome of the battle of writing through his powerful immobility. I feel his presence most strongly when he doesn’t appear.

“Hello!”

“It’s your publisher.”

“I was thinking about you.”

“I’m in Stockholm for a colloquium about Andersen.”

“But he’s Danish.”

“The Danes hate Andersen because he made them look like monsters who would let a poor little girl die of cold. I don’t know how I got caught in this mess. Even when I was a kid I hated Andersen. The worst nightmares in my life came from reading “The Little Match Girl.” I ended up in this business because of that fairy tale. It ruined my life. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t written by someone who was moved by the poor little girl’s fate — oh, no, it was written by a sadist, a pervert, a bastard, a sick man.”

“Okay,” I said to slow him down, “don’t get carried away, it’s only a colloquium. Stop stewing in your room and go out and get a drink somewhere.”

“There’s not even a bar in this hotel. I got back an hour ago, completely exhausted by some wordy bitch who kept beating me over the head with her damned Andersen.”

“You won’t escape him where you are. There must be a whole tribe of Andersen specialists where you’re staying.”

“I’m afraid so… I called the front desk and asked what floor the bar was on. No bar, sir. Why not? You can drink in your room if you want to. You can drink in your room, but not in a bar. The guy probably thought I was an alcoholic. We argued back and forth for a while, then I lay down on the bed with my clothes on.”

I’d rarely heard him so wound up. Andersen, plus the fact that he couldn’t have a nightcap in a quiet corner of a bar, in the shadows, must have disturbed him deeply. People have their habits. But why go if you hate Andersen so much? Probably for the free booze, and a little convention fling.

“There must be a bar somewhere, I’m sure. Those northerners really know how to drink.”

“The nightcap is drunk at the hotel,” he said categorically.

“I’m in full agreement.”

“So I fell asleep and slept a half hour. Then I woke up and went to smoke a cigarette by the window and look at the town — otherwise I wouldn’t have seen any of it. I went back to bed with a pile of manuscripts. I put two pillows behind my back and my head, and I got ready for a sleepless night. That’s what I like to do most of all: read manuscripts in a hotel room. That’s why I say yes to these trips. Those books were written just for me — or at least it seems that way. If I don’t like them, they won’t exist.”

He was sparing me no details. His life was a regular novel.

“The television was on, and all of a sudden there was your face, a close-up, looking right at me.”

“What was I doing on tv in Stockholm? I don’t even know that town.”

“That’s modern life, old man. We’re known in places we don’t even know ourselves. . It was a piece from Japanese tv. You were walking in a park in Montreal. I thought I was hallucinating when I heard them talk about your novel I Am a Japanese Writer. I’d only been half paying attention, but now I jumped right out of the bed. It was completely crazy. . A thousand possibilities went through my head. Like that some prankster had tinkered with the hotel TV system to play a trick on me. Maybe there really is a bar in the hotel— they’re just toying with my nerves. I don’t mind telling you, my problem isn’t alcohol, but the lack of it. . I don’t know if you understand the position this puts me in. People will have seen the report on tv. Tomorrow they’re going to torture me with questions. Other publishers are going to want to buy the rights. What do I tell them?”

“If you want to sell my book to a Swedish publisher, go ahead, but on one condition: I don’t want a title like ‘I Am a Swedish Writer.’”

“Why not? That’s an excellent idea! We’ll do the same thing for every country that wants to publish it. It’ll be perfect for translation.”

“I’ll end up looking like a chameleon.”

“But what the hell is going on? I haven’t even got the book and already it’s been translated, and in Japanese. Am I the publisher or not?”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t written it yet. The Japanese wanted to do a piece on a book that isn’t written. That’s their way of getting a step up on us. We’re old-fashioned, with our books that have to be written, published, critiqued and read — maybe. Too many steps.”

“I want the manuscript in two weeks. I want to catch up with the Japanese.”

“Two weeks!”

“Look, I’m going out to get a drink at the corner bar. When I get back, I expect to have it on my bed. If you can do that, I’ll get you the Nobel.”

“A drink would be good enough for me.”

THE CANNIBAL IN HIS HOMETOWN

SOMEONE IS KNOCKING at the door. I won’t leave this bed. It’s my place in the sun, and I’m sticking to it. I lie on my back and contemplate the stains on the ceiling. The guy upstairs must piss right on the floor. I am preparing for a long journey that might last hours, even days. There are times like that. My eyes are open, I hear everything, but I’m not really there. I travel that way at astonishing speed. I step across centuries as if they were minutes. I can do it without any chemical assistance. I knew a guy who could make the moon drop into a white saucer. He taught me how to travel across time. It’s more technique than magic. I am both the vessel and the traveler. I travel, not in space, but time. Time is vaster than space. That knock on the door again. I hear everything clearly, but my arms and legs have stopped obeying me. My face must be all twisted. There — stay still. Retrieve your human form. The traveler has returned. I crawl to the bathroom on all fours. Water restores life to me, extinguishing the last flames. I hadn’t realized how speed had sucked all the moisture from my body. The knocking continues. This time I’ll answer. I open the door. Midori is standing there. She backs off. I wonder what I must look like.

“Sorry for being so insistent. . but I heard voices and I didn’t understand what was going on. I heard a conversation but I didn’t recognize the language. I thought you were with someone, but the voices were so hushed.”

I didn’t know I was speaking, or that I wasn’t alone. I thought I was a solitary traveler. “Well, come in.”

Normally I don’t let anyone inside. Midori glances around quickly, then smiles.

“This is exactly how I imagined your lair.”

I allow only what is essential in this room. A bed, a window, a little table on which my old Remington 22 sits, a pile of books on the floor. I turn to Midori. Still Midori. As sober as my room. She stands there with her camera, but I know she’s really somewhere else. Not that she isn’t present — she’s burning with intensity. But I know that she’s just as present, with the same strength, in the lives of so many other people. At this very minute she could be talking with a girlfriend in Manhattan, or running through a park in Berlin with a dog. Midori has the gift of ubiquity, and that’s not just a figure of speech.

“It’s hot in here. Can you open the window?”

I haven’t opened it since Noriko’s suicide. I open it for Midori. A wave of light enters the room. Midori is radiant in her tiny black dress — her version of mourning. Photographers have an intimate relationship with light. And so with shadow, too.

“I like your room.”

“I sleep, write and read here.”

“You left a little quickly the last time,” she said, leaning on the window ledge.

“I don’t like to wait around.”

“Takashi’s been showing me how to take pictures. Can I take a few here?”

“No problem.”

She photographs the room from every angle. Afterwards, she is a little out of breath.

“Don’t you have any questions?”

“Why would I?”

“You don’t even want to know what I’m doing here?”

“You’re here — that’s all.” I know why she’s here, and I’m trying to avoid the subject.

“I had a phone call from Kara Juro. Don’t you know him?”

“Midori, I don’t know anyone in town.”

“He doesn’t live here.”

“Nor anywhere else.”

“If you like.”

“I like things to be clear so I don’t waste time in futile pursuits.” I can feel my nerves jangling.

“Juro wrote that fascinating book, Letters from Sagawa. You’ve never heard of it? It tells the story of a Japanese man who ate a Dutch student in Paris, a woman. A true story. The guy lives in Tokyo now. He was in prison in France. When he returned to Tokyo, he was given a hero’s welcome. That’s why I would never live in that country, it’s too disgusting.”

