Of course, these were all kind-of-colleagues and, one or two of them, almost I might have said friends. Down there on my pre-breakfast walks, it was as if they had all combined with the host’s pressed invitation to give me a moment’s pause. Past flaked edges, undulant willows, equivocal bends and shallows, I might just have the chance to pull that past together, roll it up into a ball, like some failed draft, and chuck the lot right into that glinting intellectual waterway. Then those past-resented years might become a blur and be lost in so many forgotten opportunities, leaving me able to see again untarnished the clouds among leaf-fringes, the shimmer of sunlight on water, and all those other far-off things.
Being out of the loop – and how – I wasn’t finding it at all easy to catch on to what the others were discussing. The topics of conversation in any such microclimate shift as unpredictably as the weather in this north European archipelago. The prizewinners come and go with the publishing seasons, each receiving their due portions of resentment and bile. Attempts to link by direct analogy the current styles with equally current burning issues and persuasions could only hold conviction for the weeks that were a long time in politics or, for that matter, literature written for the moment. After all my years away in a species of exile, I hardly knew the names of the players, never mind what games they were playing.
Ever the tactless unbeliever, I would slip up in the brain storming sessions themselves.
‘We murder to dissect,’ said the poet-critic at our first bout, ‘if I may quote a phrase.’
‘Live dissections have been reported in certain experimental conditions,’ I put in with a loaded inflection.
‘You’re not comparing us to concentration camp doctors?’ asked the man about town, with his familiar politesse.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said, ‘just trying to lighten up the session here, folks.’
And at those agonizing moments with their seminar eyes all turned upon me, as I coughed to get into one exchange about something or other, I could see it in their faces. It was obvious to me at least. I was to be the chosen victim, as clearly as if I’d been tied to a stake with the big black stewpot heating up below me. ‘If one of you doesn’t get your just desserts first,’ I had to prevent myself saying out loud.
‘It’ll be just another case of Ars longa, vita brevis,’ the academic hitman would smilingly say, and apropos of what seemed nothing.
After the first few sessions, it was true, I could sense that from various quarters of the room, people were going out of focus, their voices falling silent. The short story writer, occasionally scrawling a note of some kind on the back of the programme, hadn’t said a thing for some hours. Like the Cheshire cat – who was from hereabouts too – the grand dame of verse had disappeared. Whatever had happened to her?
‘She just had to split early,’ our host explained.
So that was one name to cross off my list.
‘But isn’t it supposed to be enjoyable?’ said the Internet magazine founder. ‘Art, I mean … isn’t it supposed to be enjoyable?’
This was in response to a rallying call from the poet-critic inviting us to make more strenuous moral enquiry into the ideals of disinterested contemplation. I’m afraid to confess my tummy rumbled even as he spoke.
The college food was, it has to be admitted, no worse than could be expected; we were lucky not to have been mysteriously poisoned, one and all. Breakfast was taken, for those that could stomach it, among gaggles of the senior citizens there for a gerontology conference. Three-course lunches were held in a common room, allowing conversations with neighbours to escape from the official topics on our programme, but equally putting paid to much intellectual effort once the dishes had been ingested.
Dinners were served on the undergraduate benches in college hall …
But it was the evenings in the pub afterwards when my being out of the loop was most painfully revealed. It was when the so-called state of things actually got thrashed out too. As soon as we’d settled down to our first drinks, while the laughter and gossip began to circulate, one or other celebrity’s name would never be far from somebody’s teeth.
‘He’s had it now,’ the academic hitman might say.
‘Oh, she’ll get what she deserves,’ said the professional feminist.
‘So-and-so’s totally shot,’ said the nationalist poet.
‘Well, I didn’t know there was a backlash going on against such-and-such-a-one,’ I naively blurted out.
‘A backlash?’ said one of the survivors. ‘There hasn’t even been a front-lash, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘God, I could kill him,’ said the head of department.
‘Why?’ our token woman, the professional feminist, now reduced to the role of love interest, glumly enquired.
‘Because he’s gone and taken my name in vain!’
‘Oh, calm down, we all of us have a more famous crime writer with just the same handle,’ said the perpetual writer-in-residence.
‘If we don’t have a pop star as well,’ I said – me myself I.
Naturally, my fellow-talkers had it in for the usual suspects; but if, like me, you haven’t the time or patience to keep up with the review and letters pages of the weekly journals, let alone the quarterlies and little magazines, it’s not that easy to tell whom the usual suspects might be.
Being out of everything, anyway, you don’t have a lot of evidence for thinking that other people are expressing opinions behind your back, and indeed the more likely thought is that you’re being treated to the usual non-benign neglect. However, as those talking shops continued, I began to pick up the occasional hint, and actually started to wonder whether I wasn’t myself being suspected of something – if not quite yet counted among those usual suspects to be rounded up by the thought police.
