I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferriere

  “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?”