“The Japanese have always been daring when it comes to food. They’re not afraid to take chances. They must have appreciated the guy’s attempt to try something new.”

“I’ve always wanted to work with Kara. He called me a while ago. I was very excited. Then, nothing but silence for two months. Yesterday his agent called me and asked if I knew you. I said yes. He told me Kara wanted me to photograph you at your place. What kind of photos? He told me Kara never gives directions, but he needed the pictures right away. I don’t know what he wants.”

“He wants you.”

“Me?”

“Not necessarily in a sexual way. It’s bigger than that. The same thing is true in literature: the publisher doesn’t want anything in particular, he wants the writer.”

“I’d like to do a book with my photos. And I want you to write the text.”

“I don’t know your world well enough.”

“I think you know it very well. Takashi says you don’t even need a camera to take pictures. You have a lens in your head. Coming from Takashi, that’s the greatest compliment. I’ve watched you do it. I like the way you observe things. You were at the apartment, you saw the girls, you were at the parties, you know my little zoo.”

“I don’t write about other people’s lives.”

“Look at the photos and write what you like.”

“I don’t like looking at things that don’t move.”

“That’s exactly what interests me: the perspective of someone who hates to look. We’ll talk about it later, all right?”

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.

A SPLENDID VIEW OF THE RIVER

I KNEW I had to move out of my room when a Japanese tourist, a magazine in his hand and a camera over his shoulder, came knocking at my door.

“Hello,” he said, with a beaming smile.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you the Japanese writer?”

“No,” I said, and closed the door sharply.

I pressed my ear to the door. I didn’t hear footsteps. I went to the bathroom and moved aside a piece of tile. That was my window onto what was happening in the hallway. A long line of people were waiting patiently — all of them Japanese. I left the rent money on the table. I pictured Zorba banging away at my door all night long, only to open it in the morning, muttering to himself, and discover the closet empty and the money waiting. I packed my bag and slipped out by the fire escape. I went down the alley where kids were running like crazy. Their mothers watched casually as they hung out their laundry, knowing that cars rarely came that way. Except for cop cars, which hid there sometimes. A spider feigning sleep, patiently awaiting its prey: I stopped just in time. I recognized the scar on the arm of the cop who’d recently paid me a visit. What was he doing here, right underneath my window? I didn’t move; I held my breath. He was sipping his coffee. He must have known I was home. Another cop got out to stretch his legs. They were the same age, with the same hard faces. Were they waiting for nightfall to make their move upstairs? I knew what would happen next. They would take me to some spot considered dangerous for the police, then rape me before using their nightsticks. If ever an accident happened (though they were too experienced to let that occur), they’d blame it on a settling of accounts among rival gangs. The city desk journalist would write what the cops told him, otherwise he could kiss his scoops goodbye. And a city desk reporter without a scoop is no better than a penniless mafioso on the run.

My intention is to live like Basho this time. Underneath a banana tree. But the winter is too harsh. I sleep here and there. Sometimes on a hot-air grate in front of a downtown building, a warm breeze on my back. Other times in the subway. If you don’t sleep two nights in a row in the same station, you can get away with it. The police keep a lazy watch. Sometimes I spend the night in the Voyageur station where the buses head out for the great American cities. I just say I’m going to New York or Chicago and they leave me alone. Watch out for your smell— it’ll give you away. The cops do their rounds at the smaller bus station (the main one is downtown and not to be recommended), sniffing at people to ferret out the scent of poverty. Here, race isn’t much of an issue (we all belong to the loser race); smell determines everything. And it’s not easy getting rid of that smell, believe me. I go for a shower at the SaintVincent de Paul. I soap myself down till the smell disappears. I put on a clean shirt. Everything goes according to plan until I start sweating. I’ve got a trick: I replace the identifiable smell of poverty with another one. I go and I sit in front of the Da Giovanni restaurant until the smell of spaghetti fully permeates my skin. I want to change smells.

It’s easy to find something to eat in a big city: you follow the first guy you see walking south with his head down. South is always poorer than north. The man led me to the docks. He sat down and looked at the boats. It was child’s play: the lapping of the waves, a few white birds attracted by the crumbs he was throwing. I stood there, knowing this wasn’t his final station. After getting his fill of the horizon, he stood up, adjusted his old bones and got back on the road. I followed him like a shadow. We all have an itinerary in a city. His was mine too. The difference is that I had chosen my path, while he was passive. I could tell by his slumped shoulders. He stopped a minute, turned around as if he suddenly felt he was being followed, then stepped through a doorway. I followed him in and discovered a giant room where all the city’s down-andouters seemed to have their meeting point. The place smelled like vegetable soup. It didn’t smell bad; it smelled of poverty. A smell of wet canvas and rotting fruit. A sweetish smell. We were in the bowels of the city. Someone motioned me forward. I hadn’t even noticed I had joined the ranks. There was one line and one menu. A nun was doing her best to make us feel at home. Everything came to a standstill. A man wanted two portions. Impossible, the nun told him with a sad smile. We don’t know how many people will be needing us. There were the usual visitors, then there were people like me who followed some miserable old guy, not realizing he was part of the slumped-shouldered crowd. My bowl of soup. I went and sat down in a corner near the window with a splendid view of the river. Two or three people burst out laughing. It’s always dangerous when poor people laugh. I spotted a shadow on the floor stretching out in front of my shoes. I looked up and discovered the exact reproduction of the Indian who acted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I understood what he meant before he said it. I’d looked for the most uncomfortable spot and I’d found it. I was halfway through my soup when a man kneeled down in front of me. What did he want? My soul, I guess. It’s the last thing I had that I could sell. He took my measurements and assured me that next time, he would bring me a pair of boots so I could get through the winter with warm feet. Later the nun told me he’d been doing that for twenty years. No one knew his name. I wasn’t afraid of him, but of the guy he works for. What does he want from me?

CHRONICLE OF A DISPOSSESSION

I RAN INTO François near the little store that sells fish, fruits and vegetables where I’d bought, not so long ago, my last salmon. We had lost track of each other. We’d always done everything, not exactly together, but at the same time. When we needed to express ourselves publicly, in our twenties, we did so: he on the radio, me in an entertainment weekly. When things got too dangerous, we left the country together. In Montreal, we refused to live in a ghetto. We liked Malraux, and we got sick of him at the same time too. We did so many things in the same way without even asking each other. Then came a time when our paths separated. Life is like that. I would hear about him, but through friends in common. I suppose the same people kept him up-to-date about me. Then time began to do its work. Slowly, his image faded from memory. And now life brought us together again. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the complex network of events that had been necessary for our reunion to take place. He told me this wasn’t his neighborhood, he never went to this store, he’d stopped off here only because he’d forgotten to pick up his salmon at his usual fish market. He understood the situation immediately, I could see it in his eyes, when he noticed my jacket was missing two buttons. He must have spotted the spaghetti-sauce stain on my shirt, too. He saw I was going through a rough period, but he couldn’t have known that that was exactly what I was looking for. His greeting was manly and his warmth sincere; that’s the way he’s always been, with that surface strength. Of course he did his best not to sniff that soup-kitchen smell that clung to my skin: the perfume of poverty. I did the same thing for his chartered-accountant odor. Our smells tell others where we’ve been. Lately, I’d been finding what I needed in Chinatown, in the alley that runs behind the grocery stores. Tuesday and Saturday are garbage pick-up days.

