I Am a Japanese Writer

Once he’d left, I sent a telegram to my publisher: “I am no longer a writer.” That’s not the title of a novel. Mind you, it wouldn’t be a bad one—in perfect harmony with my progress towards minimalism. Absolute zero, though, would be: “I am no longer.”

One secret always hides another—the one that you really do want to hide.

You don’t hide your secret in your heart, but in your ass.

It’s always important to appropriate the story.

In life, we always take the wrong path at the right time.

You don’t just meet a girl, I’ve come to see, you meet a culture. And you don’t leave that culture easily. It takes five unhappy affairs to break free from a culture as powerful as Japan’s.

Every time I broke in to tell a story about him, he cut me off, the better to batter me with compliments. I felt as though I belonged to him. With his prodigious memory, so flattering to me, he had taken over my life. I had been dispossessed of myself. Beware of those who love you.

“Maybe Japan wants to be something else as well.”
“No. Japan just wants to be Japan. That’s the saddest part of it.”

“You know the book hasn’t been written yet.”
“But its impact is real. People might be disappointed if you wrote it.”

“‘The Japanese right’? Aren’t they all on the right?”

Look me in the eye: there is no book.

“Your father is black, your mother is Japanese, and only black men attract you...”
“But not the same way as for my mother. <...>”
“Didn’t you ever think you were black?”
“Never.”
“But your father is black.”
“YesbutI’mmymothernotmyfatherImeanI’mawomannotaman.”

“I can’t see a psychologist.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a fan of Woody Allen.”

“...When I meet a man like that, I literally melt.”
“Any man, or a black man?”
“I don’t look at any other kind of man.”
“So you’re in search of your father.”
“That’s what my mother told me."

I would like to be, not a photographer, but a cold, objective camera lens. To simply look at the person in front of me. Is that even possible?

I’ll mention that to Dazaï. He loves everything that’s original.

Americans will never become Americans again because they don’t realize they’re already Japanese.

After the Americans defeated them, they became Americans.

“...We would like Western artists to get interested in today’s Japan, not just in geishas and cherry trees. Young Japanese aren’t interested in Basho, you know.”
“They’re interested in America, and I’m not interested in them.”

You know that the Japanese are very interested in questions of identity.