I Am a Japanese Writer

To masturbate, you need to imagine yourself with someone else, to take him against his will, or make him take you, kiss you, and this is an operation that demands a minimum of self-esteem.

There’s something manga about hara-kiri.

Fascists are obsessed with rules, which allow them to intervene in the passage of time.

Mishima wanted to eliminate the present by establishing Japan in the future perfect, a tense that lives only in grammar books.

That’s another thing I detest: authenticity. A real restaurant. Real people. Real things. Real life. Nothing more fake than that. Life itself is a construct.

Must I choose between Basho and the woman who is about to show up? Between the past, with its fascination, and the present, so warm, so true, so alive? Both attract me, but can I keep them both? That is my dilemma.

“Do you know Basho?”
“A little.”
“Do you like him?”
“No.”
I have no further questions.

Admit it, it’s pretty strange that despite these migrations all over the planet—people can’t or won’t stay in their home countries—an accent is still the thing that determines someone’s place on the social ladder, more than race or class. An accent speaks for race and class.

“That happens all the time,” I tell her. “You look at someone, but the whole time someone else is looking at you and you don’t even know it.”

...neither the sun nor the moon nor girls interested me. Only the journeys that books could provide. I could never get enough. I dreamed that, one day, I would enter a book and never come out.

Just as I feel my backache returning, I come upon this passage where Basho is complaining about the same pain. Often, pain allows us to recognize another human being.

Her long fragile neck. Its sad nape (I project my sadness onto her nape).

As soon as someone enters my field of vision, she becomes a fictional character. No borders between literature and life.

Everything is moving. Except time: that stands still. I’m too absorbed by all this telescoping of time and crisscrossing of space to get interested in my surroundings.

Very naturally, I repatriated the writers I read at the time. All of them: Flaubert, Goethe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Kipling, Senghor, Césaire, Roumain, Amado, Diderot—they all lived in my village. Otherwise, what were they doing in my room?

At the time, I firmly believed that writers formed a lost tribe and spent their lives wandering the world and telling stories in all languages. That was their sentence for some unnameable crime.

That’s the problem with Westerners: we’re too afraid of ridicule. Being ridiculous won’t kill us, but the fear of it will.

Vonnegut was always out of context.