Despite my fall, I still mattered to him — I was the only one who could appreciate his ascent. I knew him back when he hadn’t even climbed the first rung. He wasn’t going to let me get away without telling me the story of his struggle, step by step. And he wouldn’t settle for a simple recounting of events: with my bare hand, I’d have to touch every trace, every sign, every object that spoke of his rise through society. What good would it do to tell him I’d spent my life scribbling down stories that I tore up once I’d finished them, not because they were bad, but because I was writing them for myself? I am both writer and reader. Totally autonomous. I would have kept on like that if I hadn’t got sick of working at the factory. I stopped working, but I wanted to continue writing. I found a way of getting a publisher. A publisher, I understood, gives you money in hopes of getting a book at the end of the line. The perfect deal for me. I negotiated over a book I hadn’t written, and knew I wouldn’t write; the only proof of its existence was the title. They gave me five thousand euros upon signing the contract. I hardly even saw the color of that money because of the debts I’d built up over the years. They promised me the rest, another five thousand, when I submitted the manuscript. In other words, I made five thousand euros for nothing. In the meantime, I became a filmmaker, I made a short film about a group of Japanese girls, a film that even the most experimental festivals wouldn’t touch. Everyone wants a neatly tied-up little plot. I get bored too quickly to begin a story and then finish it. Once I can picture the ending, I move on to something else. I write as long as I’m not hungry. When I feel like eating, I wrap up the story in a hurry. Maybe I’d get something from Midori. I didn’t know how much she’d be willing to put out for her photo book. I could write it over a weekend, but I’d make her believe it’d take me months of effort. I’ve noticed that people are unhappy when they get something too easily. You have to sweat — that’s the only moral they know. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of story you could tell an old friend on the first night of your reunion. I trusted him to serve me up a better fable.

We went into the bar where he stops off for a drink once or twice a week with his colleagues. I knew he wanted me to observe the position he occupied in his world. François likes concrete things. I remember he used to love acting out the anecdotes he’d tell me, and if a story took place in a discotheque, he’d start dancing. I tried in vain to make him see he could achieve the same results with words. He smiled, then applied a gentle slap to the face: “That’s something a writer would say.” Back then, I hadn’t written a single line. And when I did write my first story, after he read it, he was practically angry. “You want the Nobel?” he said. “Is that what you want?” And now he was being greeted noisily by his group of friends — which is a figure of speech, because I’m his only friend. Hearty slaps on the back. He introduced me and I received a vague welcome, but he wanted everyone to greet me with greater respect. “Listen, guys, he’s the one I’ve been telling you about. Ask him anything you want to about what’s going on in the world — he’ll have the answer.” Everyone waited a moment or two, but no questions came. An embarrassed silence settled in. Finally, a mercantile murmur arose (they’re accountants, after all). A chalet in the Laurentians, the new model that bmw had just come out with, the chances of winning that night’s hockey game. The price of pleasure, above all else. After five minutes, my head was spinning. Still, I could see that he was the prince of the evening. The waitresses took his order first. And when he laughed at a joke, everyone’s laughter ratcheted up a notch. But we weren’t going to put down roots here. We said our goodbyes and headed out. Fat tips on the table. I didn’t even look at the bill. Such figures didn’t concern me. He was taking me to his place. We got on the expressway. He wanted to spring a surprise on me. He rummaged through the glove compartment and finally found a Skah Shah cd, the group of our tender years. He danced as he drove — and so did the car. Dancing was his thing. Not mine. He used to say, every time, “Sure, but you know how to make words dance.” We finally got there. His house stood at the end of a dead-end street, behind a barrier of rosebushes — his colleagues must have the same set-up. Off-handedly, he introduced me to his wife, Shônagon. I’d always thought François was the kind of guy who would settle down with someone of his own blood type. We entered the living room. Sober decoration. He didn’t walk, he glided. Cognac? Whiskey? He had rum too. He laughed. People laugh as soon as he laughs. His laughter always was contagious. He wanted to give me everything he had: his house, his wife, his car. Nothing new there; he’d always wanted to be me. Even as a teenager, he had everything he wanted: girls, money, freedom. I was a shy guy, I didn’t know how to dance and I didn’t have a penny. Worse, my mother wouldn’t let me go further than the Paramount movie house. Why? What did he see in me that he didn’t have? Finally, his wife smiled. I began to see her differently. An overseas call he’d been expecting came in. He went into his office to take it. I was alone with Shônagon. The silence was awkward. Then, in a small voice, she began to tell me what her life with him was like. François talked constantly about me. It was a regular obsession. I avoided her eyes, so sad and resigned. A magnificent Hokusai on the wall. Not a single Haitian painting. The decor was entirely Asian. On the outside, he’s a Quebecker. Within his own walls, he’s Japanese. Everyone is always telling him that Haiti is a disaster. Does he ever dream of Haiti? Does he remember the country? He returned with the rum (Haiti in a bottle) in the middle of a silence. Now he began telling me about his wife. He started with her origins. Her father is Spanish and her mother Japanese. She inherited from both sides: Spanish fire and Japanese sobriety, he added without a smile. As if the thing that had once seduced him no longer meant much. An interesting mix in bed, I imagined. Those are the qualities I’d like to have as a writer: a classic style fueled by devastating passion. François told stories from our boyhood as he drank. He remembered tiny things my memory could not hold. I imagined him in front of a bottle of rum on a Saturday night, performing a heartbreaking solo. In life, we fight but a single battle. The more he drank, the more he wanted to recall the smallest details of his life before the big departure. He seemed desperate that he’d forgotten the title of a Tabou Combo song. And when I said — it was a pure guess — that it was “Bébé Paramount,” he was even more distraught that I, to whom music meant nothing, could remember the title he’d been searching his memory for all these years. It was typical of our strange relationship, of how he’d always claimed I was a genius, worthy of the Nobel. The only song whose title he’d forgotten, and I remembered it right off. That happens only with him; otherwise I don’t know anything in life. By the way he looked at his wife, I saw that what she had been trying to explain to me was true: I really was the focal point around which his incredible energy revolved. Every detail he conjured was about me, as if he had spent his entire life analyzing my being. Shônagon’s smile (his last piece of property) grew thinner as I, a helpless witness, was forced to watch the film of my life. Life before Shônagon. Every time I broke in to tell a story about him, he cut me off, the better to batter me with compliments. I felt as though I belonged to him. With his prodigious memory, so flattering to me, he had taken over my life. I had been dispossessed of myself. Beware of those who love you.

