That he should wind up in a shop selling electronic goods was inevitable, and of all the astonishing new products he found there, nothing astonished him more than how much smaller things had become. He had had a Sony Walkman for ages, but on sale here – he could hardly believe his eyes – was a Sony Watchman, a tiny, flat television set, not much bigger than a pocket calculator and in Jonas’s eyes as much of a masterpiece as a Renaissance miniature. He just had to have one of these, and it was as he was standing with the box in his hand that he was struck by an irresistible impulse: he would speak to – no, not merely speak to – he would interview Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. Not for television – that would be too complicated – but for a newspaper. ‘It’s probably impossible,’ he said to himself as he stood there eyeing the Sony logo, the best-known trademark in the world after Coca Cola, ‘but I will, I must, do it.’
And thanks to his impressive business card and a few carefully considered words written with a calligraphy pen purchased in the Kyukyodo stationery shop in Ginza on the NRK notepaper which he had had the foresight to bring with him, and thanks, not least, to the fact that Morita chanced to be in Tokyo just then – a stroke of luck to which Jonas Wergeland turned a blind eye – two days later, with a newly acquired dictaphone in his pocket, he was bowed into Morita’s office in Sony’s flamboyant headquarters on Gotenyama Hills in Shinagawa on the south side of the city. Jonas knows that this is a huge scoop, and he has already made a deal with an editor back home in Norway; he can just picture how people’s eyes will pop when they open their Saturday paper and turn to the sensational double-page spread: a Norwegian having an exclusive tête-à-tête with Akio Morita, one of those men whom some would say exercised more power over the lives of ordinary people around the world than any national assembly.
One might well ask what possessed Jonas Wergeland to do this, Professor. Because, even though he did have genuine admiration for the Japanese gentleman across from him, who seemed – perhaps because of his mane of white hair – to be surrounded by a nimbus of wisdom, the deeper reason lay, of course, in that old, niggling suspicion that he was a middle-of-the-roader – something which, so far, his television career, despite all the respect, despite all the attention, tended to suggest. So yet again it was his extraordinary calibre that Jonas Wergeland was endeavouring to summon up, or have confirmed, as he sat there conducting his carefully prepared interview with Akio Morita, an individual who had helped to change the world in which Jonas lived and even shaped the medium from which he earned his living: television. For a second Jonas felt as though he were talking to God, his creator.
Such a thought would surely have been far from the mind of Morita himself, with his steel-rimmed glasses, his white shirt and dark tie, as he sat there describing the history of Sony, from its early beginnings just after the war right up to the present day. ‘Our aim was always to break new ground,’ he said, ‘and we knew that we had to export in order to survive.’ Morita had lived in New York in the sixties and spoke very good English. Jonas was struck by his charming manner, his un-Japanese candour and, not least, the honesty with which he answered questions about management techniques and the difference between the American and the Japanese styles. This is going to look great in print, he thought exultantly as Morita was rounding off with some pearls of wisdom about business management and the world economy. Before he left, and after they had duly posed together for the photographer whom Jonas had hired, he thanked Sony’s founder heartily.
Not until he was in the lift did it occur to Jonas that he had just met the man who had been the ruin of Vebjørn Tandberg and as such was, in a way, the reason why his own little flutter on the stock market had come to such a sorry end.
Some hours later he was sitting in the café at the top of the Akasaka Prince Hotel, an extraordinary half moon-shaped skyscraper designed by Kenzo Tange, the architect responsible for the ultramodern sports stadiums which, as a boy, Jonas had seen in television broadcasts from the 1964 Olympic Games. And it really was like being on the moon. Far below him spread the whole of the centre-less city of Tokyo, looking as though it were floating, was in motion, and in that chaotic mass down there Jonas actually thought he could make out a spiral formation, like a galaxy. On the marble-topped table in front of him lay a postcard he had written to Kristin, a card with a picture of the cherry trees in blossom, because his daughter collected pictures of trees. He had also bought a pretty lacquer casket in which he hoped she would keep her sacred things, as he had once put the puck and the silver brooch in his casket. Jonas returned his attention to the enormous slice of Queen Elizabeth chocolate cake, sat there congratulating himself, hundreds of feet above the ground in a shimmering blue and white room. And then, in the midst of his triumph, while he was sitting there patting himself on the back as it were, an enormous wave of despondency – not to say, nausea – washed over him.
Suddenly it was all so clear – and not simply because he was so high up, with such a stunning panoramic view: he was nothing but a spectator. He could travel halfway around the world, but he would always be a spectator. He was a Norwegian, and as such born to be a spectator. Here, in Tokyo, he had the ghastly feeling that Norway was not represented at all, not as an active participant. No, wait – there were a few products: in one shop he had seen a toothbrush manufactured by Jordan, and if he visited a bookshop he might find a book by Thorbjørn Egner about two little dental demons called Carius and Bactus – as if all Norway had to offer to the Far East – to the whole world, for that matter – was a moralistic injunction to keep one’s teeth clean. While the Japanese had permeated everyday life, even in Norway, with technology, from the cars on the roads to the sounds and images in living rooms, the Norwegian contribution to the world was stuck at the level of goats’ cheese and woollen mittens. Looking at it from here, from the top of the crescent-shaped Akasaka Prince Hotel, in this magnificent Asian amphitheatre, Jonas Wergeland realized that Norway was but a part of an obscure and totally inconsequential periphery.
