The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, and Yoshiaki Koshikawa, "Why Not Have Fun?—An Interview with Gen’ichiro Takahashi"Why not Have Fun?—An Interview with Gen’ichiro Takahashi
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, and Yoshiaki Koshikawa
Gen’ichiro Takahashi was born in 1951. A radical student activist, he dropped out of Yokohama National University in 1969 and worked as a manual laborer throughout the 1970s. In 1982 he won the Gunzo Literary Award for First Novels for his Sayonara Gyangu Tachi (Good-bye Gangsters). His strong interest in American postmodern fiction was apparent in his first novel, Niji No Kanata Ni (Over the Rainbow, 1984), which was acclaimed as one of the first Japanese metafictional works and was also notable for its typographical innovations. His Jon Renon Tai Kasai Jin (John Lennon vs. The Martians) was a metafictional manual on pornographic writings, and his Yuga de Kansho-teki na Nippon-Yakyuu (Japanese Baseball: Elegant and Sentimental), which bares comparison with Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, won the Yukio Mishima Award in 1988. Takahashi’s other works include Penguin Mura Ni Hi Wa Ochite (Sunset in Penguin Village, 1989), Wakusei P-13 no Himitsu (The Secret of Planet 13, 1990), and Goosutobasutaazu (Ghostbusters, 1997). Takahashi has also published numerous essays on literary themes, as well as on horse racing. (Hisayo Ogushi)
Larry McCaffery: We’d like to start by asking you some questions about how books get translated in Japan, either from English to Japanese or vice versa. Of course, a great deal American fiction regularly appears in Japanese translations, but until recently there hasn’t been much of an audience in America for Japanese fiction. But that seems to be changing somewhat, and so obviously it’s important for writers such as yourself to have your work appear in good translations. But for instance, right now about the only access Americans have to reading English translations of your own work is in the stories that appear in the recent Monkey Brain Sushi or New Voices anthologies—which seems a shame because the translations struck me as being far from being good, especially with the baseball novel excerpt. I could tell that it was a brilliant story—it was funny and was doing all sorts of interesting things with the baseball metaphor, but I found myself having to kind of mentally translate it myself. So it seemed as if the person who did the translation either didn’t really know English that well or perhaps didn’t know baseball that well. For example, in one passage the translator did not even know idioms like sacrifice bunt and so on.
Gen’ichiro Takahashi: Translations are indeed a big problem. If an author is working with a very particularized, idiomatic metaphor and the translator doesn’t know that particular metaphor, the translation won’t work no matter how good the translator is generally. Yesterday I saw a movie on TV about horseracing. But the translator did not know anything about horseracing and so the whole experience was ruined.
Sinda Gregory: What is the procedure for having a book translated in Japan? Do writers have any input about who will do the translation or does the publisher make the decision?
GT: Your editor handles all those decisions, or the press company. So in terms of my own work, the matter of who will do the translation is rather out of my hands. It’s only after everything is decided that the writer is informed of the results.
LM: What about the other way around—that is, books written in English that are translated into Japanese? We’ve noticed that many Japanese writers are also translators. So how does that work? For instance, how did you wind up translating Jay McInnerny?
GT: That was under a rather unique situation. I was going to write a second-person-narrative novel, and so as a sort of preparation, I decided to accept the offer. Actually it did not help much in my own writing.
LM: I don’t know the technicalities of Japanese grammar, but isn’t the whole notion of "first person" and "second person" a lot more complicated in Japanese? And didn’t that present problems for a translator in terms of coming up with a Japanese equivalent of McInnerny’s second person voice—especially since that voice is such an important part of the effect of the novel in English?
GT: It wasn’t as big a problem as you might think. In Japanese novels, you do not see many second-person narratives but in modern Japanese poems it is not so unusual, so I was rather used to it. There is a difficulty in translating the English "I," since there are a great many Japanese words that are equal to it. For example,Watashi, Anata, Ore, Wagahai, and so on. Using the right word in the right place does require a certain sensibility. As for the English "you," there are many Japanese words for that as well—for example, Kimi and Boku—but we seldom use it for the subject in Japanese, so the intonation is somewhat similar to that in English.
