THOSE WHO WRITE IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE
September mornings in Iowa City get pretty chilly.
Stepping out of the hotel, I saw a scattering of writers waiting for the minibuses, standing stooped with mugs of steamy Starbucks coffee in hand. Writers tend to be stooped specimens to begin with, and these looked particularly so in the cold morning air. At their feet was a variety of luggage in all shapes and sizes.
Before I left Japan, I had gone to the Web site of the International Writing Program, or IWP, and printed out the list of writers participating in this Fall Residency. Intent on familiarizing myself with their faces, names, and brief biographies during my flight to Iowa, I made a point of putting the printout in my carry-on bag. Yet even now, the morning when we were about to set out together on a four-day trip to Minneapolis, I still hadn’t studied the list. My physical ailments and the medication that I had been taking left me groggy, unable to muster the energy to browse through it. Besides, nearly all the names on the list were foreign ones I could hardly pronounce.
Today was going to be the day I would meet most of the other writers for the first time. Some were engaged in a friendly chat, while others stood apart, looking all the more aloof in the cold morning air. They had already been in Iowa for a month or so, whereas I had arrived just a few days before. Not only that, I had arrived with a hidden vow to keep my participation to a minimum. Still, as I stood there alone with my overnight bag, not knowing what to do with myself, I felt that as a newcomer I should at least introduce myself to some of the others. But this morning, as on so many other mornings, I was feeling lethargic, and so I only kept eyeing them.
Two minibuses soon arrived. Most of the Westerners headed toward one, and shortly afterward, Asians with uniformly black hair began trooping toward the other. The group seemed to split naturally into two as for one reason or another the Westerners stuck together, leaving the Asians behind. I see, this is how it goes, I told myself. I then headed toward the second bus, the one with mostly Asian passengers.
Seated at the back of the bus were several buff East Asian men at the peak of their manhood, Chinese or Korean or both. In the middle of the bus was a woman with the air of a girl. The line from cheekbone to chin, as keen as if carved with a knife, reminded me of the women in the film The Scent of Green Papaya, which I had seen about ten years earlier. She must be Vietnamese, I thought, or some other Southeast Asian nationality. Toward the front of the bus was a man who looked just like a Japanese, with plump cheeks and small eyes slanting downward. He seemed close to sixty, not exactly the peak of manhood. I wondered what nationality he was, knowing that I was the sole Japanese participant. There were three whites on the bus, among them the program director, Chris, to whom I had already introduced myself the day before; he was doing double duty as our driver. I was the last one to board the bus through the front door, so I ended up sitting in the passenger seat beside him. A journalist and a poet, Chris was a handsome man whose blond-bearded face still looked a bit boyish.
Soon after Chris started us on our journey, I turned around to greet the man sitting diagonally behind me, the one with typical Japanese features, only to find him looking vacantly out the window. Rather curiously, I thought, he occupied the aisle seat, leaving the window seat next to him empty. Across the aisle from him was a young white man who likewise occupied the aisle seat, leaving the window seat next to him empty, and he too was looking vacantly out the window.
Once we left the college town behind, tall buildings disappeared and modest, two-story houses typical of the American countryside took their place, lit by the white morning light. The view was not particularly beautiful. There was none of the poetry one sees in scenes of the countryside in American films. There was neither order nor coherence, much as in life itself.
Turning to Chris, I roused myself and said exactly what an American might say at such a moment: “Beautiful day!” Chris responded, “Yes, very beautiful!” as one would expect of an American constitutionally blessed, as most Americans are, with an admirably positive outlook on life. And with that began something of a conversation. When I engage an American in conversation, typically the exchange follows a pattern: I try to come up with a question, and the almost always talkative American responds with a lengthy answer. On this day, I had no trouble coming up with one question after another, for, having arrived late and missed the orientation week, I knew next to nothing about the IWP.