The blue interior no longer shimmered. Jonas sat there surrounded by marble and mirrors and looked out over Tokyo. ‘It was as if a scream ran through me,’ he said later. The Morita interview was not a triumph. It was a sham. An adolescent fancy, a bit like collecting autographs – or having one’s dream of kissing Brigitte Bardot come true. Jonas could not help thinking of ordinary people who had their pictures taken with celebrities, as if securing themselves lifelong proof that they were not, after all, invisible or insignificant: ‘I interviewed Akio Morita!’ The truth slid over him like an unseen roller of lead: he had never been anything but a walking tape recorder, it seemed that he was forever doomed to copy others, to merely be someone who repeated or reproduced the thoughts and ideas of great people. And although up to now he had proved to be a master copyist, a true virtuoso in his field, he would have given a lot – everything – for the ability to create something with a dash of originality. All at once he felt completely flat, as if he had been just about to reach a finishing line but now found himself back at the start.
It was in this frame of mind that he took the underground further down the line and got off at Tokyo station, a little, redbrick Renaissance castle; from there he made his way across the moat, through the Otemon Gate in the steep wall encircling the Imperial Palace, and into the palace gardens, perhaps because he felt that he had to be out in the open, otherwise he might suffocate. He plodded glumly along paved paths and eventually found himself in the middle of the Imperial Palace’s East Garden where he sank down onto a bench, surrounded by flower beds, small coniferous trees and rhododendron bushes and by office workers armed with handy cardboard cases containing chopsticks and a little marvel of a lunch: minuscule dishes arranged as neatly and delicately as chocolates in a box.
Jonas sat gazing at the man-made landscape before him – a miniature mountain, a stream running into a pond, stone lanterns and a bridge – all forming a harmonious whole, true to the Japanese ideal. Across from him stood
a brown, wooden tea pavilion with a green copper roof. The sounds of birdsong and running water mingled with the faint rumble of the surrounding city. Jonas took out his dictaphone and removed the cassette, began to pull the tape out, slowly hauled out the cassette’s innards, until the entire tape lay in a tangled mass in his lap. He did the same with the camera film, the pictures of himself and Morita and, without thinking about it, tied a knot in the whole lot. Right next to him a gardener was clipping a bush; it gave off a pungent odour, a mixture of spice and perfume. Beyond the trees Jonas glimpsed one of the white corner towers on the wall, a sight that reminded him of something he had once heard: that a Norwegian marble quarry had supplied stone for the new Imperial Palace here in Tokyo. That was always something, he thought, reminded also of how he and Ørn – on one of the few, but memorable, expeditions instigated by Ørn – had made a tour of Oslo to look at buildings constructed out of Grorud granite. With pride, true pride, they had paced round the foundation walls of the Palace and the Historical Museum and stood outside the University Library, admiring the plinth of the building. Even the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s gravestone had come from Grorud. It was really the same story with the marble from Fauske, the only difference being that this stone now sat outside of Norway.
Feeling a little more cheerful, Jonas lifted his eyes to the soaring buildings of the banks and big corporations in the Marunouchi district on the other side of the wall and the moat; he was dazzled for a moment by the sun reflecting off their façades – and, perhaps, by the thought of the vast power which, like Sony, these multinational concerns represented – companies each one of which boasted a greater turnover than the GNP of some countries in Europe. A new, almost invisible, capitalist power was in the process of conquering the world, including little Norway, without anyone noticing.
The thought of Sony reminded him of something: towards the end of their conversation, Morita himself had brought up the subject of Norway, or more precisely, of Edvard Munch, mentioning something to the effect that he was a great admirer of Munch’s work, particularly The Scream. The Scream, Morita felt, had to be Norway’s answer to the Mona Lisa. Was it for sale? Jonas just smiled, it never occurred to him that Morita might be serious; how could he know that Japanese buyers would later be prepared to shell out nigh-on a billion Norwegian kroner for a single European painting without so much as a murmur. ‘And do you know?’ Morita had said as Jonas was leaving. ‘When I tried out the first Walkman on a friend of mine, I used a tape of Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto. It gave the perfect demonstration.’ Jonas had smiled at this too, taking it as no more than polite chitchat. But now, only hours later, he spied another, very different, dimension to these snippets of conversation.