LM: Of course, in Bright Lights, Big City it’s obvious that "you" really means "I."
GT: Yes. But in Japan, in a colloquial context, the first and second person subject tends to be skipped. So "you" is more of a literary sign of respect or aggression. We do not have the custom of addressing people as "you" in a colloquial context. In other words, the usage of "you" is rather literary.
Yoshiaki Koshikawa: Yes. So, for example, when you ask Mr. Takahashi about something in English, you would say, "What do you think of . . .". But in Japanese, there is no need to use that sort of "you" construction. Even if there were, I would use the subject Takahashi-san instead.
LM: So what form of the "you" did you wind up using in the Japanese translation of Bright Lights?
GT: I used Kimi, which has a rather intimate feel to it—it’s somewhat close to "my friend."
LM: Did you happen to meet Jay McInnerny while he was living here?
GT: I understand that Mr. McInnerny wanted to see me, but on my part, I didn’t pursue the opportunity. The truth is that I didn’t really feel there would be much to talk about with him. In other words, there are two types of literary works: one is the type in which you would want to actually meet the author. The other type is the one in which you are interested only in the work. McInnerny was the latter.
LM: I spent one long afternoon a long interview with him that was very interesting.
GT: In what points?
LM: For one thing, when I first contacted him I emphasized that I wanted to conduct an interview in which we would seriously talk about his work in some detail—and this was something he was eager to do, because, frankly, what he has actually been doing in his books has often gotten lost amidst all sensationalized talk about cocaine and the "Brat Pack," and so on. While I was doing research to get ready for the interview, I discovered that there hadn’t been even a single interview with him that had ever really focused on his fiction. It’s typical of what you see happening today—people want the image of the writer, while the work itself isn’t so important. That’s what DeLillo is talking about in Mao II.
GT: Yes, you see the same sort of thing happening here in Japan: all the interviews talk about is gossip.
SG: What is the role of a writer like you in Japan?
GT: First of all, in Japan, nearly all critics tend to be severely critical about modern writers and postmodern writers as well. It has been so for more than a hundred years, since modernism was first attacked as an imported trend and not having any roots in Japan. Then, how can you avoid their harsh attacks? The best way is to become a critic yourself! At least that is what I do. In fact, I’ve somehow managed to create this sort of camouflage for myself too effectively! As a result, nowadays I am usually considered more of a critic than a fiction writer. However, in my case, I don’t limit myself only to literature. I also write about mangas, cinema, fashion, etc., and in this way, I am attempting to expand the definitions of "literature," just as Roland Barthes has done.
SG: Do critics have power over writers in Japan?
GT: Until about twenty years ago, there was collaboration between good writers and good critics. After that, there was a lack of good critics—that is, critics who read new works and who were aware of what was happening in other countries as well as Japan. Nowadays, the fiction writers are apt to know more than the critics. This unbalance has made it so difficult to build a positive writer-critic relationship like that which our predecessors used to enjoy.
SG: Do you have a particular theoretical position that you are coming from as a critic? Or do you write criticism that mostly reflects your own individual interests as a fiction writer?
GT: Probably both. But I try not to mix them up. As I have already mentioned, when I am writing as a critic, I try to expand the definition of "literature" and the style becomes that of a critic. On the other hand, when I write from the interest of a writer, my criticism comes quite near to fiction. I take one stance or the other according to the context that I am put in.
LM: Then, what about your theoretical position? Is it singular? Do you consider yourself as a Marxist critic or a deconstructionist critic or whatever?
GT: No. It’s far from singular. Marxist theory, deconstruction, poststructuralism—of course, I am interested in them and have read them. Their weapons are useful but they lack the sensibility which, I think, is quite necessary to a good critic. For my defining "literature," these kinds of theory are not valid. To me, this sensibility is my greatest weapon and I try to refine it as precisely as I can. Remember, Paul Valéry has no theory, but had other strong weapons—his intelligence and knowledge of literature.