MAGIC MOMENT

AFTER A WHILE, he ushered me into his office, which was filled with photos of the two of us in different settings in Port-au-Prince. In front of the Rex Cinema, next to an ice cream vendor, playing soccer in the big square on the Champ-deMars, in our school uniforms across from the girls’ high school. I have no photos from that time. I’d forgotten François was so interested in photography, and that he’d even taken a correspondence course. He showed me a small picture, rather blurry, taken with some Japanese tourists. Japanese people in Haiti — I hadn’t remembered that. Nothing like a photo to cast you back to another time. We all have two lives, at least. One that settles into memory like a stone at the bottom of a well, and another that disappears as it unravels like a vapor trail. The tourists had actually been journalists from a big Tokyo daily who’d passed themselves off as innocent travelers in order to write an exposé about life in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship. We spent a lot of time with the young lady interpreter, Miss Shikibu Murasaki, who worked at the Japanese embassy. It was a very Japanese summer. The blushing Miss Murasaki would invite us all the time to the embassy for cocktails. I suppose everything started between François and her back then. I hadn’t noticed a thing, too absorbed at the time by Diderot and my fascination with the beginning of Jacques le fataliste. I read it as I walked down the street. You can’t read that book sitting down. That sense of speed suited me perfectly. I was always bugging François with Diderot. He thought the guy was lazy. The idea of laziness was fine with me. A lazy writer — now that was a life for me! Not too many descriptions and a lot of dialogue. Diderot is still an influence on me. There’s plenty of talk in his books. I like books where you see people talking. I hate it when the narrator talks for them. That method never got too far, though, because although Frenchmen love to converse, they don’t like to let their characters talk. Apart from crime novels, you never hear anyone even saying hello in a French book. It’s too easy, so writers skip that step, which you can’t do in real life. Unfortunately, Miss Murasaki had to return to New York to study journalism at Columbia University. All summer, we accompanied the journalists through the country, despite the Tontons-Macoutes who stuck to us like glue. We didn’t really notice them, so subjugated were we by Miss Murasaki, who led the expedition with wonderful grace. We would have followed her right into one of Papa Doc’s prisons. The journalists told her that her studies at the famous American university would help her find a job at a Tokyo newspaper. Unless she preferred working in television, in which case it would be simpler to go back to Japan and get a job doing the weather. Television is much more image than intelligence. Miss Murasaki turned as red as a beet at the very word “television.” We understood then that she was too shy for the small screen that sucks in human energies and spits out wind in return. François went to be with her in New York after I left Haiti. Now it’s François telling the story. We lived together for a while, but we were too different to share life as a couple. That had nothing to do with the fact she was Japanese. She considered love from the accountant’s point of view. Every week, she had to draw up a statement of our romantic and financial life. I spent, and she saved. We quickly understood we couldn’t live together. Since our desire still burned, we remained lovers, going from my little room to her spacious apartment in Manhattan (her parents were in banking and the diplomatic service). I continued to see her friends, who were all Japanese. Then I moved to Brooklyn, where I found something bigger. We saw each other less and less: I spent more time at my place, since I had sun in my room now. A love affair in New York is a fleeting thing. The sun is more reliable. Just before I moved out of Manhattan, I ran into a girl at Columbia who was a cousin of Shikibu’s. She lived in Brooklyn too. Destiny is made of many coincidences. Well, that didn’t work out either. I came back to Montreal, and that’s when I met Shônagon, at McGill where she was doing her master’s in accounting. Shônagon never knew I’d had two Japanese women before her. I convinced her that our meeting was the fruit of chance, and not the result of a path set out before me. You don’t just meet a girl, I’ve come to see, you meet a culture. And you don’t leave that culture easily. It takes five unhappy affairs to break free from a culture as powerful as Japan’s. Once you meet your first Italian girl, you’ll be eating spaghetti the rest of your life. That’s what makes people suspicious of interracial romances: they wonder if it’s really them or their culture that interests their partner. Blacks want to know whether they are really loved, or if someone just wants to support a cause. And rich people, if it’s just about their money. That’s why I never spoke of Shikibu in front of Shônagon. Sometimes I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to tell the truth, since I’m always afraid of running into someone who knew me in New York. Maybe she hasn’t told me everything about her life, either. Maybe she keeps a secret diary. So we’re even. We laughed. And with that laughter we left his office.

Shônagon was busy wrapping something when we came into the living room. She offered me the tightly tied package and forbade me to open it until I was by myself. François wanted to go hear some jazz at the Rising Sun. He was friends with the owner, a certain Doudou Boicel. I informed him that I didn’t have a dime — and he smiled kindly. Tonight was on him. We heard Dizzy Gillespie. A great sound, but it would have been better without all the exaggerated facial expressions. Then we went for a nightcap on Rue St-Denis, in the East End. The West was for meeting his friends. The East was where he went out with his wife. He ran his life like an accountant, with two columns: debit and credit. That’s all he’d kept of Miss Murasaki — the banking side. François was beaming. Even when I wasn’t saying anything, he was sure I was the most brilliant person he’d ever met. There was no curing him of that illusion. It was my karma. Fortunately, very few people share his opinion. The rest of the world, to reach the same conclusion, would demand proof — of which I have none. François weighed me with his heart, not his mind. That’s great, but hard to bear. Another nightcap. A little drunk, François wanted to introduce me to the customers. Shônagon kept her eyes lowered. After lengthy negotiations, I managed to convince him to give up his plan. I helped him to his feet. We headed for the car, climbing the hill that lead to Sherbrooke Street. Leaning on my shoulder, François started muttering things I had trouble making out. Like that he’d never loved Miss Murasaki, but seeing that I was interested in her, he got to her first. He wasn’t going to let me win in the woman area. I was in books, that was okay. The rest just sort of happened, he said, and here I am in the Montreal suburbs with a new Japanese girl. In life, we always take the wrong path at the right time. François wanted to drive me back, even though I kept telling him I’d rather walk beneath the glowing moon, which always makes me feel closer to Basho. Pretty soon, these wonderful mild nights will be over — winter is coming in. Life, for François, ended with adolescence. He filled up with memories back then, and everything has been frozen in that emotional space ever since. He’s never wanted to leave that magic moment. We weren’t far from the car when his wife slipped a matchbook into my hand with her cell phone number written on it.

ARE YOU PLAYING THE WHORE NOW, HARUKI?