While effortlessly steering the wheel, Chris, who has an astonishingly orderly brain—a trait common among American intellectuals but rare among speakers of Japanese, a language that doesn’t even require a clear distinction between “and” and “but”—gave me a succinct summary of the IWP, including its history and its current financial situation. He was relaxed enough to turn toward me and show me his blond-bearded smile as he spoke. He was, of course, constantly checking the rearview mirror. He also reached out an arm from time to time to find a radio station that played classical music or to adjust the volume. I myself am a bad driver who hardly ever took the wheel and ended up losing my license by forgetting to renew it; as I listened with an occasional “Oh, yes?” or “Really?” I was in secret awe of Chris for being able to talk coherently while simultaneously driving and doing so many other things.
Meanwhile, I felt the presence of the Asian writers in the bus weighing on me, especially the middle-aged man sitting right behind me, the one who looked so Japanese.
Fifteen minutes or so passed. When Chris paused, I made an overt gesture this time to turn myself around, feeling I should at least introduce myself. In such a situation, the longer you wait, the harder it is to begin a conversation. The man was still looking vacantly out the window, but this time he noticed me. I put on the brightest smile I could and said, “Hi! I am from Japan.”
The man had a gentle face. It also seemed full of wisdom. I wondered if he might be Korean or Chinese. Mentally I combed through my meager knowledge of expressions from classical Chinese, searching for one that might describe him, and came up with shunpū taitō (serene as the spring breeze).
Where was he from, I asked.
“I am from Mongolia.” A smile filled his gentle face.
Mongolia? Quickly I spread out the world map in my head. At the same time, a vague memory came to me that on the list of IWP participants there was indeed a leader of the Mongolian democratic movement, a one-time presidential candidate. Now that I looked at him armed with this knowledge, he suddenly acquired an aura peculiar to a great man—an aura we can hardly expect from Japanese politicians today. Perhaps when a nation goes through a period of upheaval, those who should become politicians, do. Mongolian sumo wrestlers are a familiar sight on Japanese television, but this was only the second time in my life that I had met a Mongolian in person. The first time was about twenty-five years ago, when I encountered a girl in Paris who claimed to be one. Her ancestors had left Mongolia in the seventeenth century and taken three more centuries to make their leisurely way to Paris. “I know this sounds incredible, but it’s true,” the slim, tall, and strikingly beautiful girl said in perfect Parisian French. A picture unfolded before my eyes, as if on wide-screen CinemaScope, of clusters of the round tents called “ger” moving ever westward across the Eurasian continent at a timeless pace.
The man on the bus was a bona fide Mongolian, born and raised in Mongolia. To me, the word “Mongolia” itself sounds as if it transcends the worldly. Hearing it, I felt a rush of fresh wind from the steppes sweep through my mind, clearing away the clouds that had been ever-present since my first illness a couple of years before. I may have looked too inquisitively at his gentle face when I asked, “Are you a novelist or a poet?”
“I’m a poet.”
“Is this your first time in America?” I asked, assuming that of course it was.
“Yes, it is my first time.” The Mongolian poet then motioned to the young white man sitting across the aisle. “He’s from Lithuania.”
Really? Was there someone from Lithuania in the program? I couldn’t remember a Lithuanian youth on the list of participants. And because as a child, instead of learning anything useful, all I ever did was read novels, now when I tried to check the world map in my head I could not begin to locate Lithuania. I knew that it must be somewhere near Russia, but as to what sort of country it was, what the capital was, or whether there were any Lithuanian historical figures I should have heard of, I was clueless.
Like many young men around the globe, he had an edgy style, with spiky hair and piercing in one ear. I asked him, “Are you a novelist?”
“No, I’m a poet.”
“I see. I’m a novelist.”
Thus ended our conversation that sounded like an excerpt from an English textbook for beginners. Both the Mongolian poet and the Lithuanian poet had what looked like a smile playing around the mouth, but they said nothing further. I too smiled, then faced front again, relieved that I had now made my obligatory greetings as a newcomer and so let others know that I am not excessively antisocial. It was a shame that I had nothing to say about either Mongolia or Lithuania, but the conversation ended not only because of my ignorance: their half-smiles eloquently conveyed their discomfort in speaking English.
