You sent it to me in the mail. The envelope contained page 17 of the newspaper—plus page 18, inevitably, printed on the rear side—the entirety of which was devoted to the interview, and which you had torn out as a full page and folded into a square. You hadn’t enclosed a note, as far as I could see, or even jotted something down on the newspaper itself.
Mr. H, what do you generally get your inspiration from when you write?
Back in the day, my subjects were almost always beautiful women I admired, you know. But now, the meaning of a “subject” has itself paled. It can be a mailbox or trash can. The subjects from which I draw inspiration now are precisely those that ensnare me in confusion . . . that ambush me in an utterly unpredictable fashion. That I can neither prepare for nor calculate in advance. Like dreams . . .
Like dreams, that part was underlined. Your method of underlining is so very familiar to me. You always applied more strength than necessary, ruthlessly and impetuously, like drawing an arrow. I never knew you to use a pencil. Sometimes you would draw a big circle around one word, sometimes your underlining would be so excessive that I couldn’t make out the sentence itself. And then it would come to an awkward end, breaking off in some crude, incomplete shape as though you had snatched your pen away, having abruptly thought of something else. Next to the underlined passage there would generally be an exclamation mark, triangular in shape, gouged deeply into the paper. The kind of underlining that clearly had decades of egoism behind it.
At some point I was standing in a long immigration queue. Even though I turned to look in all directions, the only thing to see was the throng of people drifting around distractedly, so many they filled the large entrance hall. You couldn’t even tell where the immigration counter was. A uniformed man (presumably a policeman) had planted himself firmly halfway down the line, standing with arms crossed and legs apart, to prevent everyone rushing forward en masse. In their jodhpur-style trousers, the policemen reminded me more of colonial prison officers or detention camp guards than they did of ordinary policemen. The concrete construction of the wharf entrance hall amplified noise. The extraordinary din of the crowd made me feel as though my head had been shoved inside a clanging steel bell. The people in front of me suddenly began to run. They were running blindly forward, all carrying bags, some holding the hands of little children wearing little backpacks. Without knowing the reason for all this, I too flowed into the crowd. As soon as we turned the corner, the immigration counter became visible. The instant they had that reassurance, ah, now we’re here, those who had been running stopped in their tracks. Once again, policemen were blocking the way in front. We were unable to move any closer to the counter. It was the turn of the group who had slipped through the other gate to approach the counter. Only then did I figure out the control system. Each line had fed in through a different gate, and now they were all rayed out in a semicircle, the people in them staring piercingly at the immigration counter. The policemen were fixing the throng with some truly intimidating looks, while there were those who accepted the system as familiar, and presumably had their reasons. Inside my bag was the notebook containing the first writer’s address, and when I recalled that fact my courage revived. As long as he is still living in this city, if he remembers the past appointment, I would be able to meet him. Perhaps, if I mentioned your name, I might receive some small welcome. He would ask how you were doing, and I would tell him.
I thought that the city, though it was a city, would have looked suburban for the sake of those foreign aliens who came from rural areas. Befitting an exotic Special District. This was down to the brief, fairy-tale impression I’d gotten from you. I was vaguely expecting that if I came out from the harbor and took the bus, after a few stops I would be in the heart of the city, the square and ruins would appear and, without even knowing the name of the street, I would be able to recognize it at a single glance, with the feeling of ah, here it is. And my first writer was living in some apartment nearby. In that room with a potted red orchid and where the balcony window, hung with a rattan blind, looked down onto the ruins where a bell could often be heard.
But what you’d told me was very different from what I found. The fact that quite a few years had passed since your visit needed to be taken into consideration. After finally escaping from the harbor area I managed to make it to the bus stop, constantly jostled in the great tide of bodies, and caught a bus with the driver’s seat on the right-hand side. The bus was small and there were many passengers, so I had to stand and cling to the handrail. Each street we passed through was packed with such an enormous mass of people that my eyes widened in shock. I thought of the mass of immigrants I’d seen at the harbor. If the throng that had passed through immigration was at this very moment heading for the narrow sloping alleyways of the old quarter, or the downtown shopping district, or to take souvenir photos in the tiny square with the fountain, this—the entire city looking as though it had been occupied by a swarm of scurrying ants—would have been the natural result. The bus cut through the city center, which was dense with malls and department stores. I had no idea where I needed to get off. More people crowded on at each bus stop, and I was gradually pushed farther to the back. I craned my head with effort to look outside the window, but couldn’t see a single street that might be part of the old district. On top of that, I didn’t know for certain the name of the ruins where my first writer lived.
A long time ago, and a longer time ago still, two people I knew each came on a separate trip to this city. They sat on the steps of the ruins. What they saw was the last remaining colonial wreckage, a breeze soft as young rice, and in the heart of it a beautiful, young, yellowish-green woman who turned calmly toward them in the light, and the open window of some nameless apartment. A potted red orchid had been placed at that window. At each gust of wind the laundry hanging from the balcony, a white handkerchief, fluttered. All the balconies were ships leaving port. They were fixed there but forever departing, and with no way to return. All were the things of 1999, an awfully long time ago.
For a long time now I’d been thinking of him as someone incredibly old. According to the common expression, someone “with one foot already in the grave.” But this was an illusion. Not that the first writer was old, but old people like him already have one foot in another world, hear voices from that other world and put them into their writing. Only later, when I was as old as him, did I realize how mistaken I had been in this. The first writer was still among the living. I’d been greatly attached to him for several years, but could not have described his face in any detail. All I had was a photograph, one that had been taken some twenty years ago and printed in a book. Beyond that, there were only the photographs that accompanied his newspaper interviews, and they all seemed impersonal, sterile. Those images of him with his white hair, wearing black sunglasses and carrying a cane. All that anyone could tell from such a picture was that he was very old, that he wore unattractive, shabbily cut suits, was slightly stooped, and relied on a cane. But it was neither the cane nor the sunglasses that allowed me to recognize him at first glance. What stood out for me was his tempo. Because it was the tempo I’d come to love through reading his work. True writers emanate their writing from their body. And so his tempo is the same as the respiration of what he writes. It is neither faster nor slower than that of other people. At the same time, neither is it not faster nor slower. That was an error shining with self-conceit, quite out of touch with reality. A mistaken assumption made by millions of people, tiny yet persistent. At some point, in a magazine interview, he had answered the question “if you weren’t a writer, what would you be?” with “I would have gone mad and killed myself fifty years ago.” A wavelength that breaks up and becomes broken up, a lunatic wavelength. A tempo that reveals sickness and transcendence at the same time. His sentences, pulse, and tempo, made up of words that have slightly different meanings than they do in the dictionary. And only then did I realize that the small space filled with people was the entrance to the ruins, where I needed to get off. I pushed my way between the other passengers, and rang the bell.
In his youth, he liked to gamble.
He wagered everything that could be wagered. After having an appendectomy, he gambled his own appendix, preserved in formaldehyde, and a few days later his family had him dragged off to the psychiatric hospital.
Even
