I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferriere

  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.