On both sides of the road were cornfields spreading endlessly flat under what was now a blue sky. Only later did I learn that cornfields are symbols of industrial agriculture, which is destructive of nature. At the time, as I looked at the long stretches of cornfields, all I vaguely felt was that the sort of poetic country scene that appears in American films was now finally here before me. As the sun rose higher in the sky, it became as bright as midsummer. Several minutes passed before the Lithuanian poet leaned forward and asked me a question.
“Do you know bonsai?”
Bonsai? He was obviously trying to find a topic he could talk about with a Japanese person, I thought. Turning back, I answered, not hiding my sense of being at a loss, “I know what bonsai is, but I really don’t know anything about it.”
That there were bonsai fans in the United States, I knew. But it had never occurred to me that the pastime of elderly Japanese bending over to trim dwarf pine trees had reached all the way to the youth of a country I couldn’t even locate on a map. He actually seemed interested in bonsai. Apparently he was trying to ask something about a particular kind of tree; he mumbled incoherently while drawing the shape of a tree in the air with his finger. I could not understand what he was trying to ask, let alone visualize what tree he had in mind. When it comes to tree names, I hardly know any even in Japanese.
Pine? No. Plum? No. Cherry? No, no, much smaller. But all bonsai trees are small, aren’t they? Mmm, yes, but much smaller. As this exchange went on, the Mongolian poet volunteered to help by leaning in and saying something to the Lithuanian.
I gasped.
He was speaking in Russian. I could tell immediately because of all the Soviet films I had seen screened on campus when I was a student. In the same fluent Russian I’d heard in those films, he was asking something of the young Lithuanian poet. I knew that on the Eurasian continent there are people who look perfectly Japanese and speak fluent Russian, yet this was the first time that I had actually seen one. Had I known the first thing about the modern history of Mongolia, this would have come as no surprise. But at the time, I was surprised. Bonsai dropped from my mind.
“You speak Russian?”
The Lithuanian poet interjected, “His Russian is much better than mine.”
Hearing this, the Mongolian poet laughed heartily. I then understood: these two men did not just happen to be sitting across the aisle from each other. This unlikely pair had become friends through the medium of the Russian language. I see, I said to myself. One could be born in Mongolia, study in Moscow, learn Russian, and later in life be invited to an American university and use the Russian learned in Moscow to become friends with a young Lithuanian with a pierced ear. “The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ended the Cold War and handed the United States a single-handed victory”—similar words had been said over and over in the intervening years. It felt as if that history was laid before me, in front of my very eyes. Little did I imagine that barely six months later, the U.S. invasion of Iraq would usher in a new era of instability.
The two of them went on talking in Russian. Soon a white middle-aged woman sitting one row behind the Mongolian, in the window seat, joined in. I later learned that she was a novelist from Ukraine with the name of a princess in Greek mythology, Yevgeniya.
From farther back in the bus, I heard the Chinese and Korean languages being spoken.
The minibus kept driving through cornfields, carrying onboard the history of the vast Eurasian continent. After a lunch break, we crossed the Iowa–Minnesota border and kept on. By the time we got to the hotel in Minneapolis, it was close to evening and the air was beginning to feel chilly again.
Perhaps because I had been locked inside an enclosed space with other foreigners all day, when we got off the minibus and entered the hotel, I had the visceral sensation of being thrown back into mid-America. Americans grown tall and stout on too many hamburgers and French fries were talking loudly. American English emerged from the full movement of chins and lips, both consonants and vowels pronounced with force. The white columns and walls of the atrium lobby were made to resemble a Mediterranean villa—not as horrific as Japanese imitations, but still fake looking—and every corner smacked of America. In this very American lobby, we multinational writers gathered with our luggage of all shapes and sizes, our tired faces on full display.
From Asian countries, besides me, the lone Japanese, there were two Chinese, three Koreans, a Vietnamese, a Burmese, and a Mongolian. From Africa, there was a Botswanan. From the Middle East, an Israeli. From eastern Europe, two Poles, a Romanian, a Hungarian, a Ukrainian, a Lithuanian, and a Bosnian; from western Europe, an Englishman, an Irishman, and a German. From northern Europe, there was a Norwegian, and from South America, a Chilean and an Argentinean. In total, there were twenty-some writers. After a few days in Minneapolis, we drove back together through the cornfields, and then for a month, the duration of my stay, we all lived on the same hotel floor in Iowa City.