Needless to say, I’ve done my fair share of hatchet jobs … and the problem with these kinds of symposia, as I soon discovered, was that they resembled nothing so much as a trial by jury, a jury of your victims. We were all expected to come face to face with our corpses and accusers and then discuss the niceties of analogous cases and crimes with precisely those same people.
The overworked head of department was next to disappear, and no need to ask what had finished him off. I sadly deleted his name from my list.
So there we were, involved, after hours of shiftless searching for some common ground, in the delicate question of whether any of these little crimes should even be so much as mentioned. Would anyone or anything ever be brought to book for the decimation that had occurred, a decimation of which this was no more than a sideshow? I had long since abandoned all hope.
By the next-to-last day, though, I settled on the policy of admitting to everything – even the things I hadn’t done. That way no one would accuse you of anything else, or so I thought.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, to one of my victims, ‘if those words of mine did cause you pain. Mind you, we are paid to say what we honestly think, are we not?’
I even found myself apologizing for the case where I’d been credited with a book review filed by another of the suspects. It was none of my doing, and you know how it is with newspapers. They hadn’t even printed a correction and apology. I was sorry, but that didn’t make the hate mail for his character assassinations any less painful to receive.
And what of the ten other victims remaining? Would I still have to pick one? Just one? Would a thought experiment do the trick of assuaging my thirst for … for what exactly was it? I was saying this to myself as I tried to access my e-mail in the student computer room. Sitting at the screen beside mine was the American academic, firing off messages to the @marks on his global network. I’d been granted a couple in my time. He was capable of sending acceptances and rejections of manuscripts in seven keystrokes, initials included. Now that’s what I call efficient dispatch.
Later the same day he took a little more time to explain over a drink exactly what was wrong with one of my more recent publications. What it a
mounted to was that I had dared to express a limiting judgment about the father professor who had taken him under an extended wing and helped him to a tenure-track post somewhere in the desert places of the south-by-south-west. I found his unexpressed loyalty almost touching in its creaturely gratitude. Needless to say, I attended to his arguments – ones being shouted at me over the beer-hall foreground noise – about how my premises were way wrong, how my conclusions should be less drastic …
‘God, I could murder you,’ I thought, and smiled my most open-minded of smiles.
At the dinner to celebrate our symposium’s end, there was certainly relief at having reached that far without any actual bloodshed. Even here, though, our host had failed to appear. Had he been imagining all this time that we would bond better without his oversight, by giving us the chance to talk about him behind his back? If so, his ears couldn’t have been burning. We disposed of him with that old quip: ‘If there’s one thing worse than being talked about … it’s being not talked about.’ Still, there were a few comic moments at our would-be feast of mirth – like the sight of an entire fellowship trying to fight its way into an hors d’oeuvre of unripe avocadoes. Some were chewing manfully at the flakes they had chipped off, while others were pushing them disgustedly away, as if at a dinner staged by that multi-person Portuguese writer what’s-his-face.
As we chattered about this and that, the absent, indeed, seemed on or near everyone’s lips. Naturally, we did mention in passing the two characters we had lost along the way. Among the others were family members missed back home, with whom the participants were itching to be reunited. Since the death of my parents and the inevitable divorce that came as a result of my expatriation, I have barely any to speak of. So that excuse for my disappearance did not arise. If I could survive the last night’s drinking, I would be heading back to the airport first thing the following morning and subjecting myself to one more long-haul flight.
Darkened oil paintings of the immortal dead in broad gilded frames were pointedly ignoring us from the high-panelled walls. They were the usual mixed bunch of great poets and scholars who had helped to create the very language we were speaking, most of their names lost in the mists of information overload – though able to be looked up should the need arise. There was the one with the eye-patch like a buccaneer, another with skin the colour of Stilton cheese, a third whose reputation for obscure sexual practices had recently eclipsed the renown of his overwhelming lyric gift. Some of their names were practically there on the tips of our tongues. But most of us were pointedly paying them back by pretending they weren’t there too.
‘Yes, it seems we’re all on the point of …’, one of our number began on the side opposite me.
Now was my moment! With all our survivors gathered together and in something resembling festive mood, now was the time to do it pat! That’s exactly what I was thinking as I gingerly slipped a hand into my inside pocket, feeling around for the murder weapon, but where had it got to? Where was my poisoned blue pencil?
‘Don’t do it,’ said a voice beside me; but she was clearly talking to somebody else – about whether to accept a memorial volume commission, or so it appeared. Well, of course, of course you’ve already guessed that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do anything of the kind. We really didn’t deserve it, did we? No, a murder’s just too good for the likes of us. That’s what I found myself thinking. Far too good, wouldn’t you say? It would make all this typing have a point, would make it approach a satisfactory end. Ut doceat and all that …
Yet there at this pause in the flagging conversation, as I looked up from the ruins of the meal on my plate, and around at the dining hall table, the din in the room for a moment stilled, as if for a parting grace, or coup de grâce, it seemed there was really nobody to kill, we were all as good as dead already; or at least that there was, and had been for some time, an intangible corpse amongst us, the lifeless body of the real victim there in our midst.