It is not entirely true that the city of Tokyo has no centre to it. Jonas Wergeland was sitting not far from the new Imperial Palace, built on the ruins of the Tokugawa Shogun’s residence, Edo Castle, which, for the Japanese in ancient times, represented the hub of the world. But now all power had been removed, also from the Emperor. Jonas Wergeland was sitting, in other words, at a centre that was devoid of meaning. And he also felt that he was at the centre of – nothing. As if he had been sucked into Nothingness. All of a sudden he understood why he travelled so much. He was a pilgrim, a man on an eternal quest for a sacred spot. And he had found it here, all the world’s altar, the empty centre. Here, right here, anything could happen.
And perhaps it was this very emptiness, this sense of a vacuum, which generated the extraordinary pressure necessary to prove to Jonas Wergeland that human beings are also polymorphous, that they too can assume different forms, as carbon can crystallize into something other than graphite. Here, in Tokyo, he finally found his other possible, maybe even optimum, form: a form which he had, in a way, possessed for a long time, though he had never acted upon it: his diamond form. Jonas Wergeland felt, in other words, an original idea working its way through, like a shoot rising out of the sludge of run-of-the-mill thinking: no more would he content himself with bringing ideas home, he – the perception made his head spin – was going to be someone who took ideas out, for others to copy. Thanks to what Morita had said about Munch and Grieg, he realized that instead of simply exporting stone – or G-MAN saws for that matter – Norway would have to concentrate much more on producing concepts, yes, fictions, pure products of the imagination. Norway sold energy, after all, so why not sell people’s ideas too? The last time Norway had made a great leap forward it had been on the back of hydroelectric power – now everything was going to depend on brainpower. People were willing to pay for that too, and pay a lot – a powerful man like Akio Morita was proof of that. Jonas Wergeland sits in the middle of Tokyo, surrounded by the clamour of one of the biggest cities in the world, in an empty centre, and has a vision – a few seconds of clear-sightedness which will determine the course of his life for many years to come: the great hope, for him, for Norway, lay in being able to offer knowledge, a different kind of knowledge. Because of all products, knowledge had become the most valuable. The future lay not in hardware – white goods – but in software – grey matter.
Jonas Wergeland knew in a flash what he was going to do, he was going to make a television series about just such people as Munch and Grieg, and he would do it so well that it would become a piece of merchandise, a programme in two senses of the word, and one so attractive that it could be exported. On the threshold of the millennium, the Japanese would not just be asking for marble, or toothbrushes or smoked salmon from Norway; they would be asking, they would be begging for, television programmes about enterprising Norwegian men and women, programmes whose worth rested not on a material but on a symbolic foundation. As with the Grorud granite, this too was all about spreading the local Norwegian bedrock, only in this case on a much larger, international, scale. That was his, Jonas Wergeland’s, future, not creeping around the offices of foreign demigods like a copycat, a spectator, a parrot with a tape recorder in his hand.
He had been in possession of this clue for a while, but only now did he see that the Japanese lacquer casket he had been given by his grandfather when he was a boy was a precursor to the television set. TV too was a black box just waiting to be filled. With symbols. At home he had even placed one of the dragons he had finished, a head covered in carvings, on top of the television, as if he had always known.
Jonas Wergeland got up from the bench. Before he left the gardens he threw, he hurled, the ruined cassette and film into a wastepaper bin, coils of tape on which Akio Morita’s words and image had left invisible traces. In his mind he could already see the Grieg programme, saw how fantastic it would be, he jogged through Tokyo – in a spiral, it seemed to him – back to the hotel, in order to scribble down some of the ideas that were simply pouring out of a brain under pressure.
It is not so surprising, when one considers Jonas Wergeland’s traumatic fear of the dark, that he should have had his momentous vision in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Norway’s Gold Reserve
There were a few of the programmes in the Thinking Big series the symbolism of which was known only to Jonas Wergeland. He derived an almost childish pleasure from this: to know that despite all the bouquets and brickbats no one really knew what he had had in mind. These film sequences harboured a secret meaning.
After the episode on Edvard Grieg was shown – a programme that also caused quite a stir in Japan – Jonas Wergeland was much complimented on the fabulous scenes from Karlsbad. People who had been to the old spa town were even moved to ask whether it had been filmed at this or that hotel. Jonas merely smiled and kept his eyes on the ground. Others actually went to Karlsbad because of what they had seen in this programme. To Jonas Wergeland, such responses proved better than anything else just how little it took to hypnotize people – sometimes he felt he could have got away with presenting his programmes as puppet shows.
The film crew had never been near Karlsbad. The sequences showing Edvard Grieg at the spa were shot in the Bank of Nor
way. Yes, that’s what I said, Professor: the Bank of Norway.
Jonas Wergeland had originally planned to build the programme on Grieg around his Concerto in A Minor, since that had been conceived abroad and thus illustrated perfectly the liberating effect which going out into the world had had on the talents of Norwegian artists. Jonas even made an unofficial reconnaissance trip to Denmark, to Søllerød on Zealand, where Grieg had written the piano part for the concerto, but he changed his mind about this, which is to say: he could milk no original ideas from this first flash of inspiration. There was also something about the predictability and opportunism of this approach which he did not feel happy with.
The Conqueror Page 38