THE PALM READER’S PREDICTION
My invitation to participate in the International Writing Program hosted by the University of Iowa had come earlier that year, in the spring. The IWP is a fine program that brings together novelists and poets from around the world. Participants are free to keep on writing while getting a taste of life in an American university. Round-trip transportation, accommodation at the university-owned hotel, and a daily stipend are provided, as well as some extra money to buy books during the stay.
As is always the case when I am invited abroad, I felt conflicted. My upbringing was not typical for a Japanese. When I was twelve, my family moved to New York because of my father’s business, and I lived in the United States for the next twenty years. Even so, I never felt comfortable with either American life or the English language. As a teenager, I immersed myself in classic Japanese novels of the modern era, a set of books that my great uncle gave my mother for her daughters—my sister and me—to read lest we forget our own language. In college and then in graduate school, I even took the trouble of majoring in French literature as a way to continue avoiding English. I was the prisoner of an intense longing for home—a kind of longing perhaps unimaginable in the age of the Internet, which allows one never to leave home, wherever one’s body may be. A confluence of circumstances forced me to go on living this incomprehensible life. And the kind of life I lived so affects everything about me that I can scarcely write a word without addressing it.
After reaching thirty, I finally went back to Japan. One day, as I was about to walk down a bustling street in Tokyo’s Shibuya, I caught sight of a palm reader—an exotic sight for me at the time. He was wearing a Chinese-style hat and had auspiciously full cheeks. In my mind, he even ended up with a drooping mandarin moustache. When I held out my palms, he took one look and said, “I see you have a strong tie to foreign countries.”
I was shocked. I told him that I had been living abroad but now intended to stay put in Japan.
“Oh, no, your tie with foreign countries will last all your life.” He sounded oddly confident.
By then Japan was a rich country, and one did not have to be particularly privileged to travel abroad. It was thus unlikely that the palm reader had said this just to please me. Of course, he wouldn’t have said it just to upset me, either. But I had only recently returned to Japan, at long last, with dozens of cardboard boxes in tow. That I was finally back in my home country had apparently not quite sunk into my psyche, for I still had dreams in which I was dismayed to find myself living in the United States—What’s going on? When will I ever get back to Japan?—and I would let out a sigh of relief when I woke up and saw the low ceiling of my small Tokyo apartment. During those first months, when the voices of screaming children on their way to school came through the window, in my half sleep it would eventually register that the screams were not in English but in Japanese, and I would repeat to myself, “Yes, those are the screams of Japanese children. The same as I heard when I was a little girl going to elementary school myself. Those are Japanese children, and I am in Japan.” And as I went from being half awake to awake, the awareness that I had finally returned to my homeland would fill me to overflowing.
The palm reader’s words were carved into my memory, along with the accompanying shock.
Whether one’s palms can show a “tie to foreign countries” remains a mystery to me, although it’s true that sometime thereafter an unexpected development took me back to the United States. It’s also true that, contrary to what I had dreamed for years, I ended up writing my first novel there. Many flights across the sea then followed. Of course, there are people who constantly crisscross the globe on business or pleasure. I am certainly not in their league. Still, for someone who expected to stay in Japan for the remainder of her life, rooted like a tree, I was making more than my share of trips abroad, though seldom willingly. And now, having passed my prime, to put it mildly, I was finding transoceanic flights an increasing burden, one that took a toll not only on my nerves but also on my never-very-robust health.