IF YOU BUY only things that are expensive and carry a designer label, does that mean you’re a snob? That’s what Haruki asked Tomo in front of the bathroom. No, Tomo told her, not unless you’re doing it to bug your girlfriends. But how can I tell? When it’s just guys complimenting you, that’s a sure sign. You know them, Tomo, the girls would rather die than notice I’m in the room. I’m just part of the furniture. Sometimes I feel invisible. I take on the color of the landscape. I merge with the group like ivy with a wall. I’d like to be the water you drink that ends up drowning you. Why are you talking that way? What are you trying to prove, Haruki? I don’t get you! I’ve always talked this way. I’m just asking for a little attention. Just to tell you that, I had to get drunk as a skunk. Aren’t you always drunk? No, but I’m doing everything I can to get people to pay attention. And it’s no use. I’ve noticed, Tomo, that we’re only interested in people who despise us. I’m talking crap, right? I don’t do this every day. Normally I only talk inside my head, and I spend two days rehearsing something before I can say it out loud. And then nobody hears me anyway. I’m just a stop along the way. Seen, then forgotten. I’m the ugly duckling waddling after the others. If I want to occupy the main stage for more than ten seconds, I have to say something like “Your dress is on fire, Hideko.” My record stands at one minute, and to even get that I had to faint dead away. I earned myself a passing remark from Midori that day. Otherwise I’m the one doing the listening. I’m not getting on your nerves, Tomo? It’s weird to be talking so much. Most of the time I analyze what other people say. I’ve gotten good at it. I observe. I know what the others like, and that lets me imagine their hidden desires. I know that sounds pretentious. I’ve had too much time to polish sentences in my head. At night, I read Proust. As soon as someone mentions something that interests one of the group, I rush out and buy it. They go out of their way not to notice my new blouse or my brooch set with purple stones. That’s because everyone knows, Haruki, that you’re just a rich bitch. You never talk to anyone, you despise us, you’re here just to give your parents shit. What are you talking about? Tell me you’re joking, Tomo. You wear the kind of clothes that make our mouths water. Someone just mentions a dress they saw and the next thing we know, you’re wearing it. Happens every time. You really bug us, you know. You’re the biggest snob I know. You always put on this bored look every time we try to have a little fun. I’m supposed to be rich? I don’t have a penny. Me, a snob? The jealousy is killing me. Where do you get your money? You can always find money downtown. Are you playing the whore, Haruki? It’s not my fault there are so many guys with more money than brains. You fuck them? No, I suck, and only when I want new clothes. I’ve got a friend who works in a gym near the department stores, that’s where I spend my lunch hour. The bicep boys come by after their workouts. They don’t really need me, they’re more interested in their own muscles. They do push-ups till they drop, they get up off the floor, they look at themselves in the mirror, and that’s all they need to get off. I prefer the businessmen with their charming little bellies. They swing by to burn off a few calories before packing them back on again at the stripper bar next door. Beer and chicken wings and the girls sliding up and down the pole. What a choice — a snack or a blow job. I wait for them by the showers. That way they’re already clean. I have the key to the little room at the back. Quick and nasty. Some of them want me to swallow, and that costs double. Cash, of course. I rinse out my mouth. I go down to the sidewalk. I like to feel the sun on my face. The sun is my pimp. He’s always waiting for me downstairs. I buy my clothes next door, and a new brooch at Birks. There’s a silence. Finally, Tomo says, I don’t listen to the other girls and I don’t talk to them, either. I’m only here for Midori. But I’m not in love with Midori, the way everybody thinks. Stop, Tomo, everyone’s in love with Midori. Not me. All of us, in our way. I owe my life to her. She’s the air I breathe. I was dying of boredom before I met her. Don’t you think it’s strange that you can love someone so much without being in love? What are you really trying to say, Tomo? (A pause.) If she dies, I die — isn’t that clear? Okay, enough’s enough, I don’t want to hear about death. The rest of you girls, that’s your favorite subject. It makes me puke. Is it the season, or what? Who told you that you have to die if you love somebody? Maybe I’m weird, but if I love someone, I want to live. That’s because you’ve never really loved, Haruki. Can’t you just go ahead and die and stop beating us over the head with it? I didn’t say I felt like dying, Haruki, I said that Midori takes all my time. We’re all living off her. I’m different from the rest. We all say that. What do you know about the other girls? Everyone knows everything about everybody else. Whatever you do, there’ll be a pair of eyes watching you. And reading your mind too. I wouldn’t last long like that. We’re talking, right, but the other girls think I’m mute. I’m sure, Haruki, someone is making you buy all that stuff. I live in my head too much for anyone to manipulate me. That’s our national pastime. You’ll never know anything if you don’t ask questions. Listen: here, when no one’s manipulating you, it means you’re being manipulated. That’s how it works. Your favorite colors— are they really your favorites? Your favorite jewelry — is it really your favorite? Your favorite perfume — is it really? Your favorite panties—? Think about it, Haruki, and you’ll see that there’s someone else who has the same tastes you do. Yeah, but I don’t see it. Stop trying to defend yourself. Let yourself go. Act like we’re talking about somebody else. Make an effort. I don’t see anything, Tomo. Who dresses like you? Who wears the same perfume you do? Who wears the same size as you? I still don’t see. You’re some kind of dumb whore, most of the time they’re smarter than you are. Who do you see everywhere you go? Oh, shit, it’s Fumi. What does she want from me? Go ask her, Haruki. No way. You won’t find out anything. One day, maybe.

A HOTEL ROOM

SHôNAGON CHOSE the hotel, and she also set the date and the time of our rendezvous. A small hotel in the West End, made of red brick and covered with ivy. I wasn’t late, but she was already there. I gave my name at the desk and was told I was expected in room 12. Shônagon was sitting quietly by the window. She didn’t look embarrassed or intimidated. She smiled and motioned for me to sit next to her. This wasn’t the same woman I had met the other evening.

“Have you eaten?” she asked, in her gentlest voice.

Now I was embarrassed.

“No.”

“May I?”

She placed the basket on a low table at the foot of the bed and began unpacking every possible kind of seafood.

“I always thought you were a man of the sea. . François is earthbound. I am of the sea too. That’s why François attracted me. They say that opposites attract, don’t they?”

She prepared our little picnic as she chatted about small things. I understood that for her, conversation is like music. There is no subject. We could imagine a world run by someone as subtle as Shônagon, but that much delicacy inevitably attracts brutality. Our balance depends on a mixture of things. Our meal progressed in orderly fashion, and she slowed time to such a point that I could feel her impact on the city’s energy. I felt as though the city were turning around a single central axis: this room. The room was full of sunlight, and the window looked onto a small inner garden. The white sheets. The colorful fruit. The white wine. A daytime feast. She rose with unbearable grace and went to lie on the bed. I joined her without haste. I didn’t want to make the first move. I waited. She brushed my forearm.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll understand if you say no.”

Good Lord! Is that how a Japanese woman asks a man to honor her?

“I would like you to talk to me about François. I would like to love him, but through your voice. I want your voice to flow into my body and enter my heart. My heart can belong only to François.”

“I see.”

“All François talks about is you, ever since I’ve known him. Everything he does has a link to you. The other day when you were at our house, I thought his heart would burst. I’ve never seen him that way. Normally he’s so taciturn. I know he’s different with his colleagues. At the house, sometimes I think he’s following the manual for the perfect Japanese husband. He can say what he wants — my Spanish side doesn’t interest him at all. When I become passionate, it shocks him.”

“You hardly know me.”

Her voice nearly broke.

“But I eat with you, I listen to music with you, I’m sad with you, I’m happy with you, I sleep with you, and when my husband makes love to me, I feel you’re there too. . What am I saying? I know you’re there. Maybe even more than he is. . You can’t imagine the life I live.”

Softly, she began to cry.

“As soon as I met François, I knew this would be a triangle.”

“But you stayed.”

“It was a challenge. But how can you compete with memories from the teenage years? He doesn’t have a single unhappy memory with you. Even the dark days grow bright in his mind. You are his sun. I can’t take that away from him. Memories help him survive the winters. When it’s twenty below, he climbs into a tub of hot water with his little suitcase full of memories. And that’s enough for three days’ happiness for him.”

“You love him very much.”

She looked me in the eye, the first time she’d done that.

“Do I love him? As much as he loves you. I think only of him, I breathe only for him, I dream of him alone, I love only him… and to understand what he feels, I’m ready to love the man he loves.”

She laughed, then pressed against me.

“Talk to me about him,” she whispered. “I want to know him a little.”