LM: To me it’s also a good sign when a critic avoids always taking a single critical position. Of course, the same thing is true for fiction writers: if you keep writing the same way, from the same voice or perspective, you wind up limiting yourself. In the case of your own fiction, I understand that, rightly or wrongly, your writing has mostly been called "metafictional." Do you agree with that—and if so, where did you get your interest in metafiction? Was there a tradition of that in Japan or was that something coming from outside?
GT: Metafiction is something that mostly comes from outside Japanese literary traditions. And it’s true that my novels are rather cut off from the traditional Japanese novel lineage. (By the way, right now I am talking as a critic.) Of course, writers are influenced by many things, but objectively speaking, I consider my creative roots as being modern Japanese poetry rather than novels. In Japan, the world of poetry is composed of a system totally different from, or independent of, that of the novel. There’s simply almost no interrelationship between Japanese poetry and novels, which is quite different from the literary scene of America or Europe, where many fiction writers have been influenced by poetry and even written poetry (I’m thinking of everyone from Poe up through James Joyce, Faulkner and Raymond Carver). This might be oversimplifying, but in Japan, the mainstream novel is dominated by realism, being premodern, whereas the world of poetry is high modern. And as I have just said, poetry and fiction are cut off and are not interested in each other. But in my own case I have been a reader of this high-modern Japanese poetry for many years. For example, I have read the works of poets such as Ryuichi Tamura, Gan Tanigawa, Shuntaro Tanigawa, Gozo Yoshimatsu. They are all pursuing the style of language and are really self-conscious about what they are trying to do. This trend cannot be seen in the mainstream novels of Japan and that is why I must say that I am very dissatisfied with them. So, to answer your question, I guess my model has been Japanese high-modern poetry and also the metafictional novels from overseas.
SG: Were you reading these in English or in Japanese?
GT: Half of them in English, half of them in Japanese translation.
SG: What type of writers are you talking about?
GT: There are many of them. For example, Faulkner, Pynchon, and Calvino. My favorite is Calvino. I bought Calvino’s last essays in criticism, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in New York, read it in my hotel and wept. That was in Algonquin Hotel, and there was a small lithograph that happened to be the same one used for the cover of Calvino’s book.
SG: Synchronicity!
LM: In the late seventies, when you were beginning to write, was there a movement of what you might call "postmodernism," in the way there was in the United States in the sixites?
GT: No, there wasn’t—at least not in the novels. But there was in the field of poetry, comics, music, television programs and also copy writing. In other words, the novel was left behind.
LM: Why was that?
GT: Even among the critics, this is considered a big mystery. It might have something to do with the incestuous publishing system in Japan, where you have the "great masters" from the pre-World War II era and all of these old-fashioned critics who swarm around them. They have lived long and they continue to have power. The characteristic of these people is that they ignore what is going on outside, and they think that attitude is aesthetic. For example, Hideo Kobayashi, who was one of the most famous critics, came to consider even war as destiny—in other words, a natural phenomenon. What he did was completely exclude the "meaning" of a social context. This attitude was considered as aesthetic and was fondly accepted by the Japanese. Now the procedure through which one goes in order to become a novelist in Japan is very unique; I am sure there is nothing like this in America or in any other country. In Japan, there are five or six high-literature magazines which give out awards for newcomers. These awards are the one and only gateway that leads to the writing profession.
LM: Sinda and I both noticed in going through the fiction selections included in Monkey Brain Sushi that at the end of every single story there always seemed to be a reference to awards! It seems that there are so many of them—many more in Japan than we have in America. We even speculated that these awards might actually have the effect of controlling things rather than merely of rewarding the good works that do appear.
GT: And that’s exactly the case. The awards function as a kind of permission, just like a governmental permission given out from an office.
