Death Sentences (19 page)

... which is to say?"

"Let me put it more concretely. Personally, I have very high aspirations. With these new materials, I think it's possible to write the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde from a thoroughly new perspective ... and to produce a new series on surrealism, for instance."

"A new series on surrealism?"

"Don't you think such work would be truly worthwhile?"

"Basically, you're saying that it's okay for us to publish everything?"

"And if necessary, we can offer financial support. If you complete a volume or two in time for the grand opening, we can display them at the exhibition, and our distributors can help to set up special displays for bookstore sales. What do you think?"

Tsujimi did not fail to add that if Kirin Publishers was not able to show some success within the year, he would withdraw their publication rights and find some other publisher.

Sakakibara was eager to give it a go.

The response was a foregone conclusion. He promised that they'd give it their all.

It was too much work for five people, however.

Sakakibara hired a couple of graduate students from the French Department of his alma mater on a part-time basis. He met with the students and their supervisor to assure that they could take a one-year leave beginning in the spring.

Their task was to skim the materials, sort them by content, and provide brief summaries.

The new year was soon upon them.

Even throughout the holiday week, the lights remained on well after midnight in the third floor offices and the fifth floor workspaces. Everyone was absorbed in his or her various tasks.

The deadline for the submission of the initial plan was only two days away.

But it was almost complete.

Sakakibara shifted his focus to establishing the overall theme for the exhibition on surrealism and related materials.

And then it came to him-

"The Undiscovered Century."

And as a subtitle he opted for "An International Exhibition on the Age of Surrealism."

He had already sent the conceptual designs to Tsujimi.

That is-

In order to establish the twentieth century as the undiscovered century, they would present it as traversed by intellectual projects that remained "unfinished"-Marxism, Freudianism, and surrealism.

Sakakibara's idea was to stress their "unfinished" nature. And then he would show that the raison d'etre of surrealism lay in its being a project awaiting completion.

He felt confident about this approach.

The piles of never-before-seen materials from Seito gave quite a boost to his confidence.

Now, in the third-floor offices, Mishima Keiko was producing a clean draft of the proposal. A clean draft no longer involved writing by hand or using a typewriter. She was busily typing on their newly acquired word processor.

Another person was working alongside them on the editorial floor, Miyagami. He was busy working on the ads for the spring issue of Kirin Quarterly. Prominently featured among the advertisements in the spring issue were announcements for the next issue, a special issue on surrealism, and for the publication of their eight-volume series of books on surrealism.

All of the other employees, including Sakakibara, were in the fifth-floor workrooms.

The two graduate student part-timers were organizing and classifying materials to produce a detailed list and index for the surrealism exhibit catalog.

The other three, Sakakibara, Kasadera, and Kojima, were about to start in on the looming task, Andre Breton's trunk.

It was-

It was a large old-fashioned steamer trunk, the leather binding thoroughly worn and covered with scratches.

Beneath the stout straps on both sides, the initials A. B." were embossed.

No one had touched this trunk until now.

As a consequence, expectations were running high, but at the same time, they all felt a sense of foreboding about it.

The trunk ... without a doubt ... its very existence was cloaked in an aura of fascination. The trunk itself seemed to be a sort of powerful object, ready to spring to life before their eyes.

That's why-

Sakakibara had suggested in the project proposal that they use this trunk as the symbol of the exhibit.

The trunk would appear, for instance, on exhibition brochures and posters, and as a logo on other visual materials. They were toying with the idea of placing the trunk right where visitors entered into the exhibition space, providing no other explanation but the words "Breton's trunk."

He was keen on pushing this scheme.

Breton's trunk was undoubtedly the perfect symbol for conveying the concept of the "undiscovered century."

In any event-

They were now going to raise the lid.

It felt like Pandora's box.

There probably wasn't all that much in the trunk, since one person could easily lift it.

Kasadera cut the cords binding it and carried it over to a large worktable in the middle of the room.

As it tilted, they could hear the contents sliding and knocking.

Sakakibara and Kojima gathered around the table.

Kasadera unclasped the thick leather straps.

The lock had broken and no longer held the lid. And so, as soon as he removed the straps, the lid opened halfway.

Sakakibara reached over and pulled the lid back until the trunk was fully open.

From within-

An unpleasant odor filled the room.

"All right, let's check every item, one by one. And Kojima, could you take care of writing it all down?"

Passing the notepad to Kojima, Sakakibara looked inside.

Letters and notes lay scattered, pages yellow and brittle. There was also a bundle of what looked like letters.

Alongside them lay a necktie, twisted and kinked.

As he sorted through things, he found a side pocket, and in it, an old wristwatch. The hands had stopped at eight sixteen.

At the bottom a picture postcard turned up, bearing a photo of the Empire State Building.

Sakakibara began with the bundle of letters.

There were a dozen or so of them. He noticed that the rubber band around them was new. Someone had bound them recently.

This meant that someone had looked through the contents before they had.

Come to think of it, it made sense. The buyer for the Seito international art section who acquired these materials must first have taken a look, and in Tokyo, the art staff and even Tsujimi Yujiro had surely opened the trunk for a look.

It wasn't at all surprising that someone had put a rubber band around the letters, but Sakakibara couldn't help feeling disappointed nonetheless. It was the sort of disappointment an archaeologist might feel upon finding a Coke bottle inside an ancient tomb that he had just excavated.

Clucking his tongue slightly, Sakakibara removed the rubber band.

He passed half of the dozen odd letters to Kasadera.

Most of them seemed to be addressed to Breton. A number of them had been sent to a New York address.

Judging from the postcard of the Empire State Building that had turned up, it seemed likely that Breton had had the trunk with him during his sojourn in America.