“The only thing I know is that half of what he gives me credit for belongs to him. When he talks about me, he’s talking about himself.”

“I don’t want to hear logical things. . I know all the stories by heart. I want to hear his name, because François never says François. He always says your name, never his. Sometimes, when I want him to listen to what I have to say, I slip your name into the conversation.”

I glanced out the window, long enough to see a bird fly past. I turned and looked at her. She was at the end of her rope: running up against a wall for so many years.

“I’ve forgotten it all, you know.”

“How could you forget? No one can forget everything. Memory goes on working without our help.”

“I’m sure you know more about me than I know myself.”

“Just tell me one little story that’s about him, and him only. . Do it for me. Some little detail, some insignificant thing. Something he could never remember.”

Silence. More silence. We listened to the birds in the garden.

“There was something… We were supposed to meet on the main square. I was late, very late. He was sleeping on a bench.

There were four or five birds perched on his chest, as if they were watching over him. I stood there for a long time and watched him. I didn’t want to disturb him. I waited for the birds to fly away on their own before going to his side.”

“There,” said Shônagon softly. “A story he couldn’t know. And you were watching him, instead of him studying you. Thank you, my love. . I have to go now, but you can stay as long as you like. If you’re hungry, order something from downstairs. I’ll tell the front desk.”

THE MAN WITH THE SNAKE TATTOOS

JUST DOWNSTAIRS, BENEATH the hotel: the underground city. Stores crowded with old ladies in flowered hats making themselves useful by watching out for shoplifters. Restaurants where you can get something quick before going back to work. I sit down at a free table. A newspaper is lying there. A half-naked girl on page 7. That’s how you attract readers. For thirty-five cents, you get your money’s worth. The coffee costs twice as much. Since I didn’t pay for the paper, I come out all right. On page 36 is the picture of one of my old neighbors from back when I lived next to the deaf and blind school (it took me a while before I realized the girls couldn’t hear me). I read the story and learn that my neighbor has changed his address: he’s been transferred to a maximum security prison. He’s a star in the world behind the walls. It’s rare that someone looks exactly like what he is: a killer. It’s a form of honesty. His body is entirely covered in tattoos of snakes, tigers and dragons. And plenty of girls’ names inside big red hearts — tough guys are so sentimental. A few men’s names too — guys unfortunate enough to have crossed his path. What happened? His face is closed. I insist. Mute reaction. He used to spend hours just sitting there, without a word. At first that intimidated me. As time went by, I learned to tolerate his presence and not try to drag any information out of him. I did it out of curiosity, without moral judgment. As far as I was concerned, he could have killed them all. Or he might have just been a Sunday killer: what did I know? We all want to meet someone exceptional. Sometimes he would come upstairs to see me and tell me how his day went, down to the smallest detail. At times like that, he couldn’t stop talking. In the middle of a sentence, he’d get up and walk away. He’d keep his mouth shut for a month afterwards. I liked to watch him. Always on the alert. He missed nothing: not a sound, not a movement. Once in a while he’d go to the window to see what was happening in the street. He’d call me over.

“You know him?”

“No.”

He couldn’t understand how someone could live this way. In his opinion, I just didn’t realize we were living in a jungle. Such insouciance impressed him in the end. We met by chance, but he distrusted chance and fled it like the plague. For mystics, God is manipulating the whole show. For him, Inspector Tremblay of the rcmp is behind it all — the one who ended up busting him. If you ask me, there’s nothing unusual about neighbors meeting each other. I had just rented an apartment in this rotting building. I had occupied room 7 on the second floor for exactly three days. I was still greeting people in the stairway, even if they ignored me. Him, most of all. I didn’t know that the word hello could embarrass people to such a point. One evening he came knocking at my door. I opened up, and there I was, face to face with a killer. Someone had paid him off to eliminate me. Suddenly he put out his hand. I backed off: I was sure he was going to stick a knife into my gut. His malevolent laughter — and total lack of humor — did nothing for the atmosphere. He stepped into my place without an invitation. Right away he began going over the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. I kept an eye on his powerful forearms. I was caught in a cage with a starving tiger. Who had paid for my death? A jealous writer? I thought the competition was content with destroying their enemies at the literary cocktail parties that infested the city. He moved through the apartment, paying no attention to me. I was not his center of interest. He went and opened a window, looked suspiciously down on the street, then came back and sat down next to me on the couch. He finally turned and gave me a long look.

“Who do you work for?”

“What?”

Suddenly his face turned crimson, as if he had sat down on a snake by accident.

“Never answer me that way. You understand?”

I almost said What? a second time.

“I’m not part of any group.”

More silence. I heard my breathing, but not his. My neighbor was noisily rehearsing Hamlet. The killer (I don’t know what else to call him) listened a while, then pointed at the wall.

“He’s an actor,” I said, to head off any faulty interpretations.

He went over to where my books were spread out on the table and stroked them with the palm of his hand.

“You read all these?”

I didn’t have very many.

“Yes…. But I don’t keep them.”

“What do you do with them?”

“I give the ones I like to people I like. I throw away the rest.”

His eyes had a strange glow as he looked my way. I had set something off in the mind of the beast. He smiled. His white fangs. For a split second, I saw a little window open inside him.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a beer?”

I opened two bottles. We drank slowly.

“What about another?”

I had filled up yesterday. Every time I took out two beers, I put two more in the fridge. Night fell without us noticing. Suddenly he got to his feet and headed for the door.

“You’re an okay guy. I live downstairs, number 3. Anyone gives you shit, you come and tell me. The name’s Réjean.”

We shook hands. Réjean was missing two fingers. Instead of pity, I felt mostly fear. The proof I was dealing with a real pro. We were both manual laborers. I needed my fingers to write. I hoped we wouldn’t reach such extremities: cutting off the hand of a writer.

Now I’m looking at his photo. Surrounded by a dozen cops, chains on his feet, he’s climbing into an unmarked van. I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t looked at the photographer at the last second. That hard face, those small eyes, that vicious smile. I know another Réjean. The guy who told me how he used to go fishing with his father. His Gaspé childhood. I could see the trout flashing silver in his eyes.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN'S COWBOY BOOTS

ONE EVENING THERE was a knock at the door. I opened it. He refused to come in. I understood I was to follow. Some animals communicate that way. He wanted to show me his lair.

“No one’s ever been in here,” he said.

I didn’t answer. He grabbed me by the neck.

“I told you no one’s ever been in here.”

“It certainly is an honor!”

He smiled. He was doing his absolute best to put on a show for me. He offered me everything he owned. He brought me an object, and depending on how I looked at it, he would pull it out of my hands.

“You probably won’t care…”

We had drunk a few beers, and I was heading for the door when his face lit up. He scrambled through the apartment and found me an old pair of cowboy boots. He was sure he’d got it right this time. I couldn’t refuse, even if they were old boots curled up at the toes.

“They belonged to a friend of my father’s. I knew I’d find someone to give these to one day.”

I thanked him and went upstairs with the boots. I was in the middle of a Lee van Cleef Western when I heard a knock on the door. He was wearing a smile like a kid about to play a trick on someone. He handed me a book covered in lime dust. I could hardly read the title. The author’s name had disappeared under the dust. He waited for my reaction. I opened the book. The pages cracked like dry bread. I found myself gazing at Richard Brautigan’s droopy mustache and worldweary eyes.

