The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, and Takayuki Tatsumi, "Keeping Not Writing: An Interview with Yasutaka Tsutsui"Keeping not Writing: An Interview with Yasutaka Tsutsui
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, Takayuki Tatsumi
The Japanese guru of metafiction, Yasutaka Tsutsui is a novelist, playwright, literary critic, actor, and musician. The oldest of four brothers, Tsutsui was born in Osaka, 24 September 1934, and educated from 1953-57 at Doshisha University, Kyoto, where he majored in aesthetics and art. Giving up his boyhood dream of becoming an actor, he started with his brothers NULL, an SF fanzine, in 1960. Discovered by Edogawa Rampo, the creator of the modern Japanese detective genre, Tsutsui made his debut as a professional writer with the publication of a short story, "O-Tasuke" (which had originally appeared in the first issue of NULL), in the detective fiction magazine, Hoseki. But it was in the field of SF and fantasy that Tsutsui would achieve his earliest acclaim. In 1962 his story "Muki Sekai e" (Toward the Inorganic) obtained an honorable mention in the Hayakawa SF Contest and "Okon Shoten" (The Death of Okon) became his first publication in Hiyakawa’s prestigious SF Magazine.
In the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, Tsutsui was nominated several times for the Naoki Prize without ever winning. In the 1970s and 1980s, his stylistic abilities, ranging from slapstick to fabulism and metafiction, began to attract a wide readership. In the 1980s, Shinchosha published his complete works in twenty-four volumes. A member of the Science Fiction Writers Association of Japan and the Japan PEN Club, Tsutsui has received a number of literary prizes, including: the 1981 Izumi Kyoka award for Kyojin-Tachi (Imaginary People); the 1987 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro award for Yumenokizaka-Bunkiten (The Yumenokizaka Intersection); the 1989 Kawabata Yasunari award for "Yoppa-dani eno Koka" (A Descent into the Yoppa Valley) and the 1992 Japan SF award for Asa no Gasuparu (Gaspard of the Morning). In 1997, he was awarded the rank of Chevalier des Arts and des Lettres by the French government for his literary work.
Like Borges, Lem, Vonnegut, Barth and other authors associated with the first wave of postmodern experimentalism, Yasutaka Tsutsui has often relied on SF and other genre motifs while developing metafictional critiques of the genre forms they employ. Tsutsui started his career as a science fiction writer in the mid-sixties, came to transgress in the seventies the generic boundary between serious and popular fiction, and won numerous "big" awards of science fiction and mainstream literature by the early nineties. Deeply influenced by Darwin, Freud, and the Marx Brothers, his own postsituationist poetics of "hyperfictionality" have persistently disclosed the conspiracy between reality and fiction in the hypercapitalist age haunted by "spectacles" and "pseudo-events." While his earliest works in the mid-sixties such as "Tokaido Senso" (The Tokyo-Osaka War, 1964) and "Vietnam Kanko Kosha" (The Vietnam Tourist Bureau, 1967) and Dasso to Tsuiseki no Samba (The Samba for Runaways and Chasers, 1972) prophesized the acceleration of hypermedia that would transform fictions into realities, battlefields into amusement parks, and individual identities into computer programs. His latest diptych of Gaspard of the Morning and Paprika (1993) radically reconsiders our own reality as a version of hyperfictionality, our everyday life as the effect of the political unconscious, and the boundary-transgressor as the greatest survivor of natural selection. Tsutsui states: "I do not find it accidental that from the 60s through the 70s, just while the postsurrealist mode nurtured British New Wave and North-American Metafiction and Latin American Magic Realism, I was making every effort to develop my own theory of hyper-fictionality without knowing those western literary experiments" ("On My Fictional Theory: a Recollection," unpublished, 1991). Tsutsui also unwittingly rivaled scholar-critics like David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury by experimenting with avant-garde literary criticisms in the novel Bungaku-bu Tadano Kyoju (Hitoshi Tadano the Professor of English,1990), which became a national bestseller. Thus, Tsutsui’s long career from the 1960s to the 1990s convinces us of the way Japanese literary history has gradually accepted the hybridization of metafiction and science fiction as the fate of postmodern literature per se.