SG: Whereas in the United States, what determines what is going to appear is a publisher reading a manuscript and saying, "This will make me a lot of money!"
GT: Well in Japan, it is those old-fashioned "award-makers" that decide who should become a writer. This is sometimes referred to as the "root of all evils." So my entering the publishing world as a novelist is thought of as a miracle, because I have never won any award at all (and, by the way, Masahiko Shimada has not won an award yet, either).
SG: Then how was it that you were able to enter this world?
YK: Actually, they have both been forced to live on the margins. But of course, that is where you can find the best writers.
GT: I will tell you about another miracle. Did you know that Mr. Shimada is the only one to have succeeded in becoming a novelist by taking the "orthodox," American procedure? That is, one day he knocked on the door of a publisher with a manuscript in his hand and asked him to read it. And believe it or not, it was accepted and he became a writer! I’m sure he is the only one to have succeeded in doing this in Japan.
LM: Do Japanese writers usually have their agents submit their work to publishers?
GT: There are no agents for writers in Japan. You just apply for a literary award in a literary magazine.
YK: And you have to be lucky.
LM: Are the magazine editors who choose the winners relatively conservative or is there a group of magazines that are very liberal and very "trendy"?
GT: I would say they are either hard-conservative or soft-conservative.
LM: Right now, in the United States, a lot of the best fiction is being published by small presses, maybe the university presses and in literary journals—in general, the big commercial publishers simply aren’t interested in publishing serious fiction anymore, especially innovative works. Is there a network in Japan of small presses and university presses that publish innovative fiction?
GT: Yes, but only for poems, and in some instances, criticisms, but not novels. As for novels, they are published only through the major mainstream publishing companies. There are a few small publishing presses for novels but they have no power and the novelists who write there are usually not very good. Then what happens to the truly radical novelists, you are probably wondering? They get their books published by deceiving the editors of the major presses about how radical the work is.
LM: What you’re describing seems related to what I’ve been attempting to describe with my concept of Avant-Pop: serious artists using pop cultural materials that mainstream readers (and editors) will be familiar with—but using these materials to create what is actually a radical critique (or "deconstruction") of the meanings and associations these familiar forms usually have. A kind of guerrilla art.
GT: The way you’re using that term seems basically a way of explaining the contents of certain works, but in Japan, the publishing system itself can also be referred to as Avant-Pop. I guess I am one of the best examples. All of my works have been published by major publishing companies, and fortunately I have a pretty good number of readers, but the executives of the press—the people of the business department and most often even the editors themselves—turn out to be unconscious of what they are dealing with. I think this is okay.
LM: It’s okay as long as they keep publishing your books. Since we’re speaking of Avant-Pop, everything I’ve heard about your new book, Ghostbusters, makes it sound like it’s a perfect example of Avant-Pop. I understand that the main characters in this book are the famous Japanese haiku master, Basho, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. What gave you the idea to write a book with that combination?
GT: It was originally going to be a ‘road-story" about a traveler trying to go across the continent of the United States from east to west. It didn’t need to be the U.S.—actually it could have been set anywhere, but I knew I wanted to write an adventure novel in that form. There are many people who have gone on the sort of adventures I had in mind, but I chose Butch Cassidy and Sundance because I loved the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I had in mind making an adventure story which moves horizontally, from the west to east (or east to west) but I also wanted another story that would cross or intersect this horizontal movement at right angles, from north to south. I decided to use Basho, the Japanese haiku-writer who, as you know, wrote about his travels from south to north and north to south. Of course, historically speaking the two adventures took place in two different countries, but since I was telling their stories in literature, I thought, why not have their stories intersect so I could put them together?
LM: This east-west trajectory has all sorts of historical and mythic resonances in America—you can see this in everything from the early Fennimore Cooper novels up through Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Crying of Lot 49—whereas in Japan these are associated with the north/south movement.
GT: A good point. For details, just read my book! But I should add that the origin of my own novel has more to do with the Don Quixote—the very first novel—than with those American works.
