I Am a Japanese Writer (3 page)
I am in the Montreal subway, following the footsteps of
a certain Matsuo Munefusa, also known as Basho. He was
born in 1644 in Tsuge, a village close to Ueno. He admired
the poet Tu Fu. Basho and Sora reached the prestigious
Shirakawa Barrier, which all the old poets spoke of with
great emotion. No sooner had they crossed the Abukuma
River than they discovered, on the left, “the summit of Mount
Bandai, whose vast height dominates the land of Aizu.” They
paused at the house of a hermit who lived under a chestnut
tree. Basho composed a haiku about the chestnut tree, which
seemed to him more moving than the hermit. He no doubt
recalled the banana tree that gave him his name: basho. The
rains lasted the entire month of June.
I look up. Isa is still there. Nothing has moved but the train. I go back to Basho. Matsushima! Our travelers have long dreamed of it. Finally they are there. They head for the beach at Ojima. Matsushima leaves Basho speechless. There are islands everywhere. Everything is graceful, especially the pine trees, “dense, green and dark,” whose elegance he sings. Death caresses him near the Kitakami River, where the Koromo joins it.
The journey became ever more arduous. Thickets of bamboo,
rushing streams, rocks, and, worst of all, the cold sweat
along the steep path that led to the Mogami district. The two
poets rested before resuming their journey. They hoped to
travel down the Mogami by boat. The weather was so bad
they had to wait days before taking to the road again. Peasants
recognized Basho and asked him to give them writing
lessons. He was moved: “Who would have thought that, during
this pilgrimage dedicated to those who have gone before
me, I would have the opportunity to teach my own style, and
in such surroundings?” What delicacy of spirit! And here
was the Mogami, whose source is the northern highlands.
Basho was always ready to point out the places along the way so that other poets might make the same journey. This is the great game we have been playing for centuries. Basho tried to show us that all poets are as one, that the same spirit moves through them. The road is the same for all, though each poet travels it in his own way. And in his own time. The train has stopped without me realizing it. Just time enough to see Isa, from behind, in the crowd of hurried travelers. Her long fragile neck. Its sad nape (I project my sadness onto her nape). The train starts moving again.
I HADN’T HEARD
of the Café Sarajevo, even though it’s centrally located, not far from the subway station. I prefer the subway to the bus. In the subway, you see only faces. In the bus, only landscapes. I emerge from the hole, turn left, walk into the café. Good atmosphere. Every city has at least one place like this. Anyone who has listened to Joan Baez ends up here, sooner or later. The kind of people who’ve dropped off our radar, though we wonder where they’re hiding out. They end up in cafés like the Sarajevo. I haven’t come expecting to find Joan Baez here. Or even Suzanne Vega. The wheel has turned. I’ve come for Midori, the new Japanese singer who’s on MuchMusic from time to time. I’d never heard of her, either, but ever since the Korean told me about her, I’ve seen her everywhere. You don’t know Midori? There are posters of her in the bathrooms in bars. It’s hard to tell what she really looks like from them because she’s underwater and her face is slightly deformed. She’s holding her breath. The photographer waited till the last second. Just as she was about to explode. Her eyes wide with the beginnings of terror. The pink wings of her nose diaphanous. Her throat swelling.
Click.
Her torso bursts free of the water. Water pouring from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Her name is whispered all over town: Midori. In every tongue. Montreal’s first Japanese star. The rocket Midori is launched: destination, Planet Bjork.
Bjork—
a muffled sound. A sound in water. Basho notes:
The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!
Midori is a flat object with contours so sharp she could slice through someone’s neck and leave the head standing there for a few seconds before it fell. A necklace of red pearls. Midori is polishing her act at the Sarajevo. I sit in the darkest corner of the place. The waitress shows up a half hour later. Green tea. The café is empty. Suddenly, Joan Baez. Joan Baez can be listened to only in a café like the Sarajevo. In an atmosphere like this, I could listen to Joan Baez for the rest of my days. Leonard Cohen chimes in with “Suzanne,” the song that defined Montreal in the 1970s, halfway between passion and nonchalance. So I already know the taste of the waitress, a small black-haired girl with a ring in her nose and flashing eyes. I go back to Basho. I like the idea of the journey, but I hesitate when it comes to getting on the road. Where to? The traveler has to come back one day or other; otherwise, he isn’t a traveler. You stay in your room and await his return.