Meanwhile, airfare dropped dramatically, a phenomenon giving rise in recent years to more and more events with the word “international” somewhere in the title. Writers too are now frequently invited to foreign countries for one reason or another, though typically to a university. Universities are usually modestly funded—university literature departments in particular. I have no doubt that Nobel laureates are treated differently, but someone like me has to fly economy as a matter of course. I do not have the money to pay out of pocket to upgrade to business class. Consequently, if I accept an invitation, I have to squeeze myself into a seat so cramped that it feels like I’m being transported by a prison security van or cattle truck, eat meals served as unceremoniously as if they were fodder, and, unless I am going to Korea or China, remain stuck in my seat for well over ten hours. It is on these occasions that I curse my fate in being Japanese and living in what is literally the “Far” East. When I finally reach my destination, rarely is there someone to pick me up; most of the time, I nervously get into a taxi alone. Of course, my stay is filled with tiring events, and what with strain and lack of sleep and the cold I always catch, after I get back to Japan I am as depleted as if I’d been through a major illness. And I make a firm promise to myself that I’ll never travel abroad again.
Then some time later, there is another invitation. My immediate reaction is always, “No, thank you, I’ve had enough.” Foreigners, even those who teach Japanese literature at a university, cannot read novels written in Japanese with any ease. More than likely I am invited not because the host read and liked my novels, but because I conveniently speak English. I feel a bit like I am being cheaply used. Besides, what difference could it possibly make if a novelist goes to a foreign country and speaks about her work or reads out passages from it in front of a small audience who might not even know who she is? And yet, though I mumble and grumble, every so often I do accept an invitation—in part because it is gratifying to be invited, after all, but also in part because the palm reader’s oddly confident prediction remains engraved in my mind. It could well be that some higher power is at work, unbeknownst to me, and if so I figure it can’t hurt to do its bidding every once in a while.
The invitation from the IWP came at a rather tricky time. That is, it came only two years after my health abruptly fell apart.
Life is a tiring business indeed.
Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Even Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years’ worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister’s same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.
On top of all this, I had just suffered the stress of writing an inordinately long novel and having it serialized in a monthly literary journal. Every single minute of that time, my mind was obsessed with the panic-stricken idea that if I wasted even one day a month I would be publishing something one-thirtieth poorer in quality. For days on end, I was at my desk before even brushing my teeth in the morning and remained virtually nailed there until I collapsed into bed at night.
It happened one summer night when I sat in a restaurant for hours with my neck exposed to air-conditioning. The occasion being a festive one, I was wearing a dress cut rather low in the back, which only made matters worse. I began to feel strange and then increasingly awful; finally it was all I could do to leave the table, stumble to the ladies’ room, and squat down in my high heels—but by then it was too late. My cheeks were like ice; my blood was not circulating.
Beginning that summer, I had something called “autonomic dysfunction.” I could no longer drink tap water because it tasted too cold. I shivered just opening the refrigerator. I had to avoid air-conditioned subways, buses, and taxis. Merely looking at brightly lit convenience stores from the outside, knowing how freezing they are kept to lure customers, made me sick. A year later, after somehow managing to finish the inordinately long novel, I finally visited a psychosomatic clinic and received a prescription for medications to release my built-up tension: an antidepressant, an antianxiety drug, sleeping pills. It was about a year after this that the invitation from the IWP reached me through an American scholar of Japanese literature, also a well-known translator.
One thing I learned from having my health fail so miserably is that having no physical energy makes socializing a burden unimaginable to a healthy person. Just the idea of seeing someone caused pain and tension to spread through my back, as if blackish liquid lead had been injected down my spine. While I was actually meeting with someone, I often found myself reaching for the medication in my handbag, like a drug addict. When finally home and alone, I would throw myself on the bed, close my eyes, and sleep with my jaw sloppily open like an old woman. Being transported on a plane like a prisoner or a cow I might somehow tolerate, but a program like the IWP would entail extended interaction with other writers, I thought. I was not sure I would be able to survive the obligation. My hesitation was exacerbated by the feeling that I was at an age when I had little to gain from new encounters.