Unfortunately, the recent champions of PC consensus became so nervous and critical about his literary experiments that Tsutsui finally gave up writing—at least publishing works in print media—in the summer of 1993. This decision to quit writing was in part a reaction to the protests made by the Epileptics Association of Japan against the fact that his short story "Mujin keisatu"—which allegedly included derogatory expressions about epilepsy sufferers—was being reprinted in a school textbook. Despite his public announcement that he would no longer publish any fiction in Japan, Tsutsui continued writing in private, and in December 1996 he exchanged with three Japanese publishing companies a memorandum pertaining to full freedom of speech, and this exchange eventually led to the announcement that he would resume publishing once again. The simultaneous publication in the February 1997 issues of two literary magazines—respectively Shincho and Bungaku-kai—of Jagancho and RPG shian—fufu henreki (two novellas among the fictions he had written during this period), marked his full return to literary life (with the text of the memorandum appearing as an appendix accompanying these novellas).
Meanwhile, Tsutsui has since become more active in cyber-media, helping set up in the summer of 1996 the first literary server in Japan "JALInet," which allows one to read his new story based upon Shichifuku-jin (the Seven Deities of the Good Fortune). This is how the representative metafictionist has metamorphosed himself into the exemplary cyber-fictionist. While Tsutsui up until the 1980s had been considered analogous with hard-core metafictionists like John Barth, John Fowles, and Italo Calvino, Tsutsui in the 1990s could well be compared with the godfather of American hyperfiction, Robert Coover, who, in the wake of cyber-culture, has promoted hypertextual reorganization of the metafictional imagination. (TT)
Takayuki Tatsumi: I would like to begin by using the work of Jean-Luc Godard as a means of discussing Mr. Tsutsui’s notions of avant-garde and how these relate to both Mr. Tsutsui’s own works and Larry’s recent concept of Avant-Pop. When Tsutsui saw Godard’s Bout de SoufBe (1959) for the first time, he was not so impressed, even though everyone admired it so highly and called it revolutionary, avant-garde, brilliant. Tsutsui found it neither revolutionary nor avant-garde. The technique used by Godard in the movie had already been employed by Enoken, a Japanese vaudevillian. However in 1970 when Alphaville was first screened in Japan (although it was made in 1965), Tsutsui was very impressed and contributed an essay for the movie pamphlet. Even though Godard himself described Alphaville as experimental, artistic, adventurous, and hard SF, Tsutsui considered it as a hard-core entertainment SF.
As you know, in the early seventies, there was the rise of British new wave, but to Tsutsui, Alphaville was not even new wave; in this sense, it was very old fashioned, traditional. However, what made Alphaville very new was the fact that Godard avoided cheap and trashy SPX and that he used the actual city of Paris as the setting for the movie. This kind of irony might be considered as an antithesis to the ordinary SF fans who are really into the appearance of star ships and so on. Tsutsui thinks that the content of Alphaville is brilliant. Just look at the hero who is driving almost 9,000 kilometers by car to the nebula city, Alphaville. It doesn’t make scientific sense, so, Tsutsui assumes that ordinary SF fans might get angry at this, but still, he enjoyed it as much as he did the reinterpretation of Heckle and Jeckle. He also appreciated the climax scene where the super computer went mad. He guessed that Godard must have enjoyed writing the screenplay of this movie. Godard is a skillful technician full of the spirit of entertainment. As a conclusion, he states that he will go and see Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) because someone told him that La Chinoise was even more slapstick than Alphaville.
Larry McCaffery: Judging from your summary, it sounds like a very interesting essay. There are several different questions that I would like to ask. The first thing that came to my mind was the reference to the fact that Breathless did not seem so avant-garde, because of your awareness that many of the techniques had already been used in vaudeville. It suggests to me that the whole idea of the avant-garde is different from culture to culture so for a Japanese person watching Breathless, it did not seem so unusual. Maybe we can begin by just asking, if you recall, what features of vaudeville were you referring to there.
