When I speak now of the two, I do not hesitate to use the word “genius.” And whenever, in regard to their respective fields of endeavor, I speak of “the power of thought,” it is that same word that comes to mind. Such was my immediate impression upon meeting both of them, though to neither did I ever say so, either in conversation or in writing. I do not intend to comment extensively here about what characterizes the power of thought in Takemitsu-san’s music and Abe-san’s fiction. Nevertheless, I would note before moving on that each was abundantly gifted with a unique variety of it and that such can only be described as prodigious. In this I hope, as I speak specifically about the power of literary thought, to demonstrate a more elevated level in my own thinking.
Having entered the autumn of my life by the time I took on the task of selecting the recipient of the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, I came to realize that from a young age I had had my mind focused on this particular poet or that particular thinker, on authors whom I had made the object of my own autodidactic study. I was a horse earnestly galloping along with its blinkers on. I was thinking, for example, of T.S. Eliot, who has cast an enduring shadow on my novels well beyond the past decade. With the influential Japanese American scholar of literature and culture Masao Miyoshi, I engaged in debates, both frequent and fierce, about Eliot, who for him was but a reactionary and a royalist. He died before we could mend our broken ties . . .
It occurred to me that my new responsibility offered an opportunity to broaden my perspective, so as to be able to read a great variety of Japan’s new writers. Thus, I steeled myself and, with the help of young members of the editorial staff at Gunzō—a monthly literary magazine published by Kodansha—meeting with them three times a year for preliminary readings, buckled down. At the beginning of each year, I spend several weeks reading over thirty selected works. (At the same time I continue to read the familiar masterpieces of times past, to which I cling as though it were a chronic ailment of old age, a final pleasure remaining to one at my stage of life.)
In 2010, even as the deadline was approaching, I found myself engrossed in a work directly related to two old friends of mine, the great writers Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Bakhtin: Mutsumi Yamashiro’s Dostoyevsky (Kodansha). I was particularly taken by his understanding of poetical imagination, which he himself splendidly highlights. I should now like to cite a passage from his book, as it proved to be decisive in the selection process, causing me to shift my attention from another novel to this year’s winner. Though expressions that include “gushes forth” and “assiduously cultivates” may have become irritating clichés, it will be apparent that something very different is at work here.
Dostoyevsky once contended that he was more of a poet than an artist, by which he meant that he risked ruining a work by delving into unmanageable themes. The meaning of “poet” here is ironic and is not what we might assume it to be. Poetic imagination in the context here is “only one step away from a bombshell”—a characteristic that makes it akin, as it were, to a “mission” . . . Dostoyevsky, as he himself was well aware and readily conceded, lacked Turgenev’s technical prowess, insisting that he was indeed a poet and not an artist. And that meant that he was possessed of a poetic imagination that Turgenev lacked. What this suggests is that modern Japanese literature, having put on the mantel of Turgenevan art through the influence of Futabatei Shimei, has lost the sense of the poetical.
The above paragraph is included in Yamashiro-san’s superb introductory chapter: “Razunogurāshe: Futabatei Shimei to Bafuchin” (“Raznoglas: Shimei Futabatei and Bakhtin”). Rather than give the term an overly specific and thus rigid definition, I shall understand it in a broad context. I shall not adopt the term “mission” as a synonym; I shall likewise refrain from taking sides in the matter of Dostoyevsky’s self-criticism regarding unmanageable themes.
* * *
I come now to the topic of the novel chosen for this year’s prize. (I should say that each year, as there is no monetary award, I continue to hope that each recipient will—to use the English adverb—“generously” accept it.) I will first say that what deeply impressed me about Mr. Tomoyuki Hoshino’s ME can only be described in terms of the phrase I have already used, for indeed it exemplifies the power of literary thought.
The first chapter begins with a matter-of-fact description of larceny and fraud: “I stole the cell phone on nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment whim, without any sense of wanting to do anything with it.” The protagonist/narrator, Hitoshi Nagano, an electronics salesman working in the camera section, picks it up from a tray in a fast-food restaurant as though mistaking it for his own. His victim, Daiki Hiyama, is a young “marketing man.” At this stage there is little more than a hint that the two might, like cell phones, be confused with one another.
We glimpse something of Daiki’s personality, as, following Nagano’s game, we trace the stolen cell phone’s contents. We see that Daiki has replied neither to his mother’s e-mails nor to her telephone messages:
I had wanted to add a little joy to her life . . . I practiced imitating the voice and tone of the McDonald’s man: “Hey, it’s me, Daiki. Look, I’m sooo sorry! I couldn’t pick up because I was in the middle of postponing a major drop.”
Following this line of thought, he finally calls her and finds that “Mother” is apparently not in the least suspicious. He is now carried away by his own game: “I suddenly blurted out, quite off the cuff: ‘I’ve piled up some debts.’”
Mother, of course, takes it all quite seriously. Again the protagonist is caught up in the current:
I gave her my own [account number]. I felt that I’d been taken for a ride—with me as the driver. Providing my real name was a very bad idea. I warned myself that everything was sure to immediately unravel and that I’d soon be caught. I’d been tearing along without thinking and now couldn’t stop.