At the same time, the invitation did offer one attraction: I could go someplace for a change of air and get some truly needed rest—health resort therapy, if you will. The fantasy of health resort therapy had haunted me as I anxiously worked to finish my novel amid my ailments. My fantasy resembled something from a foreign film set in a lushly bucolic location, or an advertisement in a high-end women’s magazine portraying vacationers sipping aperitifs. With my novel finally out in two volumes, I would have just received my royalties, conveniently double the usual amount. I could leave Japan, stay for a month or two in a small, quaint hotel overlooking some wonderfully soothing scenery—perhaps a Swiss lake—and spend my days reading and walking, free from daily chores, letting my exhausted mind and body unwind in the tranquil flow of time. I pictured myself in a tweed skirt that fell just below the knees and low pumps—things I never actually wear—looking (apart from my decidedly Japanese features) like a behind-the-times middle-aged English lady. This particular element of the fantasy must have arisen from my habit after finishing my novel of lying down and mindlessly listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks. The images in my mind were illusory, but my desire to be free from the tedium of daily life, to live in a magically beautiful setting, and to enjoy an entire life’s worth of rest was quite real. The fantasy kept haunting me, but I did not have the energy to decide on a destination, let alone take any action. According to the IWP brochure, participants had merely to continue their work, and they would each be provided a room by the Iowa River in which to do so. True, “Iowa River” did not have quite the same appeal as “Swiss lake,” but given that scenery with flowing water would be nearby, it was a compromise worth considering. Should I decline because the burden of international exchange would be too much? Or should I succumb to the temptations of a health resort idyll?
As I debated in my mind, the palm reader’s words about my fated tie to foreign countries kept coming back to me, and that sealed the deal. Officially participants were obligated to stay for three months, but I could not imagine leaving my elderly mother alone that long; I could not imagine that my own health would sustain itself for that long either. The host kindly agreed to reduce my stay to one month, and before I left, as I have mentioned, I had secretly made up my mind to hold my participation to a minimum without being ungracious.
THE INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM
This was my first visit to the real American Midwest.
The American Midwest, particularly the state of Iowa, is a symbol of rural America, known for its endless stretches of cornfields. Iowa City, located right in the middle of those cornfields, is a college town centered on the state university, the University of Iowa. Of the city’s population of seventy thousand, nearly half are students. What became clear to me as I stayed there, however, was that Iowa City is not exactly your typical rural college town. Streets both on and off campus are lined with fine establishments—libraries, museums, theaters, and an array of restaurants representing all kinds of cuisine. Particularly unusual in the middle of rural America is the thriving presence of small, independently run bookstores and coffee shops that would look at home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It all started from the university’s creative writing program, called Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or IWW, which shaped the town into what it is today—a lively literary community distinct from any other rural college town in the United States.
IWW, founded in 1936, was the first workshop of its kind in the country and is still considered to be the best. If teaching there is an honor, studying there is an honor no less. Every year about fifty students—aspiring novelists, poets, and a few translators—are admitted into the two-year program. Like many writers, I had never seen much significance in creative-writing programs beyond providing those who already know how to write a means to make a living; however, seeing those earnest students changed my mind. They live a life in which they write every day for at least two years. To be sure, not all graduates will succeed in earning their living by writing, but they all make it their goal to make use of their training at some point in their lives. Students with such commendable aspirations gather from all over the United States in this little place. (In 2008 Iowa City was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature, the only one in the United States.)
In 1966, when the respected poet Paul Engle stepped down from his twenty-five-year tenure as the director of IWW, his future wife, Nieh Hualing, a Chinese writer in her own right, suggested to him the idea of creating a program that would bring writers from across the nations to Iowa City. Together they founded the IWP. Since its inception in 1967, the program has invited over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries. While IWW is widely known in the United States, its offspring, the IWP, is not as well recognized. Outside the United States its name recognition seems to vary: virtually unknown in some countries, it is an important stepping-stone in a writer’s career in others.