Yasutaka Tsutsui: It’s really difficult to explain the impact of Enoken but Enoken was a very famous and almost avant-garde front-runner of the Japanese vaudeville in the 1930s. Back in the thirties, everybody knew him.
LM: It’s obvious that you had appreciated these slapstick features, like the reference to Heckle and Jeckle. And I noticed in the statement here, that one of the three people that you admire very much is Harpo Marx. One of the avant-garde features of Godard seems to be his willingness to mix together slapstick with serious fiction. What is there about slapstick that appeals to your sensibility? Doesn’t introducing slapstick risk making the work seem less serious?
YT: This essay on Godard is very strategic. At first, as I gave a second reading of what was written almost twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t remember the context. But still, according to what I recall, in the early seventies, SF was not regarded as a literary form and I felt a strong feeling of resistance towards this kind of prejudice. During that period, I was often asked by mainstream literary magazine editors to contribute more of "serious" works and give up writing SF. It was out of this antipathy that I wrote this essay.
Now here, I don’t necessarily degrade the artistic quality of Breathless nor Alphaville. But yet I appreciated Alphaville as hard-core SF. And at the same time, I note it as a trespassing of the boundaries of ordinary SF. A double strategy.
LM: That’s very much along the lines of Avant-Pop.
YT: As for the slapstick feature, in the early seventies, I had just published a novel entitled Samba of Escape and Pursuit (1971), which was the seminal Japanese metafiction and was considered as a kind of a deviant, both by the SF people and also by the mainstream people. But this slapstick tendency comes out from what I had studied in university, which was surrealism. That was my deepest commitment to literature. So it was not only Harpo but also surrealism that led me to the intermingling of entertainment and SF. To put it in another way, even surrealism has a slapstick feature within it.
LM: Also there is a coincidence. One of the other entries that I wrote was on the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Anyway, maybe the last question concerning this essay is—you appreciated the fact that Godard had dispensed with or gotten rid of all of these futuristic trappings that we associate with SF. I noticed that this is also true in your own SF works. Most of your SF works are not set in the future or outerspace, they don’t have rocket ships in them. As an SF writer, why haven’t you used these conventional trappings? Because it would not be useful for your own interest in psychology?
YT: I think this attitude that you have just described is true of myself but not necessarily of other SF writers. I have a resistant feeling against SF, and the others, too, consider me as a deviant. By the way, in Samba of Escape and Pursuit, there is one typical scene in which the hero goes through a manhole into a sewer which leads to another dimension of spatial-temporal continual. This might be a concrete example of what you have just pointed out. Pynchon also described an alligator hunt in V., didn’t he? Come to think of it, I wrote a short story titled "A Pack of Cats" where the manhole was an important factor and was very surrealistic. This was twenty years before Pynchon’s V. Anyway, my inspiration comes from the surrealistic background and not SF.
Sinda Gregory: A lot of your sensibility was influenced by surrealism and yet you have used the structure or form of SF in your works. Why have you not written more "traditional" surrealism? What was your initial impulse towards SF? Was it just a form that would allow you to create surrealism?
YT: To me, SF is an approach to deconstruct reality, just as surrealism was. Of course I could have employed other approaches. For example, I would have wanted to become a painter if only I had the talent.1 So, anyway, writing or écriture was the only way left for me to deconstruct reality. Now when I was in university, I wanted to become an actor, a comic actor. That seemed to be another way to deconstruct reality. Comedy was a very important media for me but in my time, there weren’t so many avant-garde theaters. My awareness of myself being a comic actor led me to write slapstick fiction.
TT: Just as Godard has changed his approach to filmmaking in many was since the appearance of Alphaville in the sixties, so has Mr. Tsutsui. Could you discuss the ways you feel your work has evolved?