LM: Not the Tales of Genji?
GT: No! [Laughs.] Cerventes sent Don Quixote off on an expedition in the first novel. I’ve always wanted to write a road-novel just like that of Don Quixote’s.
SG: But how is this adventure related to the other two storylines?
GT: The version of Ghostbusters which has already been published in a Japanese magazine is incomplete. I’m a little reluctant to give away too much, but I will reveal that even though Shikibu Murasaki, the author of the Tales of Genji, does not appear in my novel but there will be a poet who was about a hundred years older than her. And Don Quixote himself is also going to be making a guest appearance in the novel.
YK: When I read that version of Ghostbusters, I realized that the movement was not only geographical but also temporal—they are also time-travelers as well.
LM: So it’s four dimensional. But why isn’t the author of the Tales of Genji going to appear? And why do you think that Don Quixote is the first novel rather than Tales of Genji—which appeared several hundred years earlier.
GT: Novels and stories are two different things. Tales of Genji is a story whereas Don Quixote is a novel. And quite frankly speaking, I like Don Quixote much better than Tales of Genji because it has a sense of humor. Tales of Genji is too precious—and pretentious.
LM: This introduction of Japanese characters and narrative archetypes into Western ones—or allowing different characters and stories to intermingle and collaborate with each other—seems to be part of the postmodernism of Japan. Ghostbusters obviously is doing this, and in a different way the rock band we interviewed recently—Shan Shan Typhoon—also does this by combining traditional Okinawan music and rock. This seems to me to be the obvious approach for Japanese postmodern artists—not imitating American materials but combining them with Japanese elements. Why isn’t there more of that happening?
GT: I’ll answer you as a critic. When Japan underwent the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese literary tradition which started off with Tales of Genji was completely diminished. As a result, the Japanese literary works produced after 1868 had no connections with the works of the pre-Meiji Restoration. For example, a whole new style started to emerge that was very different from the formal "literary style" you find in all the pre-Meiji Restoration works.
YK: What was happening is a little bit like what you find in America in the late nineteenth century with the colloquialisms of Mark Twain and even Whitman. That was, in terms of style, a cut-off from the former literary tradition strongly influenced by British literature.
GT: That’s right. Anyhow, with the former tradition extinguished, the Japanese writers were essentially restarting from zero when they began basing their works on colloquialism, and it took them about twenty years to build up a new tradition of literature. This kind of basic overhaul was naturally a huge cultural trauma whose effects are still being felt on our writers even now.
LM: One of the things Mr. Shimada was saying when I interviewed him was that you’re seeing more recent Japanese writers becoming more conscious of their lost tradition—and are beginning to intentionally express their need to recuperate it.
GT: Yes. You can see this, for example, in the ways that writers are bringing back or reviving the old usage of words and expressions into their books. On the other hand, there is a tendency to affirm the hundred years of postrestoration literary works as well. But then, writers like Mr. Shimada and myself think that we can take both strands, using the traditional and also the modern. Combining is a big aspect of postmodernism, but we’ve learned that from the particularly Japanese situation rather than from the Western idea.
LM: Can you give me an example of what you mean?
GT: Have you met Yoshikichi Furui?
LM: No. What has he written?
GT: I don’t think any of his works have been translated. He is in his late fifties and specializes in German literature. He is famous for translating stories by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. He is a major mainstream writer in Japan as well, which would usually mean that he is conservative. For instance, do you know about the ranking of American writers that was done by Esquire?
YK: That appeared quite a long time ago, around 1980. That was really a literary joke, but I remember Saul Bellow was ranked as number one.