The faculty of the imagination is indeed cruel. My dream of a restful sojourn at a resort dissipated into thin air the minute the airport taxi pulled up in front of the university-owned hotel. For me, the sine qua non of my fantasy was not just that I would be freed from daily chores but that, even if not exactly wallowing in luxury, I would at least lead an aesthetic life. From outside, the hotel was nothing more than a plain concrete apartment building. Inside, what could nominally be called an entrance and lobby greeted me. I knew by then that the room I was being escorted to would be nothing like what I had envisioned. The IWP brochure had implied that we would each be given a suite overlooking the Iowa River. What I got was not a suite but a room, and not even a very spacious room at that, considering this was the American Midwest and not Tokyo. Furnishings included a double bed, an office desk and chair, a chest of drawers with mirror, a television, a tea table, and an armchair. “Modern” would have been a generous adjective to describe the decor, consisting of a set of standard furniture manufactured with no other goal than durability, the sort one finds in any basic accommodation in the United States. The Venetian blinds covering the windows had dented ends and fell below standard. As for the Iowa River, all I could see from my window was the back of what looked like an annex. I could hardly see the sky. Perhaps because I arrived late, I may have been given the last remaining room; but if this room was for rent, I thought, it would certainly be among the cheapest anywhere.
Within a few hours of my arrival, I was also dismayed to find that what the brochure claimed was a “restaurant” inside the hotel was more like a cafeteria in the middle of nowhere. Not only did we have to serve ourselves, but the menu was shockingly limited and the food plainly unappealing, especially to someone coming from a gastronomically sophisticated country like Japan. After a moment’s hesitation, I turned my back on the so-called restaurant and ended up buying my first meal in the basement of the student union next door. There I found an impressive range of offerings: fresh fruit, vegetable sticks, a variety of hot soups, and, to my pleasant surprise, sushi rolls sky-delivered daily from California—but after all, they were meals meant to be eaten out of plastic containers with a plastic fork. It was a “feast” not very different from those I remembered from my too-long graduate school years in my too-long life in the United States.
The program, however, was designed to give foreign writers a taste of university life in America; I had no right to complain like a spoiled child. For a younger writer, or one whose opportunities were limited, the IWP might well be a godsend. By the next morning, resigned to forgoing the aesthetic life that had seemed an absolute prerequisite for my therapy, I just looked forward to securing a good rest away from home. In the afternoon, I took a walk by the Iowa River, which runs through the campus. Though the narrow waterway did not remotely resemble the Swiss lake of my imagining, I would surely be able to take daily walks by it and rest my mind: as nightfall of the second day approached, my dream had already shrunk to these humble proportions.
And yet not even that humble dream was to materialize. It just so happened that I had joined the IWP at a critical juncture. Several years before, the university had decided to terminate the program because of financial difficulties. Unexpectedly, students and citizens rose to demonstrate against the decision and the IWP was miraculously saved. When I arrived, the entire staff under Chris Merrill, the new director, was frantically working to rebuild what once lay in shambles—or so I understood. The turmoil and excitement necessarily affected all the participating writers.
In the United States even cultural enterprises must be results oriented, and in order for the IWP to raise its operating funds, which come from State Department grants and private donations, it needed to publicize its contributions to society. For those writers who had some command of the English language, talking about their work, their language, and their country’s literature in university classes and public libraries, at social gatherings and bookstore events, or even on radio and television became an important part of their routine during the residency. Given my inadequate English, I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time drafting my talks, though since writers’ presentations usually lasted no more than twenty minutes, I’m sure the people who hosted these initiatives had no idea. I could have declined, but that would have seemed like refusing to do my share in rebuilding the IWP, and when I thought about all the people working untiringly under Chris, I didn’t have the heart. Thus to audiences who had never seen or heard the Japanese language, I explained that though Japanese people use Chinese characters in their writing, the two languages come from entirely different linguistic families; that written Japanese combines Chinese characters with two kinds of phonetic signs the Japanese themselves developed, katakana and hiragana; and that, as unbelievable as this may sound to the users of Western languages, Japanese sentences do not require a grammatical subject. Even when strolling along the banks of the Iowa River, I kept thinking about what to say. Remarkably, my health didn’t break down completely. To keep myself going, I took stronger doses of medication that left me uncomfortably bloated.
THE WRITERS
Life unfolds in strange ways.
I was not granted the aesthetic and relaxing health resort therapy I’d been hoping for. Instead I was granted a new, keener awareness as a Japanese writer from an unexpected source—from the very thing I had secretly tried to avoid: international exchange with writers. It might be an overstatement to call what took place an “exchange,” for few of my fellow participants had sufficient command of English, and even with those who did, I seldom got to engage in real conversation. Still, the eventual impetus to write this book was indeed occasioned by my mingling with writers from diverse countries. Reflecting back, I can only feel grateful to the IWP for providing me with what turned out to be an invaluable experience.