YT: First of all, I don’t really think Godard has greatly changed all that much. From the outset, there were two streams, two tendencies in his work. The first tendency can be seen in works such as Alphaville and the second can be seen in those such as King Lear. To me, it seems that what Godard did in King Lear was just deconstruction, not reconstruction. I think there is a sharp line between deconstruction and reconstruction. In King Lear, Godard was involved with deconstruction and the pleasures of reading, la joissance d’écriture, in the Bathesian sense. He left the text open and ambiguous. On the other hand, if you want to succeed in reconstructing, you will most probably end up with SF or with mere entertainment. As a result, if you reconstruct something, it will become a kind of parody, entertainment, often SF-oriented. Usually that will be considered lowbrow whereas deconstruction is highbrow. However, in my opinion, it is more difficult to achieve reconstruction than deconstruction. Leaving the text open is very easy, in a sense, whereas reconstruction requires a more complex approach, at least if it aims to genuinely add to (rather than merely subtracting from) the original material. In my own works I’m interested in developing reconstructive works that are not just supply audiences with superficial, optimistic variations on the original but which look deeply for means of transforming materials into more useful fictions—a kind of total entertainment.
SG: It’s clear in your work that there is a surrealistic effect. Do you achieve these effects through rather rational, conscious methods of writing or do you try to somehow put yourself in a situation whereby you are really tapping into your own consciousness?
YT: If you want to succeed in creating a piece of surrealist or fabulist art, it isn’t necessary to use rational method. In the case of Godard, he very much appreciates the visual effect. And what really fascinates the audience when they see the screen is the sense of déjà vu. I also consider this effect of déjà vu important in my own works as well.
LM: Do you ever use your own dreams in your work?
YT: Yes, occasionally.
SG: What about the kinds of automatic writing approaches that the surrealists often experimented with?
YT: Sometimes I do. There are parts of any book that should not be organized, parts that should be chaotic. I use automatic writing when it is most effective.
LM: I think Godard attempts to bypass the rational processes by his use of improvisation. Obviously Godard was interested in using the moment to generate a certain scene, to ask questions to the actors and actresses.
Does that have any references at all to your own writing process? That is, do you know in advance, do you plan your stories out beforehand as in an outline, or do you work, in a sense, improvisationally?
YT: As long as a writer is good and professional, he will have his own blueprint for what he would write. Before writing a piece of work, he should be able to envision almost every detail, the slightest detail of the text-to-be. However, from my experience, this kind of vision or blueprint testifies the fact that the very writer is obsessed with what he has already done in his past successful works. He is apt to follow them in the blueprints. He is delimited, encircled by his past accomplishments. Therefore, he must transgress the boundary. This is why I employ the improvisational approach. By that way, I am able to write something different, something new.
For me, a true masterpiece must be new and more often than not, it should leave the critics at a loss. As long as the writer follows the line set by his past works, it would be easy for the critics to analyze his works. But I strongly believe that a good piece of art should be something that bewilders the critics. Of course, I have a blueprint but then I employ improvisation and try to destroy the whole. Now will this make the work a failure? No, because I can never destroy a text enough. It is strange, but the work ends up in a certain settling way.
LM: The writers I personally admire the most are those who are willing to create works that leave behind their previous works, to risk losing their previous audiences and to anger critics. For writers and artists, there is always that temptation to create works that the audience already wants. That is why I like very much what you are saying. The greatest artists are willing to risk angering or bewildering the audience that they have already won. This is a question that would relate to what we have been talking about. From the very beginning, Godard’s works were metacinema. They were most always movies about moviemaking. On the other hand, in the sixties in the U.S., we have seen the rise of a lot of metafictionalists like Coover, Barth, Borges, Nabokov and so on. There was magical-realism taking place in Latin America and in the U.S. as well. As I understand it, you were writing metafiction and a kind of magical realism before you ever read these other writers. Do you think that is a coincidence? What was responsible, do you think, for the sort of independent rise of these meta-stances in art in the sixties, in genre writing? In other words, was it a coincidence or was there something going on?
YT: When a writer is ambitious enough to write fiction that has never existed, there would be several ways, and one of them would be a metafictional approach. However, even before this method had been employed consciously by artists, whether they were writers or a filmmakers, there were many works that had already suggested this way of creating. For example, there were those hilarious "road movies" of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope from the 1940s. One of them would say "Here are some flashbacks" and flashbacks would really appear on the screen. They were already self-referential.
SG: Just like the Marx brothers were.