GT: Yes. Well, if such a listing were done for Japanese writers, Yoshikichi Furui would be somewhere around number two or three. But as a critic, I consider him as one of the most postmodern writers in Japan. Especially during the past seven or eight years, Mr. Furui has been writing in a style which is very close to that of Tales of Genji. He is writing about the present world but with a style that basically comes from more than a thousand years ago, so the results are very, very strange. The style is basically from the old ages from around a thousand years ago—some things have been slightly rearranged so actually it is a style which has never existed. It’s neither modern nor ancient. At any rate, most critics are bewildered by him—they just don’t know how to deal with what he’s doing. Try to imagine a salary-man wearing a Kabuki outfit who’s talking and acting in a Kabuki manner. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that the attempt to translate his works wouldn’t lead anywhere. If the translation cannot convey the old-fashioned style of the original, the whole meaning will be lost—it would wind up just sounding like any other ordinary story of the modern world.
SG: But there’s also obviously a great number of advantages in this type of approach, even if it is difficult to translate—the writer is able to introduce so many different textures, different levels of language. A richness purely from a verbal standpoint.
GT: True, but unfortunately, since Furui has gone into such a unique realm, he is beginning to lose the readers.
LM: Have any of his works been translated?
GT: Maybe in German or French.
LM: Let me ask about the title of your new book. Clearly, Ghostbusters has to do with the American movie, but could you talk about how the idea of ghosts evolved as you were working on the book?
GT: The title did come from the movie, Ghostbusters, but the original idea of using a ghost came from a different context. What I am going to tell you is a secret which my editor doesn’t even know. Many novels have ghosts in them but I wanted to create a ghost that was totally unique, nothing like the ones that have already appeared. It had to be a metaphor of literature itself. So in my story there are no ghosts that actually have forms. But at the end I will reveal what this ghost is. I’ll give you a hint (everybody always asks me to give them hints!). As I’ve said, these ghosts have no particular form—they exist not as a substance but as a certain system of rules.
SG: Do you think literature has any power anymore to change people or to affect politics?
GT: Yes, I do think that literature still has some sort of power—perhaps a power even greater than politics. But there is a difference between the situation of writing in America or Europe and that of Japan. In America or Europe, there were many novels that have had strong political influence over the years, but in Japan, only poetry was able to attain that power. Maybe this is because Japanese readers do not like to read political messages in the form of novels. In our novels, emotion is dominant.
SG: But there are all kinds of ways to write about politics. For instance, Dashiel Hammett was a "hard boiled" detective writer but his works were still very political. In other words, novelists don’t have to present their political agendas in an obvious or direct manner.
GT: No, they don’t. But in Japan we have not seen novelists like Hammett yet. Over here, there are really only two kinds of novels—Marxist novels and aesthetic novels. So to write a political novel in Japan almost automatically means that one is expected to write a Marxist novel.
SG: I’ve been asking people in Tokyo, "What do you think about politics? What do you think about your government?" And almost everyone has said the same thing—that politics or the government simply doesn’t matter.
GT: In Japan, everyone thinks that politics is a dirty business. People do not care about it anymore.
SG: But what if you are an idealistic writer and you want to change things? How do you do it?
YK: He used to be idealistic but now he’s changed. [Laughs]
SG: I realize that this is a complicated topic, but if you live in the world and you look around and you see that things are screwed up, and you want to change things, and if you believe that politics is not the way to do it, then how in Japan does one try to help create change? Where do you put your energy to accomplish it?
GT: Basically speaking, it is not so much the political system as the way of thinking that really matters. I believe that a writer is still able to change the way of thinking. Therefore I think writing a work of fiction is in itself a very political thing to do.
YK: To change the people’s way of thinking—not directly but maybe more subtly brainwashing them—will take time.
SG: I agree that the only revolution that matters is what changes the way people think, not just the way the rules are. You can change the rules, but if people think the same way, everything stays the same. History shows that revolutions happen but the revolutionaries become reactionary. So I think that artists like fiction writers and poets and musicians are the people who have the potential to create really significant change—more so than politicians. In America, people believe that politics is important but Americans hate politicians.
YK: The Japanese, too. Actually Japanese people don’t even hate politicians—mainly they are just bored with them.
SG: When Americans rank those whom they despise the most, number one is politicians, number two is lawyers.