Foreigners, Drunks and Babies
‘In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.’
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
‘The welcome party is on Wednesday night. Will Mrs James come too?’ The department assistant, Mr Sato, had half-turned from his computer screen. It showed the homepage of a second-hand book store.
‘Certainly I will. Looking forward. Not sure about my wife, though.’
I was sure, in fact. As if to acknowledge what was thought to be a custom in the outside world, my Head of Department would regularly let it be known that resident wives of visiting professors were very welcome to go through the ordeal of such official get-togethers. But Gillian, my wife, had realized soon after coming to live here that foreigners’ gaijin spouses were not really expected to attend such events.
‘Professor Yoneyama has decided we will go somewhere special,’ Mr Sato was saying, ‘and I have booked a Chinese restaurant down town.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘By the way, how’s it going?’
Mr Sato gave a slight wince by way of an answer. His doctoral dissertation on The Invisible Man was causing him acute compositional anguish. I expressed a few visiting professorial noises to the effect that I was standing by to correct his English the moment that was needed. It was early October, the week of the second semester’s intensive course. Mr Sato’s submission date was fast approaching. His barely-started thesis would not be ready for examination in this academic year.
‘What’s Professor Miyazaki talking about?’ I asked.
‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ said Sato.
I made a mental note to think of something halfway sensible to ask about the translation of Dogberry’s speeches in Japanese.
Twice a year the department hosted a weeklong special lecture during which regular classes would be cancelled. The students were given a break from the usual voices and a glimpse of someone else’s teaching. Professor Satoshi Miyazaki, one of the best young Shakespeareans in the country, had come up from Kyoto to fill out the department’s coverage that year. Toshi and I were one-time colleagues in the old capital. Despite my transfer to this university, a four-hour Bullet Train journey away, we had managed to keep up our acquaintance and met occasionally at conferences in far-flung parts of the country.
‘Will you be going to the second party?’ Mr Sato asked.
‘Don’t know,’ I thought it best to reply. ‘My wife’s got a bad cold and isn’t sleeping well – I may have to get home early.’
‘You are a doting husband,’ said Sato.
But I was only too aware of using my wife’s health as a cast-iron excuse for going home after the first party had ended. By then the wilder students would already be turning bright pink, yelling at the tops of their voices, challenging each other to drinking contests, getting so drunk they’d be on the verge of collapse. Years back now, when a third-year student, Sato himself had committed the embarrassing act of mixing his drinks at the annual welcome party and, dead drunk, had been convulsively sick all over the foreign professor. Immediately, a group of girl students – like trainee mothers with a wayward baby – had taken charge of the very pale Sato, cleaned him up, walked him around, then helped him back to the tiny student hole he rented. Others had brought water and warm cloths to sponge the half-digested food and drink from their foreign professor’s grey flannel suit. Momentarily inclined to be annoyed, I quickly found myself appreciating the funny side – not least because Sato would be crippled with shame in class the next day. It would be something that I’d have over him, or so he would think, for the rest of his university career. And what a career! Sato had gone from the ridiculous to the sublime, had risen from his drunken exploit to being the department assistant with an MA in American fiction, a year’s experience researching in a college in Washington State, and three essays published in local academic journals. With the doctorate completed, he would surely be an unstoppable candidate for a post in the shrinking and ever more competitive Japanese ass
istant professorial market.
Autumn was the conference season, season of talks and visiting lectures. Having carved a niche out for myself up here, I didn’t much like watching foreigners new to the country stumble ineptly all over my patch. But as chance would have it, this year the invitee being Toshi, the Wednesday night party at the Chinese restaurant promised to be a chance to catch up on news and gossip from Western Japan. I was almost excited by the thought of going.
Come Wednesday, the various dishes kept arriving, the Lazy Susan in the centre slowly revolving, and I kept racking my brains for something else to say. I had found myself placed between two of the quietest graduate girls. Pretty they were, but their lack of conversational skills would have given shrinking violets and wallflowers the reputations of brazen hussies. This, frankly, was the only problem with these department gatherings, the problem of what to say.
‘Dr James, I know you are a scholar,’ Miyazaki had asked me when we’d first met, ‘but what exactly is your academic field? Who is your specialist subject?’
On that occasion it was me lost for an answer. If only I had done, all those years before, what the sensible graduate students did: chosen a canonical author with a large oeuvre that I could devote my entire life to re-editing and discussing in ever-greater depth. But I had always preferred the life of the hit-and-run merchant who finds a poet with a writing-block, the sort who finally ends up producing a slim Collected Poems after a life of obscurity and neglect. With authors like that you could knock off the essay rediscovering them, get it published in a quarterly somewhere, then, without so much as a look back after the proof-stage, move on to your next accident-statistic.
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