I swear that my original intention had been to pull some sort of harmless prank. I wanted to comfort Mother in her loneliness. Just for minor amusement. But the words kept coming out, and one thing had led to another.
And yet at some point the joke had turned real, and I missed the point of no return.
Great disruptions are about to occur in the life of this “ME,” but before that we are first given a description of his personality and character—and that is to lend him a distinctiveness which, as the story develops, he loses. A run-in with a supervisor at work renders him unambiguously real. In the aftermath, he confesses to a colleague, a young man by the name of Yasokichi, that his unrealized dream had been to become a professional photographer. Another superior of theirs compares the two:
You’re morose. There’s something dicey about you. Yasokichi has a touch of charm—but take away his buoyancy and he could be real trouble. As I say, you’re dicey.
The bouleversement comes when the ME returns home to find Daiki’s mother there, behaving as though she thinks him to be her son. When he blurts out “the truth,” she refuses to take him seriously.
The next day, having surreptitiously followed her home, he winds up visiting her. Resolutely playing her role of Mother, she recounts to him what is supposedly his own past. He lingers, then abruptly takes his leave and, being coincidentally in the vicinity of his true family’s residence, which he has not visited in some time, he goes there. Over the intercom, he hears his mother shouting that he is an imposter. It appears that another Hitoshi Nagano is already living there. He nonetheless pleads with her to allow him in.
The door opened and I stepped back slightly.
“Hey,” a young man said, “you must know that stalking is a crime, don’t you?”
I froze. It was the man I’d been seeing no end of all day. That is, it was a ME.
It was the face he had been seeing every time he looked in the mirror.
Thus the first chapter is deftly brought to a conclusion. At the beginning Chapter 2 (“Realization”), the two look-alikes meet up for a showdown in the nearest McDonald’s—the u
biquitous fast-food chain that becomes the default gathering place of the MEs, who are about to proliferate. (Chapter 3 is entitled “Proliferation.”) They feel compelled to leave behind a world where the distinct separateness of each is taken for granted and, in a state of enlightenment, enter the realm of ME. For the narrator this means a society in which it is only natural that he should take on the identity of a hitherto different ME. He no longer has in his pocket a business card with his old name on it, and his colleagues instead now treat him as Daiki Hiyama. He becomes aware that even the urban environment in which he lives is largely in the hands of the ME tribe . . .
The new Daiki Hiyama, together with the new Hitoshi Nagano, join with yet a third ME and agree to form their own fortress, conscious that this world, this society, is the House of ME, Our Mountain.
A series of faces floated up in my mind. All were ME; I wondered whether, one by one, I would meet each one of them. And if they were all ME, we would have perfect mutual understanding—100 percent. It would be safe to trust. There would be no need to push the on button.
“As of tomorrow, the world will change.”
Chapter 2 ends on the perfect note as the narrator declares: “I had come to see quite clearly who I was: I was ME.” As has already been hinted before these words, it will not be long before this seeming ME utopia will plunge precipitously into a ME dystopia.
* * *
In the novel as it has so far unfolded, we have glimpsed the power of literary thought such as to remind us again of Kōbō Abe. Mr. Hoshino’s superb talent allows for a development of the richly imaginative details that is completely natural, without any hint of forced contrivances.
I have been writing fiction for many decades and, of course, was reading fiction years before that. I am convinced that producing a novel involves mental activity that differs significantly from other forms of verbal expression. When as a high-school boy I first focused on reading Abe-san’s fiction, I discovered that my own mind did not function in that way. It was a bitter realization. I was, to be sure, under the sway of immature perceptions, but as I have continued to read over the years, I have not revised that early intuition, though I have taken secret pleasure in having to some extent developed that vital capacity.
That, I would say, if I may be so bold, is a fundamental characteristic of narrative. Those who write fiction often seize upon a few important words as clues (or epiphanies) and decide that they will produce a tale for the sake of setting down those thoughts. There are also many who begin with the desire to describe a certain image. One may take particular personae and flesh them out—or, more precisely, lend reality to them as character models. It may also happen that one begins by seeking to give expression to a theme or a cause, pursuing the idea until it ultimately fails and only then arriving at a complete work. Indeed, in my own case, I often ascertain that I have come to the end of a novel when the very pursuit of an idea leads to its own demise, and this then—though it sounds strange to say—may somehow bring it to fruition.
To speak more bluntly, it is with this self-awareness that I have confronted the occasional critique: I continue to pursue the course of a novel, writing as I do with all my kinks and idiosyncrasies. I cannot help it, and if I didn’t feel so strongly, my work would simply not progress . . .
It is through this conviction that one writes and continues to write; it is again the power of literary thought. One cannot say that this capacity renders the novelist intellectually superior or that such an assumption should guide, for example, the compilation of textbooks and curricula for university creative writing classes. From society’s point of view, attributing the power of literary thought to a writer wins him or her neither trust nor respect. And yet it is surely safe to say that readers steeped in literature have had the experience of being awestruck by how a particular novel is guided and shaped by that power.