Customers start showing up. They sit with their backs to the walls. The center remains empty. The ones who like to sit in the center will show up later. Unless you arrive early, you think the room fills up in less than half an hour. But for someone who frequents small cafés, it’s not as simple as that. The customers arrive one by one. The waitress calls the owner to find out whether she ought to get an extra waitress or two. How come? There are fifteen customers in the place. How many are there usually at this time? Seven. And there’s a new guy who ordered green tea. Green tea—you call that a customer? Sure. What do you suggest? Two more waitresses. It’s your call, you know the place. She hangs up and looks at me with a big smile. I’d order another tea, but I’m afraid she’ll call in a third waitress.
I go off to the washroom. Everything is black, even the floor tiles. A regular boudoir. The posters tell you a lot about the people who go to the café. Their tastes are exposed for all to see. This is a musicians’ café. The posters tell it all. Next to a choral group that sings medieval songs is an offer to help cure your backaches through acupuncture. Yoga classes too. A charter to India to go see some guru. And there are posters of Midori. Midori is at home here. Like Air France in Paris, American Airlines in New York or Alitalia in Rome. Midori at the Café Sarajevo. A poster of her naked—out of focus. We never see her clearly. Her narrow body, straight hips, no breasts. Her sex is shaved close. Swollen. I linger in front of Midori’s sex. Then I return to the room. It’s filled to the rafters. A boxing ring. Performances. A girl made up like Nina Hagen is writhing in front of a camera. It’s chaos. No borders between the customers and the stage. Everything’s shaking. A guy grabs the mike and starts in on a speech about the price of oil on the world market. Someone else weighs in about the famine in Africa. It’s back to the 1970s with its spiritual outbursts. Someone else wants to talk about the fabulous F1 race that afternoon. He gets shouted down when he bellows that Ayrton Senna was the best who ever drove. The crowd starts shouting the name Gilles Villeneuve, a native son. No more stage, no more audience. A sea of raised arms clamors for one thing after another. Nina Hagen’s double demands a kiss from her girlfriend, who looks like Suzanne Vega twenty years ago. A universe of doubles. Vega has a boyfriend. He looked worried at first, but he’s wised up. Nina Hagen leans over and kisses him gently on his left eye. The crowd is moved but unsatisfied. Then on the right eye, with the same light touch. Everyone holds his breath. The fantasies of heterosexual guys haven’t changed since the Neolithic era. Nina Hagen acknowledges the crowd and makes a show of returning to her seat. The crowd howls in protest. Hagen gets back to her feet, taking her own sweet time. She has us eating out of her hand. A kiss doesn’t mean anything. It’s only as important as we want to make it. Vega’s double seems to want to put an end to the waiting. Hagen is in no hurry. We know there will be a kiss, but we don’t know what will happen after it. The guy at my table starts chewing his nails. Hagen bends low and kisses Vega on the neck, then on each eye. The crowd wants more. Hagen holds Vega’s head in her hands and looks her deep in the eye (we wonder what the real Nina Hagen and Suzanne Vega are doing right now). This is the longest kiss ever recorded at the Sarajevo. A kiss that lasts until Vega feels really embarrassed, until she really understands what is going on. She snaps her eyes open when Hagen’s tongue touches hers. Hagen’s furious, dominating gaze. Vega’s imploring, submissive answer. The crowd, whose expectations have been surpassed. As she keeps kissing Vega, Hagen locks eyes with the boyfriend. He gets up to leave. The crowd follows each of his steps. Hagen’s lips still on Vega’s. Vega is the only one who doesn’t know her boyfriend is leaving. Finally, Hagen surrenders her prey. Sated. Vega’s head on Hagen’s shoulder, asleep. The crowd falls silent. The guy comes back into the room. Vega wakes with a saucy smile. Once more, Hagen acknowledges the crowd (the place is full by now). We have just witnessed The Big Kiss, a Kiss Inc. production. The trio exits the café as the crowd applauds and the amateur photographers shoot off their flashes. The three waitresses are hopping.
THE NIPPON AT THE EIFFEL TOWER
I’VE NEVER OWNED
a still camera. That’s because I’ve never quite figured out their purpose. If it’s just to take pictures I’ll never look at, then it has to be the stupidest invention ever. Anyway, I have one that works very well: this skull where I’ve stored fifty years of images, most of them repeated until they’ve become the fabric of my ordinary life. This day-today life made of a series of tiny explosions. An electric life. I’ve been told that these images belong to me only, and that other people can’t access them. That’s not exactly true—I can describe them with such precision that, in the end, they become visible to other eyes. Even better: I can transform these pictures into feelings. I can relate a moment without describing the people who were there, simply by bringing forth the energy that gave life to the event. In a photo, we rarely see the emotion that creates the story unfolding before our eyes. Except, maybe, in birthday photos, where we see the child’s enchanted eyes behind the lit candles. Of course, sometimes a whiff of nostalgia rises up from a picture yellowed with time, especially when almost all those who looked into the lens are dead. I keep all those photos in my head, and they have taken root there, the images falling one over the other, all wanting to surge to the front. As for the Japanese man, who never stops photographing the world: what does he see? He doesn’t even see the two elements he is trying to capture, his traveling companion and the monument that the companion is blocking out. The Eiffel Tower is there to show that this guy spent a day in Paris. But by cracking the same wide, impersonal smile in front of every monument on the face of the Earth, he is destroying the intimate nature of the moment. The Japanese man becomes as timeless as the tower itself. You’d think that the Eiffel Tower was being photographed as a backdrop for a smiling Japanese guy.