Sakakibara set at once to looking through the letters, checking the names of all the senders, and reading them to Kojima to write down.

Among them was one envelope without any sender marked on it.

It was addressed to Breton's Paris address.

The postmark was so faint as to be almost illegible, but he could make out 1953 or 1958.

Sakakibara slid the letter out of the envelope. There was only a single sheet of paper. And the message written on it was exceedingly short. This was all there was to it: "`The Gold of Time' is in America. I know where it is. But I don't have any intention of getting it."

That was it.

The signature read Avida Dollars.

Avida Dollars-which meant greedy for money.

It came back to him. Breton and his group had coined this name for Salvador Dali when he turned his back on surrealism and began to sell himself as "the wise Catalan prince of staggering genius." It was an intentionally malicious gesture on their part.

It was an anagram of Salvador Dali.

In which case-

This was probably the letter from Dali to Breton that Tsujimi Yujiro had mentioned.

Sakakibara read the sentence over and over again.

Something else came to mind.

In 1966, the year in which Andre Breton had died-

A certain phrase had appeared as an epitaph for the famous writer: "I seek the gold of time."

5

"Hey, take a look at this."

Sakakibara handed the letter to Kasadera.

He told him about the connections that had come to mind.

Kasadera tilted his head to the side. He said, "Well, let's worry about that later. Let's stick to cataloging the contents of this trunk tonight."

"... Yeah, okay."

Sakakibara reluctantly agreed.

But once the idea had flashed through his mind, it stuck with him, continually in the back of his mind. It was a knot that promised to untangle if he could just pull the right thread.

Only he had not yet grasped the right thread.

Sakakibara returned to his tasks, fighting back his impatience.

After they had gone through all the letters, setting aside those that they might make use of, they went on to the next task.

Next were the miscellaneous memos and notes.

The bulk of them were covered with diagrams and designs and rapidly written notations. They were very hard to read.

"There's no way. Let's leave these to the students."

Kasadera voiced his opinion.

Sakakibara also gave up on them.

They decided to have the graduate students decipher them and set them aside in a large briefcase marked for the students.

Next-

A hand-written manuscript emerged.

It wasn't Breton's handwriting, though. It was written with perfectly formed letters, bold yet neat.

It was signed Who May, which sounded like a joke.

They found another manuscript with the same signature.

Both of them seemed to be prose poems.

One bore the title "Another World," and the other "Mirror."

At the top corner of the manuscript "Another World" were written an address and phone number. The address looked like New York.

Surely, it was something related to Breton's time of exile.

"What exactly is this?"

Kasadera read the manuscript two or three times, then frowned.

"Who May ... is what it says. It must be someone's pen name?"

One of the graduate student part-timers working at another desk turned when he heard Kasadera's remark.

"Did you say Who May? There's something here by Who May as well."

"Is that so?"

The student stood, walked over to the sorting shelves along the wall, and pulled out an envelope from the piles of materials that had already been classified.

"Who May, as in `and who may you be ...'? It's right here."

On the envelope was written "Long poem, to Antonin Artaud, from Who May (1948?)."

"To Artaud, no less?"

Sakakibara's eyes opened wide.

"Yes. We found it among the items belonging to Antonin Artaud. But it's not the same handwriting. I thought that it may have been dictated, and so I included it with the Artaud items-Who May sounds like the sort of pen name that Artaud might have used, doesn't it?"

Put that way, it actually made sense.

Sakakibara took the envelope and pulled out the contents.

A sheaf of yellowed pages emerged. The other manuscripts were written in a fine hand. But this one looked different. The hand was obviously different from the two other manuscripts found in Breton's trunks. The writing was clearly legible but not as smooth. It looked like it had been written very slowly and deliberately.

In any event-

Sakakibara set the sheath of papers on the worktable.

Indeed, it had been signed with the name Who May.

"L'or du temps."

(I:or du temps ... !)

Sakakibara groaned.

"L'or du temps" was "the gold of time."

The inexplicable letter that Avida Dollars, that is, Salvador Dali, had sent to Breton had spoken of "the gold of time"-

And then, in his epitaph, Breton was said to be seeking the "gold of time"-

Now here was yet another "gold of time" but-in this instance, it was not some mysterious reference. Rather, even if they don't really understand it, it was a concrete title for an actual poem-which had appeared before their very eyes.

And so ultimately-

Did Dali's "gold of time" and Breton's "gold of time" refer to the same thing?

And then did those two actually refer to the manuscript belonging to Antonin Artaud, titled "The Gold of Time"?

There was no way to know. Still, it was hard to believe that these were mere coincidences.

Who was this Who May, anyway?

Indeed, who may you be ... ?

Was it one of those riddles that the surrealists were so fond of?

There was no way to be sure. There just wasn't enough information at hand.

Sakakibara lined up the three documents on the worktable, the two manuscripts from Breton's trunk and the manuscript found among Artaud's belongings.

Three references to "The Gold of Time"-

Three manuscripts by "Who May"-

Two sets of three that formed a single link.

"Do you think that Who May was Artaud's pen name, as he suggested?" Kasadera said.

"If that's the case, we have a way to explain the connection with Breton. What a discovery that would be!" The graduate student who had first discovered Who May said excitedly.

"In any case, we're definitely going to use these three. Well, it will depend on content, but we can probably use it as a central theme for one of the volumes on poetry in the book series. Needless to say, we can make a hell of a lot out of it if we find actual proof that this was by Artaud."

Kasadera gazed into space.

"I'll try to come up with something. I'll leave no stone unturned to trace connections to Artaud. If necessary, I can do a comparative analysis of word frequency or grammatical patterns."