GT: Number three would be the police. And number four—teachers, maybe? [Laughs]
LM: I know you were very active in the student movement in the sixties—perhaps even too active, in a sense, since after one student protest, you wound up having to go to jail. And apparently during that period you suffered autism or aphasia. I’ve interviewed other writers who had physical problems in speaking or writing—for instance, Samuel Delany, the science fiction writer, is dyslexic. I’m wondering to what degree having these sorts of problems might wind up making someone particularly aware of language or heighten one’s self-consciousness about its functioning. How would you see your own problems might or might not have had effects in your writing?
GT: I’ll answer that question from a critic’s point of view. It’s hard to see myself as a writer objectively, but on the other hand, I suppose I should be the best critic to explain the writer "Gen’ichiro Takahashi." I think that there are three types in the usage of words. One is the very political usage—for example, the way language is used as a vehicle for propaganda. To me, that usage is incorrect. People using language like this are nearly always usually using words not so much to persuade but to confute, to attack and if possible, beat the disputant. So the users of these words are most often trapped in their own contradictions. That is what I mean by "incorrect," but I have to admit that this type of language was a part of my mental background. The second usage is poetic usage. As I have mentioned before, I have always loved modern Japanese poetry even though it was the exact opposite of the political usage of words. That is, the poetic use of language aims at absolute correctness or precision. Both the political and poetic usage of words are very far from the everyday language, which is the third type—words as we use them ordinarily in our daily lives. Back during my student activist days, I was in jail for about ten months, and when I came back to everyday life, I had trouble using my words. I was sort of torn apart between the two extremes of the political and the poetic usage of language since those were the only words that I had been using before being imprisoned. Then when I suddenly slipped back to the real world, I was at a loss. And so I went through a period when I suffered from aphasia. Before long, I started writing novels in which the words seemed to be very "moderate" or close to the everyday usage and I began to feel more comfortable again using language. Actually, even though I just said "before long," it actually took me ten years before I was able to find the most comforting, adequate usage of words to express myself.
LM: What was there about the form of the novel that allowed you to feel like you could express yourself—that words in novels somehow seem to function in an ordinary way—the way they do in real life?
GT: Novels have more capacity to be flexible, to exist in some kind of "in-between" status that is neither political and deceptive or absolutely correct. Words used in novels can be correct and incorrect at the same time. I know this sounds pretty contradictory but that’s what I think.
LM: I’m not sure if this is directly related to what you’re talking about, but there always seems to be an element of playfulness and humor in your works; they leave the readers with Genki. How do you see the role of playfulness or humor—and how does that relate to the seriousness of your purpose?
GT: The best way to answer that would be to cite Cervantes or Calvino! But in my own case I feel that the writer is at the same time the best reader of his work. So when I write, I write in order to satisfy myself as a reader. And I get that satisfaction by playing with words. Of course, true life as it really is involves suffering. Therefore, at least in novels, why not have fun?
LM: You have written a playful but also somehow very serious and interesting book about baseball. What gave you the idea to use baseball as the basis of a novel? The excerpt I read in New Voices from that novel somehow reminded me of Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association—particularly the way the book seemed to be mixing together philosophical issues with baseball. Had you read that book before you started your own?
GT: Yes, I had—and also The Great American Novel by Philip Roth. But I’m going to tell you another secret that nobody knows: the idea of using baseball in "Imitation of Life," which is included in New Voices, did not come from a baseball novel but from a short story by John Updike—about golf! That was the story entitled "Pro," which was included in his Museums and Women collection from 1972. In this story, Updike writes thoroughly about golf—so thoroughly that golf transcended golf. It became more than a golf story, in other words, somewhat like a metafiction. I was very moved after reading this story and so I decided to write a story like that but using baseball instead of golf. In Japan, nobody had ever read that particular Updike story, so nobody noticed!
LM: Many important writers, for example, Hemingway, Coover, Roth have all used sports as a central metaphor in the novels. Why is it that sports are such a useful metaphor or structure for a writer?