“He was a friend of my father’s. They used to go troutfishing together, right behind the house. I spent hours watching them out the window. They were like two posts nailed into the river… My mother didn’t want me to bother them.”

I stood there a moment, trying to picture Brautigan in these boots. They were the cowboy boots he wore all the time. He has them on in the few photos I’ve seen of him. He gave them to his Gaspé friend, who passed them on to his son, who was now giving them to me. If I had to choose between the writer’s typewriter and his boots, which would I choose? The typewriter, no doubt. Practically lying on top of the machine, he typed with his heavy fingers. His spirit lived in his fingertips. Which is false. Actually, he beat out the rhythm of his books with his feet. His feet in these boots. A real cowboy. He walked into the river in these boots. I thought of all those things as I tapped the boots one against the other. White dust fell. Réjean was waiting for me to say something, even though he’d never read a book in his life. These boots were his last connection to his father, the man who did only what he wanted to.

“He was a very delicate but delirious writer. He wrote the way he fished. He hunkered down in the middle of a book and wouldn’t budge. Once in a while you’d feel a slight pull. A fish had just taken the bait. The problem was that we never saw the fish. He always managed to let it slip away.”

Fishing, writing. Réjean looked at me, incredulous. He’d never understood my metaphors, but he did get the emotion. He understood I was moved.

“I knew you would know him. My father told me he was a pretty strange guy. They died the same year.”

I read the inscription. To my friend Réjean.

“That’s for my father. We have the same name.”

Réjean turned and left. He was too moved to hang around. On the table, I placed the old cowboy boots that had belonged to the author of The Tokyo-Montana Express.

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.

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.

THE QUEST FOR GOLD

WHEN I’VE READ too much at the library, I go and relax in the little park at the top of the hill. I sit down on a bench in the sun and think about the Midori book. Though I’ve been trying since the very beginning to distance myself from writing, I go right back to it every time. Why isn’t there another way of doing it? Through assertion, for example. I assert that I’ve written a good book about the multiple lives of Midori and her group (I used images from the short film to reconstruct the troubling atmosphere of those quiet days). I already have the title: A Song for Midori. I’ve said it before, once you have a good title, the rest falls into place. You just have to wait. That’s not so easy. It’s a lost art. I can’t even take a good nap, let alone empty my head. A film or a book always starts off great. You have that clean energy that beginning something gives you. But after the first quarter, it goes off track, and every time for the same reason: you’re not letting things follow their natural course. It’s not that different from planting peas: you make a hole, you put the seed in and cover it over with earth, then you water it and move on. No use waiting to see if it’ll sprout. You have to trust nature’s healthy logic. Literature doesn’t like those people who wait for it, sitting like fools in front of a typewriter. I go out for a breath of fresh air. Two guys are unloading cases of beer. A black man and a white man. I think of the south of the United States and Faulkner. And I fall out of my simple little story. Here I am back in the political world out of sheer lack of concentration. Basho’s art is one of concentration. I should have learned that lesson after all this time. The truck is spitting black smoke in front of the bar. One of the two men is naked from the waist up. The other guy is running with sweat. They’re working fast, talking the whole time, telling stories. Real pros. I write fast too. Maybe badly, but always fast. I assert that I am the fastest sprinter of my generation. People should take my word for it, because not everyone makes such audacious claims, saying he’s the best. In other trades, yes — but not in literature. Athletes don’t hesitate to say they’re out to win gold. But writers get artistically fuzzy when you mention awards. They should seek inspiration from kids — they don’t think twice about showing off their biceps. The problem is, people distrust those who move through life with an open face. And people also believe, naively, that art isn’t created in a gym. In fact, you have to train hard, which is why I’m drenched in sweat. I picture myself again in Midori’s universe. Before my closed eyes, scene by scene, the entire black-and-white film of my stay there rolls past, with Hideko, Noriko, Fumi, Tomo, Haruki and Eiko. I picture myself walking in Basho’s footsteps. The purple party at Midori’s place. Wandering through the city. The brilliant landscapes of autumn. Already the air is warmer beneath this splendid sun. Its heat spreads across my face. I could spend days on this park bench watching the young squirrels climb trees. I feel the surrender of sleep overtake me. I shiver: a cloud has passed by. Everything will disappear (what we lived and what we dreamed). A radioactive future awaits us.

I'M NOT BORGES AND MR. TANIZAKI ISN'T MR. TANIZAKI EITHER

I SLOWLY OPENED my eyes, only to discover Mr. Tanizaki’s laughing round face.

“It’s like a revolution over there. Your book is becoming a social phenomenon.”

“What book? I didn’t write any book.”

“I mean the book you’re writing.”

Mr. Tanizaki was completely wound up. He waved a slender volume in front of my face. I looked at it but couldn’t make out a single word: it was all in Japanese. He pulled it away.

“The title is ‘I Am a Malagasy Writer’ and it’s written by a Japanese guy.”

“So what?”

“That’s how young writers are displaying their contempt for literary nationalism. For them a Japanese writer doesn’t necessarily write a Japanese book. In fact, a Japanese writer doesn’t even exist any more.”

“Too bad, because that’s what I am.”

“Over there, their new slogan is, ‘A writer is a writer. A Japanese is a Japanese.’ For them, these are parallel lines. They paraded around the Tokyo Book Fair chanting that slogan. There was something about it on the news, in between a story about agriculture and the latest banking scandal. Such a thing would have been unthinkable just a month ago: literature on the news. And in Japan.”

He was as red as a squash player at the end of a game.

“And then there’s the tv host who wrote some shitty book.”

He seemed to have recovered the energy of his student protest days.

“It’s called ‘I Am a Japanese tv Host.’ But everyone let him know that he was completely not getting it. He was trying to proclaim his Japanese pride. Baudrillard — you know, the French philosopher — wrote a long article about how it sounds less Japanese when a Japanese says he’s Japanese.”

Mr. Tanizaki was turning circles around my park bench. I listened to him half-heartedly, though I felt his passion for the issue. If I understood correctly, the whole thing started with a cultural program I was featured on, then the tv got involved, and pretty soon it hit the streets. Even the army got into the act: on the nightly news, in front of his whole family, an officer declared, “I am a Korean soldier.” A Japanese officer said that! Of course he was thrown into the brig, but then the student press went wild. In the end he was sent to the north, a kind of internal exile. But the high point of the whole business was this truck driver, rippling with muscles and covered in tattoos, who did a transvestite number late at night in a little club on the outskirts of town. Everyone rushed to see him. His hit song played on every radio station: “I Am a Japanese Geisha.” Everyone was singing it in the subway, even kids.

Mr. Tanizaki was out of breath by the time he finished his story.

“How’s it going for you?” I asked him.

“Couldn’t be better! They’ve been taking me seriously at the consulate since all this began. They even talked about me on tv. My father wrote to me, the first time in his life that he’s opened his heart to someone. He certainly never did that with my mother. He said he regretted never having told her he loved her. He told me about the war. He was a career soldier. The Army was his whole life. In the end, he sent me his love. And, most amazing of all, he didn’t say a single word about the homeland or the Emperor. I cried when I read his letter. A dozen sentences written down in pencil. . I’m going back to Japan. I’ll be able to go back to my old job at the college, teaching poetry.”