YT: Yes. And there were even mangas which had this metafictional tendency (without yet being aware of it). For example, often in Osamu Tezuka’s works, the author would appear and have a say to something. So there was a sort of accumulation of these metafictional tendencies and we were very amused by all of this. We would think how this effect had come about, and start to employ them ourselves. That was how the "coincidences" worked, I would say.
LM: Ironically, in the U.S., some critics criticize metafictionists as being only engaged in playing games with words and fiction and not interested in reality. But it seems to me that metafiction is a way of returning people to reality by revealing the artifice. It’s a gesture in getting at "the real."
YT: I think that metafiction is a game, only in the sense that games are a commitment to contingency. Let’s take the publication of Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Condition of Postmodern in 1979. Within this book, as you remember, the phrase "master narrative" was used and this was translated into the Japanese word monogatari. Now what makes things confusing is the fact that the word monogatari usually means "story," which is very different from Lyotard’s context. Of course, Lyotard’s "narrative" conveys a meaning closer to "idea" or "discourse." Anyhow, after the translation, people started to use the word monogatari, the Japanese translation for "master narrative," without even understanding what it really meant. They just could not get rid of the "good old" story-idea. They would think that in order to make a story realistic, there would have to be a linear structure, which is in itself a dominant narrative. However, having a linear structure is not close to reality at all. As we all know, reality is full of coincidences and contingency. Now I am not sure how exactly metafiction and games are related to each other, but if you think of the main aspect of games as being dependent on contingency, then saying that metafiction is but a game would be the same as saying metafiction is reality itself.
SG: One of the things that is striking about the tales included in What the Maid Saw, is that by the end of this work, there is a sense where Nanase is doing things that are not ethically correct but are necessary for her self-preservation. Is her decision to choose self-preservation at the expense of everything else more acceptable because she is a woman? If a man had chosen self-preservation over the ethical choice, would the response to the character be different?
YT: Yes, you are asking about the important relationship between social justice and femininity. In my opinion, these two are completely different and it is misleading to discuss these two together. Now let’s start with the former issue. There is what we call social justice as opposed to social evil. This includes very large-scale evil to a punkish kind of evil which a meager sneak crook might perform. But these are different from the evil which literature is trying to pursuit. Of course this has much to do with the effect of the representation of evil. But anyway, it is irrelevant to attack an evil depicted in literature in terms of social justice, because these two work on a completely different level.
In this context, we can go on to the problems of feminism. Assume that you are a talented woman and became popular, started to appear on TV, media covers you, etc, etc, but from a certain point people start to find faults and bash you, ridicule you and thus you start to fall, ending up as a fallen idol. There is a close relationship with the problem of feminism and individual talent. If you are talented, the case would be that you might become a target of a social bashing. Nanase is a talented woman because she has supernatural powers. What I have just explained is an application of the problem of Nanase in a post-PC era. Nanase can be reinterpreted from this context.
LM: Do you remember how you got the idea for What the Maid Saw? I know that within What the Maid Saw, you make a number of references to actual studies of telepathy and parapsychology—were these studies part of what got you initially interested in developing the book or were you already familiar with them beforehand?
YT: When I started acting in an actor’s group, I was still very young so it was very difficult for me to fully grasp the characters of the roles that I was given. You have to be familiar with all kinds of human characters to be a good actor. So I started to read books about characterology written by Dr. Takehisa Takara. From there, I went to Freud. I thought it would be very helpful for my own understanding of acting out dramatic characters. But gradually, I became interested in them for their own sake, rather than for the application of these theories into my acting. It was not until I started to write fiction that the books of Jung were translated into Japanese. I read many of his works as well, according to my own interest, but needless to say, I realized that my studying would also help me understand the psychological aspects of surrealism which I had always been fascinated with.
TT: By the way, the topic of his B.A. thesis was the psychology of surrealistic creative writing with special emphasis on psychological automatism.
YT: I was not particularly interested in parapsychology but I was aware that if I used this in fiction, it would be very experimental. It turned out that what I had studied according to my own interest happened to end up as very useful in my writings.
