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.”
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?”
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.
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.