“That’s good news.”

“Remember back in the restaurant, you asked me right out, ‘And the poets?’ I didn’t answer. That’s what rekindled my desire to take up teaching again. Never forget poetry. . Oh, and a major publisher asked me to write the preface to your book. I’m going to take a few days, then get down to it. I wanted to tell you what an honor it was to spend time with you. Your book changed my life.”

“But I haven’t written a book.”

“You did better than that,” he said, his voice low and full of emotion.

It’s good to write a book, but sometimes it’s better not to write it. I was famous in Japan for a book I didn’t write. I was starting to get hungry. I decided to walk downtown and buy myself a hamburger with fries and a Coke, the only American contribution to world gastronomy. And if the fries were soggy and cold, the way I figured they’d be, I would console myself by thinking about how famous I was in Japan.

“Let me wish you good luck, Mr. Tanizaki.”

“You know me as Mr. Tanizaki, but that’s not my real name. Tanizaki is my favorite novelist. You can’t imagine how much enjoyment you have given me… And now, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You’re not going to spend the rest of your life sitting on this park bench?”

“Not a bad idea.”

Once he’d left, I sent a telegram to my publisher: “I am no longer a writer.” That’s not the title of a novel. Mind you, it wouldn’t be a bad one — in perfect harmony with my progress towards minimalism. Absolute zero, though, would be: “I am no longer.” I’ll keep those two titles for later on, when my belly is scraping my backbone. I won’t be able to use “I am no longer” until I’m at least ninety years old.

I went down St-Denis and turned right on Ste-Catherine, disappearing into the downtown crowds. It was one of those sunny autumn Montreal days. The air smelled good. The girls were still wearing their summer skirts. Right then, no one knew where I was. Or who I was either. But I was still famous in Japan.

LANDSCAPE

BASHO DIDN’T LOOK at the landscape like a geographer. He perceived only its colors. An exacerbated visual sensitivity to the detriment of a waning sense of smell. Good hearing, that’s for sure. He heard music (falling snow) that a normal ear could not pick up. Basho took nourishment only to continue his journey toward the Deep North; he set out to walk across Japan in order to see a sunset. During his long journey, we rarely see him eating, and he almost never speaks of the pleasures of food. He’s certainly no Caribbean. On the other hand, he does know how to contemplate. An endless gaze that makes us feel as if he were motionless. But intense activity is stirring underneath. We feel a strong passion in his descriptions, which at first might seem cold — winter was his season of choice. The smell of fresh snow wipes away all others, except that of the fish called konoshiro, whose odor recalls charred human flesh, and which he will not eat. Basho doesn’t face the landscape he wishes to describe; he stands behind it. He is so quick we never catch him slipping over to the other side — except that suddenly the colors start to vibrate before our eyes. The thousand nuances of green of the bamboo shoots. Basho acknowledged but one master: landscape. A master who did not know he was one. He seemed in harmony with nature. As for me, nature puts me to sleep. The peasant disappears into the landscape. His song is the beginning of art. In another time, traveling into the north of Haiti, I came across peasants working a rice paddy. I was in a red Jeep with an agronomist, a rice specialist who had named a strain of rice after his beloved. We’d gotten ourselves stuck. The peasants came to help us, and they never stopped singing. What is the importance of song in agricultural work? Does it help give energy? At times we scarcely heard them; then, their voices would swell anew. Sometimes the voices were high-pitched; at other times, the bass prevailed. The feminine mixes with the masculine. Peasants aren’t concerned with genres. Sacred songs, bound with voodoo, serve as a curtain separating two worlds. Between the two stands Legba. Legba must open the gate for you if you want to change worlds. He is invoked in the first couplet of the first song. Song keeps the peasants in a world of pagan gods and voodoo ceremonies. Faces appear in the landscape. Other names are heard: Damballah, Erzulie, Zaka. Zaka, the god of agriculture. Zaka, so stingy that even when he dances, he keeps his eyes on his wallet. I watched their show and thought that people of the earth are the same everywhere. Caught inside their songs and rituals. Basho sought to penetrate the secrets of this obsession. He believed the origins of poetry were to be found there. I certainly don’t believe in the peasant, who is often fascist, nor in popular culture, which is always reactionary (Mishima is the perfect example of the writer falling into the trap of “pure” identity). But Basho — Basho amuses me.

THE FINAL VOYAGE

I CROSS THE street. The snow is heavy and wet. Evening falls quietly. The brake lights suddenly glow sharper. Red reflections in frozen slush. A snowflake falls into my eye. A young woman, her arms loaded with packages from a department store, smiles as she goes past. How does she manage in the snow with shoes like that? Some art forms are harder to master than others. A man runs into me as he goes by. I stumble. He turns around to say he’s sorry but already his voice is fading. I go on my way without quite recovering my balance. Horns are blaring at me from all sides. Urban music. Through a fog I see a woman screaming something at me, her eyes and mouth wide open. Among the cars, I search for the celebrated barrier that Basho was so happy to cross to take the narrow road that led to the Interior.

Content

Dany Laferriere
I Am a Japanese Writer

THE FASTEST IN AMERICA

AT THE FISH STORE

AN ANXIOUS SALMON

A POCKET GUIDE TO ASIA

LIFE ON YOUR FEET

BASHO IN THE METRO

THE KISS AT THE CAFÉ SARAJEVO

THE NIPPON AT THE EIFFEL TOWER

THE BJORK VOODOO DOLL

PRIMITIVE PAINTERS

OBJECTS

THE MIDORI GANG

A POISON KISS

EIKO'S ENDLESS BACK

CRISSCROSS

THE HUMAN MACHINE

THE NEGRO'S DEFEAT

A SUNDAY IN THE PROVINCES

IN THE BATH

LA PETITE MORT

THE FINAL LEAP

A SONG FOR MIDORI

FRENCH KISS

A PING — PONG GAME

DO YOU LIKE SUSHI?

ARE YOU A WRITER?

MANGA DEATH

PLATO AND THE LANDLORD

HIDEKO'S SECRET

THE PARK

THE TROJAN WAR

A DISH OF SPAGHETTI IN FRONT OF THE TV SET

THE COP'S NIGHTSTICK

THE TIME OF THE MIMOSAS

THE WEATHER GIRL

THE SORROWS OF MR. TANIZAKI

AMERICANIZE/JAPANIZE

EGO ZOOM

THE COLDEST EYE

SOFT SKIN

KAMIKAZE

THE PUBLISHER OF STOCKHOLM

THE CANNIBAL IN HIS HOMETOWN

METAMORPHOSES

A SPLENDID VIEW OF THE RIVER

CHRONICLE OF A DISPOSSESSION

MAGIC MOMENT

ARE YOU PLAYING THE WHORE NOW, HARUKI?

A HOTEL ROOM

THE MAN WITH THE SNAKE TATTOOS

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN'S COWBOY BOOTS

CLOSED EYELIDS

A FORGOTTEN SECRET

THE QUEST FOR GOLD

I'M NOT BORGES AND MR. TANIZAKI ISN'T MR. TANIZAKI EITHER

LANDSCAPE

THE FINAL VOYAGE