LM: Did your conception of your central character, Nanase, change at all while you were writing these stories? For example, when I began reading the stories, I assumed that she was going to be a purely positive figure. But I noticed that as stories went along, her interventions into other people’s lives became increasingly ambiguous in terms of what we are supposed to feel about her. Can this be considered as an evolution?
YT: This change in Nanase comes from both Nanase’s growth and my own growth, too. In such kind of story, a writer develops a deep sympathy with the protagonist. So, the writer should know that the protagonist will not act as she or he would have because, she or he has gone through several experiences. And again, this also shows the evolution of the writer himself. The series of Nanase’s stories were first published in an entertainment magazine called Shoosetsu Shinchoo. I kept writing these stories every two to four months for two years. It was natural that I went through evolution as much as I developed a sympathy for Nanase.
SG: I have a question about the manifesto. Towards the end, it says that every author basically wants to represent his own romantic love for literature. I was wondering about the relationship of this statement to the author who is doing something for his love of literature as opposed to the author who wants to translate his experiences in the world. Related to this, I was wondering if you have any impulse to write something about the recent earthquake here in Kobe. In other words, do you consider your fiction only an aesthetic form that is removed from the world, or is it something that conveys your own personal experience?
YT: In so far as we are living in the real world, we have to be aware of the society or reality to a certain extent, no matter how committed we are to the aesthetic aspects of our works. In the sixties or maybe in the early seventies, when I was still at my early stage as a writer, I had very often been asked to write fiction that was closely related with current topics. Sometimes I accepted their suggestion if the incident was appropriate enough to be fit into my fiction, but needless to say, I don’t do that anymore.
However, I do think that a writer should have the ability to predict. Now, this is not in the sense of a supernatural power. The context is completely different. For example, almost one or two years before the Kobe earthquake, I had already written several stories that were in a way, predicting it. This is very important for a writer. Fiction predicts future reality.
SG: There is another part in the manifesto that says at one time, fiction reflected reality and now reality reflects fiction.
YT: That part comes from Vonnegut’s "canary in the coal mine" theory.
TT: Since we are talking about the writer’s sense of prediction, why don’t we go back to Godard. His sense of prediction can be easily seen in his La Chinoise. In the same way, we have Mr. Tsutsui’s The Tokyo-Osaka War. The novels that he had written in the mid-sixties already predicted the media-oriented society controlled by TV. Maybe he was the first writer to take up TV as a literary topic in Japanese literary history. How was it in the U.S.?
LM: There were SF writers who were anticipating this fact in the fifties. Robert Sheckley was one and Paul Cornbluth wrote The Space Merchant. But there weren’t many mainstream writers who did this until, for example, Robert Coover. Of course Godard in Breathless showed Jean-Paul Belmondo already acting like Humphrey Bogart.
YT: When did Coover take up TV?
LM: He had already written an early story involving television called "Panel Game" back in the fifties or early sixties; his most influential TV story, "The Babysitter," appeared in the late sixties.
SG: Gertrude Stein in the mid-thirties was already writing about how difficult it is to live in the world because of so much information.
YT: When I wrote "4 Billion 8 Hundred Million Hallucinations," I had the intention to visualize life a couple of decades ahead from that point. I was inspired by Daniel Buastin. In any case, my point there was that it seems that the whole world has turned into a TV studio.
TT: That concept is what Mr. McCaffery calls the "reality studio" in the anthology of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction he edited, Storming the Reality Studio. He considers the world we are living in as a movie studio under the name of "reality. " The phrase itself comes from William Burroughs.
LM: It occurred to me that the comment about reality imitating art is even more true today than it has ever been, because of the media. Even in What the Maid Saw, the story "Cult of Youth" in which everybody wants to look thin and young shows what is happening nowadays. Reality is imitating art because there is no culture any more, as Frederick Jameson says, with the media extending throughout the world. Just like Mr. Tsutsui’s own story about Vietnam. By presenting this idea of transforming the Vietnam War into a spectacle that tourists can visit, you were predicting our present life in which even taboos are turned into spectacle, in the sense of Guy Debord. I was thinking about us watching O. J. Simpson and his trial.