GT: I think I know the answer to that: Writers who use sports in their fiction do so because they like those sports! It’s a simple as that.
LM: Japan, like the U.S., is a world of hyperconsumption in which even the most radical gesture or art work can be quickly appropriated by the "mainstream" and then sold as a kind of commodity—or the radicalism can be marketed as a kind of trendy style that can be sold to be public, which can then feel that it’s not satisfied with the "ordinary." In such a world is it possible for a writer to have any real influence on people’s lives?
GT: Yes and no. If I take that question literally or directly, I think it is impossible for a writer to have political influence over people. But I assume you have asked that question with writers like Sartre in mind.
LM: Yes, but I was also thinking of artists such as Arthur Rimbaud and, in an ever broader sense, of someone like Elvis Presley, whose radicalism probably has had the greatest impact on ordinary American lives of anyone in the twentieth century.
GT: Then, in that case, the answer would be definitely, yes. But I had a little narrower range. For example, look at Jean Genet. This may initially sound rather contradictory, but Genet was politically engaged without taking any political stance. True, Genet supported Palestine but that was for a very personal reasons that aren’t really relevant to his writing. And yet even though Genet didn’t take political stances in his work, he had a great deal of influence on the ways people think—he was "transgressive" in the best sense of the word, which means that his work ultimately had deep and profound political implications beyond any concern with specific issues. But it is important to realize that being a writer and being political are two different things. In the days of Sartre, those two were interlinked in a more peaceful, seamless way. Nowadays, the writer has to self-sacrifice himself in order to achieve any kind of political influence.
LM: What do you mean by "self-sacrifice"?
GT: Sartre was able to write political essays without sacrificing himself as a writer. But in the case of Genet, there is always a danger of jeopardizing his literary works whenever he expresses his political stance. In other words, his dramas or novels are in danger of being mistaken as a political message even when they are purely aesthetic. It is very difficult to distinguish between his political works and his literary works. If writers are not willing to accept the fact that they might have to jeopardize the literary quality of their works, they will find it impossible to have political influence.
LM: Almost every Japanese writer, artist or academic that we have talked to has been very interested in the Persian Gulf War. Is it because it was the first postmodern war?
GT: Exactly. There are several elements involved in this. In 1945,World War II ended but Japan had not done what it should have, concerning the responsibilities that it should have owed. Because of this incompleteness, or "unfinishedness," a big movement occurred first in the 1960s, then in the 1970s, whose main issue was the security treaty. This matter still has not yet been settled, which explains the wishy-washiness of the Japanese government when it comes to expressing their political stance in public. As a result, even the intellectuals, including writers, have ended up thinking that you are safe as long as you keep your mouth shut. At least if you are quiet you do not have to worry about whether or not you are politically correct. When the Gulf War occurred, we thought that what the United States was doing was wrong—and that it would be better to express our view about this, whether that be right or wrong, rather than being silent. We did what we believed in but we were attacked not for the particular political position we took but for the very fact that we had said something. In that sense, maybe the whole thing was postmodern.
LM: This seems related to postmodernism’s emphasis on irony. Irony is always a protective stance.
GT: That idea came up when Mr. Kojin Karatani and I were talking. During the several decades after the war, Japan had been dominated by a very ironic atmosphere. This is certainly the way the fiction Masahiko Shimada and I have published has been considered—we’re seen as being among the most ironic writers in Japan. But during the Persian Gulf War, we were seen as betraying that image because we took a stand by speaking out against the war in a very unironic fashion. I suppose that was one of the reasons why we were attacked so severely: we had betrayed our image.
LM: When I recently interviewed the young American author, David Foster Wallace, he said that he felt the most important thing for contemporary writers to do is to abandon irony—that perhaps the most radical thing a writer can do right now is to be sincere.
GT: To say something you actually believe with sincerity—what a truly bizarre notion! But I must admit it is an idea I definitely agree with.
Transcribed and translated by Reiko Tochigi