I should like to give an example from the closest work at hand, namely that of Mr. Hoshino. By the end of Chapters 1 and 2, it seems that the MEs have in their fortress achieved perfect harmony and mutual reliance. In Chapter 3, as their numbers grow, that bonhomie will reverse itself, transformed into murderous hatred. Daiki, the former Hitoshi, has already sensed that something is wrong, as he sits in the presence of the new Hitoshi. The subtle shift, as the writer expresses it, reflects the literary power of which I speak:
Why was he holding back his feelings from us, his fellow MEs? I was already dissatisfied that our emotions and desires were not perfectly in accord. We were supposed to be comrades, in sync with each other twenty-four hours a day. The three of us could remain together alone, if that’s what Hitoshi wished. I wanted to bask in the sensation of being a part of a truly larger self, always with the full, shared range of our human feelings and thoughts. As long as that condition held, WE would endure, always for the sake of one another.
And yet I did not attempt to pin him down. He was, after all, a ME. What happened to him also happened to me. Of that I was confident.
It goes without saying that this “confidence” is a product of the power of literary thought, the character being quite incapable of arbitrarily altering his state of mind or actions or changing according to happenstance. And yet, in the same way, writers cannot depart from the logic that their power of literary thought imposes on them. Indeed, it is under these constraints that ME is made most refreshingly enjoyable by the peculiar spice that the various personality traits of the characters provide, together with the fascinatingly relentless logic of their exchanges.
There is a clear distinction to be seen here between ME and the sort of television drama or potboiler fiction already available that take up telephone fraud as a social topic. Nor does the novel allow itself to slip into simplistic allegory. The weight of reality it creates reflects the substantiality of the author’s prowess. “Proliferation” is followed in the latter part of the novel by “Disintegration,” chapters that surpass even Kōbō Abe, Japan’s great forerunner in the power of literary thought. The author has leaped to a higher level.
Translator’s Note
Translators should be like good puppeteers: that is, inconspicuous. To intrude with elaborate explanations is to encourage the pernicious notion that some languages and cultures are too exotic to be accessible without anthropological assistance. This story takes place in contemporary Japan, where day-to-day life is hardly different from that of any other advanced industrialized democracy, and if readers find themselves taken on a bumpy, surrealistic ride, there is little that is peculiarly “Japanese” about it. The novel opens, it will be noted, with the narrator/protagonist eating lunch at McDonald’s. He has worked for Yoshinoya, a Japanese fast-food chain, now with branches in the United States. He presently works for an electrical appliance store, which though fictitious, is placed in a real station building in Yokohama. He lives in a small apartment, with a kotatsu (a blanketed table with a heating element underneath) and a futon, a term that hardly needs elaboration. Other Japanese words are kept to a minimum.
He spends considerable time on the train, his travels taking him from Yokohama through Tokyo and on to Urawa in Saitama Prefecture. There is nothing of particular cultural significance in these place names, though they will obviously mean more to those already familiar with the geography of the metropolis and its environs.
With his lookalike companions, he goes on an outing to Mount Takao, located within Greater Tokyo. On their return, they have dinner in Shin-Ōkubo, well known as a Korean neighborhood, the barbecued meat they eat typifying Korean cuisine, though this is not specified in the original text. The flower-card game they played earlier will not be known to most readers, but then it is likewise unfamiliar to increasing numbers of Japanese.
The soap operas taped by the protagonist’s pseudomother and her Korean-language lessons are reminders of the “Korean wave” that was sweeping Japan at the time of the novel’s original Japanese publication. The “charisma boom” refers to a dramatic surge in the number of male haird
ressers, beginning around 2000.
Mention is made of Keisuke Kuwata (1956–), a singer and musician, and Hiroyuki Nagato (1934–2011), a film and TV actor, resembling one another. Shigeo Nagashima is a famous Japanese baseball player who later became an equally famous manager; Yukiko Ueno is a female Japanese Olympic softball pitcher, whose team is compared to halberd warriors. Riding the Yamanote-sen, Tokyo’s loop line, the protagonist finds himself having to endure songs leaking from the earphones of a female doppelgänger. The fact that the singer is Yutaka Ozaki, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1992 at the age of twenty-six, perhaps as the result of foul play, might add to the ominous mood.
The phrase translated as “passenger accident” (jinshin-jiko) is a common euphemism for suicide by jumping in front of a train. “Delete” and “deletion” come from sakujo, a term corresponding in semantic range to the English words, referring specifically to the obliteration of written material, particularly in the realm of computers.
Japanese males typically use several first-person pronouns, depending on their relationship to the addressee. Of these, ore, by which the protagonist invariably refers to himself, is the most casual. Ore Ore, the title of the novel in the original Japanese, immediately suggests the words used by telephone scam artists who, posing as the sons or grandsons of their would-be victims, claim to require a sudden transfer of funds: “It’s me, it’s me.” Such, however, is no more than the novel’s point of departure. Ore comes to function as a quasi noun, referring to all of the rapidly duplicating doppelgängers. In the original, the Chinese character representing the pronoun is printed in bold; in the translation, capital letters are used, with Oreyama, literally “me-mountain,” rendered as Ore Mountain.
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