TT: Godard was very much influenced by Guy Debord. There is even a "Guy Debord period" in his works.
Anyway, one of Mr. Tsutsui’s literary characteristics is to demystify preexisting establishments, ideas, highly-admired notions.
YT: I already anticipated while writing that story about Vietnam, that there would be accusations. In fact, a SF critic named Takashi Ishikawa who then was working for the newspapers rebuked me by saying there are certain things that you just cannot disgrace or make fun of. From this, it is easy to imagine how the general response was. There has been an accumulation of this kind of ethical response but for me, to write something very radical is equal to attacking the conscientious part of the mass communication.
A while ago, I gave an explanation to Ms. Gregory’s question by using the talented female figure. That might be true in my own case, as well. As you might already know, I was forced to stop writing a few years ago. For me, the rhetoric of discrimination was aimed to describe evil in this society. But major newspapers attacked me just in the view of social justice. Some started to call me a discriminator. In this post-postmodern age, this kind of incident is totally anachronistic, or negatively anachronistic. It was all so sad and ridiculous. The newspapers could not deconstruct the binary opposition.
LM: Clearly when Godard was creating those new wave films in the early sixties, they were conceived in terms of the avant-garde. Shocking, surprising. . .. And Godard thought of his work as having potentially politically liberating effects. I wonder what he would say to the idea that you hear sometimes in the U.S. that the whole idea of the avant-garde is dead, because of the ability of the media to take even the avant-garde and to transform it into trivial effects. The mass media can take even the concept of opposition and just simply incorporate it into mass media forms. How is it possible to create avant-garde art today when even the gesture of the avant-garde is so quickly assimilated by the mass media?
YT: If you want to do something new and avant-garde, you need to know what you are trying to reconstruct or deconstruct, appropriate or reappropriate, what there was in the past, the heritage of avant-garde, the history of philosophy, literature. For example, take philosophy. You might start off with Aristotle, go to Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida. You might want to build up something new, but the fact is, you might not even have reached Aristotle.
In today’s Nihon Keizai Newspaper, a Japanese equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, there was an article saying that Japanese literature has been emptied, because Oe and myself have ceased to write. This is not so. But I do regret that younger generation writers have never read the classics. Of course they can try things new but at the same time it is possible to read or reread the given heritage as well. What I truly recommend—particularly to the younger generation of writers in Japan—is deconstructing classics. That should be astonishing and radical to those who have never read those classics and it would be very useful for the writer, too.
LM: In the very beginning of "Standing Woman" the narrator says something like "these days, you can’t write stories that might do either harm or good." These comments seem to take pessimistic attitude about the ability of the contemporary Japanese writer to have any real impact on the culture.
YT: Even while I was writing this short story, I thought that in the near future there would be many writers who would have to stop writing, just because of social justice. It could have been that I had predicted this PC kind of age. What matters most is that it was not just myself but also other writers behind me who may have to give up writing. My giving up writing represented that of other writers as well. It is not an exclusive case. It can happen to other writers any time.
LM: One direction that you find in a certain type of avant-garde writing and avant-garde cinema is the abandonment of story in favor of, for example, pure writing, pure improvisation, automatic writing, or digression. You can see this in the works of the later Godard, where he seemed to be increasingly willing to give up narrative—or presenting a story—and instead began to develop films which were more interesting in simply presenting the process of creating the film. Whereas in your own case, your works, no matter how strange and surreal they are, always reply on narrative—there’s always a story being told. Why do you think story is so important? My own belief, by the way, is that fiction is a form which requires story. If you give up story, you give up something very important in fiction—this was a lesson that Samuel Beckett learned.
YT: I abandon narrative only when I am prohibited to write something that I would really like to write about. For example, I wrote a story titled "Disgracing the Readers," or "I Will Attack the Readers."
LM: But right there, by having your title announce "I will attack the readers," you’ve already introduced a narrative element there.