THE CROWD KEPT
its eyes on the Kiss Inc. trio, who’d given the same show in Berlin, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, London and New York. I knew as much because I had seen their poster in the bathroom. There wasn’t room to add Rome, Amsterdam and Sydney. Those cities too had seen Kiss Inc.’s act; Montreal was the last on the list. The world is crawling with market systems in which people and things are bought and sold. It used to be the silk road, the sugar road, the spice road. Now we have the professional tennis circuit, the golf tour, the environmentalists and the all-powerful heads of state. Complex networks. Impossible to lose yourself in the natural world—nature’s slice of the pie keeps dwindling and dwindling. Workers have their own subway line. The line that runs from the workers’ neighborhood to the factory doesn’t change on the way back. Fifty years of round trips, looking at the same sights every day. Kiss Inc. studies fashion shows, the paths taken by rock stars who want to marry models. Kiss Inc. doesn’t move in the world of rock stars and Kate Moss, but hangs around the edges, hoping for a few crumbs. The whirlwind of fashion and music carries in its golden path a colorful, living, cool, non-conformist crowd awaiting the slightest signal from its leaders to pack up and move from the Sarajevo to Olympic Stadium, where Bjork is putting on a show. Bjork could have been at the Sarajevo. Bjork at the Sarajevo—what a poster that would have made! With Kiss Inc. as the warm-up band. But for that to happen, chance would have had to wave its magic wand. Bjork coming to town a day early because she absolutely had to see the big voodoo art show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The great masters of Haitian painting. The peasant painters celebrated by Malraux. The first worldwide show since the one organized at the Mellon, in Manhattan, in the 1950s. Bjork intrigued by voodoo. Bjork, as a little girl, receiving a voodoo doll as a gift. Bjork identifying with the doll, putting herself in the shoes of a little black girl who had to hide her doll because pleasure was forbidden. Bjork talking to the doll, and the doll answering her. Look at the strange turn of Bjork’s mouth and you’ll understand you’re not dealing with a pure-hearted, well-behaved little Icelandic girl, but a voodoo doll bloated with blood. The doll has taken the girl named Bjork’s place.
Bjork hasn’t grown an inch since. Bjork is the doll. And Bjork absolutely wants to see the show and meet the voodoo painters discovered in the 1940s. They’re still alive—how can that be? The doll’s eyes glow from deep within the shadows. Paging through a magazine, Bjork comes across an ad for the Montreal show. Is she in Paris, or London, or New York or Berlin (don’t forget Berlin), or is it Rome? A hotel room, in any case. A hotel room is a universal space. White sheets. Magic number. Incognito, Bjork chooses room 17 wherever she goes. She calls her producer and orders her to cancel the Melbourne show so she can get to Montreal in time to see the museum. The producer thinks the best solution is to extend the show so Bjork can see it. The producer gets on the line to Montreal. She speaks the name “Bjork” and is immediately put through to the curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, relaxing in Bermuda. The curator is “profoundly touched.” A call from Bjork—actually, it’s her producer, but on behalf of Bjork. He’s a fan, well, not really, his wife is, not really his wife, but their daughter. The curator stammers and stumbles. The producer, very amused, waits on the other end of the line. You never get enough of that sort of pleasure. Just the name of that tiny sliver of a woman can stupefy one of the major thinkers of modernity. Just say “Bjork.” Such an ugly sound—
Bjork.
So (with the right authoritarian tone), will you be extending the show for Bjork? Of course, I can’t make a decision of that sort all on my own. Not without the board of directors. What the hell? How many are there? Seven. And where are they? On vacation, as I am. Where? I have no idea, Madame. All right, leave it to me. The producer calls an agency that specializes in this kind of emergency. It’s said they could find Bin Laden, no problem, and put him on the line with George Bush. The last miracle the agency pulled off was tracking down the daughter of one of the heads of Canadian Pacific, even though she was in Tangiers and they had no clues to go on except the fact that she liked sun, sand and solitude. She wasn’t carrying her cell phone, and none of her friends knew where she was. To catch up to her, the agency contacted an enormous number of people, from the Dalai Lama to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French writer.
