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When I travel through a place, I like to think that I travel through story. Not just the immediate stories that spill out of streets and subways, but those that have preceded them. All the blurs of image and word that we’ve scavenged from books and films that reside in our memories like kindling. So before arriving in Japan I’m thinking of a perfectly blue Miyazaki sky, of a conversation with a bartender who told me of his love of Kenzaburō Ōe novels. I think of typhoons and volcanoes and tsunamis, but also of sumo wrestling and rock gardens and kabuki. I’m desperate to recall every Japan-related memory I’ve collected since I became Japan-obsessed circa 1997. But they’ve all gone the way of sedimentary rocks — stratified and compressed, so it becomes difficult to pick one away from the other.
At Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, where over a million and a half people pass through each day, I stare at a clutch of young girls with strawberry blond hair and tutu skirts. Women in kimonos. Mothers bedecked in pompoms. A Ken Watanabe lookalike stands against a pillar, immaculately rugged, waving a silk fan. Here is all humanity on display — from the stereotypical Japanese “salary man” to the sailor dress schoolgirl. And I wonder, what are their stories?
It’s naïve perhaps to believe that you can understand a country by reading your way through it. By chatting up its locals and devouring its literature. While travelling around these islands for three weeks I’ve been wondering how literature can shape our sense of a country’s reality. In other words, can you turn to books in order to find the real? Would visitors to India find glimpses of truth in Rohinton Mistry’s wistful Mumbai novels, or Mahasweta Devi’s valiant Bengali stories, or would they do better to rummage through the pages of Chetan Bhagat’s latest? Perhaps there are true Indias in all these books and each of them offers us a different window at which to perch?
In Japan there’s a curious problem when you experiment with this cocktail of mixing literature with reality. Much of Japanese culture is defined by honne-tatemae — one’s genuine feelings versus what one can say publically, which adds several layers of intrigue to the quest for understanding. When what you say is not always what you feel, it leads to some level of disconnect.
I tried to construct narratives for the many suited and booted men on the trains — the kind who read manga and stop at a pachinko parlour before going home. I felt a sisterhood with this wonderfully flamboyant woman I met in a karaoke bar called Maki Maki, who was decked out in a French cleaning maid’s outfit, and who believed punk was a way of life. I met a housewife who told me she was “curing” herself by taking karaoke lessons. She appeared as a quintessential Kawabata heroine — fragile, and supposedly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps she’d done a whole lot of engineering in order to have freedom within the constraints of her marriage.
I looked as well for stories in the newspapers. One of the major developments unfolding while I was in Japan was Prime Minister Abe’s effort to amend the peace clause — Article 9 of the constitution. After 200 hours of deliberation in parliament, the bill passed, which means that for the first time since WWII Japanese troops can be sent to fight abroad. When I tried to quiz people about what this fundamental change to their pacifist constitution meant to them, I felt I was invading some private sanctuary. Worse, it was as if after being a guest at their table, I was trying to steal their tamagotchi away. The responses I got were a bit of discomfort and a whole lot of non-committal. I thought it was because I was disturbing the harmony or the Wa , by bringing up something as divisive as politics, but a gaijin friend who’s lived in Japan for thirty years assured me that it was nothing to do with Wa , simply that many Japanese were apathetic about politics.
There are stories that skid on the surface of things, and stories that lie much deeper, and because of the many layers of Japanese society, and the transitory nature of the tourist’s experience, it’s difficult to get beyond a sense of mood. And the mood in Japan — especially in big cities like Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Osaka — exemplifies separateness, disillusion, loneliness. But alongside this, there’s also kindness, elegance and elevated aesthetics. Reading contemporary novelists like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, for whom these themes are central, and where it wouldn’t be surprising or surreal to find the protagonist hanging out at the bottom of a well, or sitting in a kitchen contemplating life and death — can bring you closer to understanding these contrasting states of being. They also remind us that while fiction belongs to the world of the imagination, it often feels more true than the truth.
So much of literature is excavation. To bring us to those deep wells of the mind and soul that are not immediately evident to the eyes of a passerby. In Japan, the writer’s role seems to be to have to dig even further, to strip reality away from the noise of the news, and show the honne that is hiding behind the tatemae .