YT: True, though this is somewhat disguised in that story. I suppose I still appreciate narrativity for the sake of the huge audience who has followed me since the sixties when I first started writing. I started my literary career by writing SF-like, entertainment novels which were all committed to narrativity. Therefore I think I owe it to these longtime fans and audience that I write at least a minimum amount of narrativity. However, it is not the past but the future that is really at stake. I gave up writing because of the increase of PC topics that one should not write about and the situation is going to be worse and worse. Therefore, as I have already said, I consider myself as the canary in the coalmine.
SG: Do you think that literature in the future in general is going to be passé?
LM: Or, what happened to you is symptomatic to other writers as well?
YT: Unfortunately, yes, I do think so.
LM: Is the work you are doing right now on computer communication an alternative to writing literature? You have stopped writing regularly but why are you willing to work in this other form? How is it different?
YT: What I am doing on the computer is just conversation, or e-mail, not really writing in the literary sense. My abandoning writing provoked many arguments—it became a provocative literary and social issue. Almost every newspaper reported about it, and they continue to be curious about what would happen. In other words, by giving up writing, people would talk about this, become conscious of the situation. So usually, writers keep writing, but for me, it is the opposite—to keep not writing is for me the way to express myself literally. In a way, this is literature in the present day.
SG: This is very interesting because now there are so many books, so many words out there, that maybe absence and silence is more powerful than statement.
TT: I would just like to add here that Mr. Tsutsui and Godard share something very important—they are both Avant-Pop. Godard has very often used popular figures and commercial genre materials, just as Mr. Tsutsui has deconstructed the boundary between avant-garde and pop culture.
LM: Of course, what I am describing as "Avant-Pop" is not a new thing. Everybody from the Marx brothers to Godard and Nabokov have been doing something like this, and I see many affinities with what you have been doing all along.
YT: Every avant-garde work should be Avant-Pop. There is this type of avant-garde which is close to elitism, which denies popularity—but this is the very opposite to what avant-garde should be.
LM: The reason why I’ve been promoting this idea is that if there is a difference, it’s because now the rise of the media culture has made pop culture so pervasive and so imprisoning for Japanese or American ordinary citizens, so the need for writers willing to address pop forms in an avant-garde way as a means of liberation has increased more and more.
YT: I am sure the Avant-Pop strategy should prove effective. Look at Samuel Beckett whose End Game you mentioned in your article, "Avant-Pop 101." He was very avant-garde but he also brought vaudeville elements into his plays. On the other hand, the mass media ranks me as highly intellectual and try to push me into the high-culture category, but that is a misunderstanding.
TT: He is reappropriating the best quality of pop culture, infusing them into a high-cultural context, and then, he reexports them to the mass audience.
LM: One of the things that has disturbed me a great deal about the last twenty or twenty-five years and about the concept of postmodernism, is the argument that there is no longer a distinction between serious high-cultural works of art and pop-culture, low cultural works. I don’t agree with that at all. Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett. . . even though they use pop culture, their works are definitely high culture. In the U.S. right now there is such an insistence by an amount of critics that what postmodernism represents is the loss of any distinction. What postmodernism has come to be defined as, for a lot of people, is a lack of distinction. Whereas what I am trying to suggest is a way to bring high-cultural literacy and a historical awareness that we associate with high culture into pop forms rather than saying that high culture is losing any credibility.
YT: Gen’ichiro Takahashi has incorporated many proper names of pop singers and manga characters into his text. This should provide a gateway through which younger readers would be able to enter the literary world with more ease. Reading Mr. Takahashi’s works, they might realize how interesting literature is. However, what will happen to the work as time passes? Will it have the same relevancy? Certainly it would be great material from a social aspect because there are so many elements that show the situation of mass culture of a certain period. In any case, the real bottom line is that such works must have literary value—this is what really counts.
TT: As can be seen in King Lear, Godard has been appearing in his movies and caricaturizing himself in quite a slapstick way. At the same time, Mr. Tsutsui also appears in movies that were transcribed from his books as much as in his own works as the writer himself. According to our interview, this is another way of literature, by "keeping not writing." Then what is the meaning of the creator exposing himself to the audience or the readers?
YT: Godard is truly exposing himself before the audience. Why? Because he is not an actor! However, I am originally an actor. I am acting, not exposing myself. These two are completely different.