The new and keener awareness I gained as a Japanese writer had very little to do with the IWP participants as individuals. If truth be told—and if I may be allowed a little impertinence—these writers, myself included, were not particularly outstanding individuals. At least we did not give any such impression. To start with, our appearance was unprepossessing. The American Midwest has an overwhelmingly white majority. Many residents are of German or Scandinavian descent, the kind of people who would once have been called “Aryan.” Having grown up in the New York metropolitan area, where all kinds of ethnic groups coexist, as I looked around at the University of Iowa students I was stunned by how many blond, blue-eyed people there are on Earth. They were also amazingly tall and dazzlingly young. People who I secretly thought would look perfect in Nazi propaganda films as members of the Hitler Jugend—though they might not like the comparison—were walking all over campus with majestic long strides.
Among such people, we writers cut a poor figure. Of course, many of us were not white, and even among the whites, many were of eastern European or Mediterranean descent—neither blond nor blue-eyed. We also were not tall. We were not young. And because many of us came from poor countries, and because writers are the way they are, we were not well dressed. Everywhere we went in this small college town that appreciates literature, we were always treated warmly and respectfully. But when we moved around in a group, we could have easily been mistaken for a band of recent immigrants or refugees. If our connection to the IWP weren’t known, some might have found our presence a bit disturbing.
Despite our unimpressive exteriors, perhaps our souls were aglow with inner light, you may kindly suggest. Well, sadly, that didn’t seem to be the case either. Ancient tales tell of people who look like beggars, lunatics, or imbeciles but are in fact a company of saints in the eyes of God. Those tales did not seem to apply to us writers. Interacting with the others on a daily basis, I didn’t get the sense that this was a group of people blessed with particularly high spirituality, generous hearts, or noble aspirations. I didn’t even get the sense that this was a group of people with particularly fine minds, as writers are generally credited with having—though I am sure this was mostly because so many of us did not speak English well. In fact, I kept thinking that if anything we were a bunch of hard-to-please curmudgeons. I often pondered the stress Chris and the other organizers must be going through.
And yet, as I kept spending more and more time with the other writers, a sense of wonderment began to wash over me.
In every corner of the globe, writers are writing. In every corner of the globe, different writers under different conditions are giving all they’ve got to their writing. To be sure, more than 99.9 percent of the seven billion inhabitants on Earth will end their lives not knowing that these writers ever existed or that their novels, short stories, or poems were ever written. Still, in every corner of the globe, while they work, raise their children, or care for their elderly parents, writers are finding the time to hunch in front of a computer or scribble in a notebook, trying their best to write. They are probably shortening their lives a bit by doing so, but they are trying their best to write nonetheless.
I began to spend more time with a world map from the campus bookstore spread out on my desk.
Yes, people were writing in Mongolia, too. The Mongolian poet I mentioned had the family name of Dashnyam. He was the only person whom everyone addressed by his family name, his first name being too long to remember, let alone pronounce. Dashnyam’s presence was a constant reminder that people were writing in Mongolia, too, in that distant, almost mythical land. The bits and pieces of his life that he shared with me using his limited English only deepened my sense of wonder.
Dashnyam, a big man, was prone to feeling lonely. “I’m lonely,” he would say as he came into my room. “I miss Mongolia.” Despite his hearty appearance, maybe he was sensitive to the cold like me. Or maybe he simply liked warm drinks. I would offer him one of the lukewarm canned beers stacked in the corner of my fridgeless room; he would drink it while warming it even more in his big hands. And he would tell me stories. His father, I learned, was a hunter. The big family lived in a big tent, or ger, in the steppe. He grew up eating mutton stew cooked in a pot in the middle of the ger. The stew was not a feast for special occasions, he said. Day after day, they ate the same mutton stew. They also had lamb cheese and sheep’s milk; they drank liquor made of sheep’s milk, too. It sounded like ovine torture to me, but Dashnyam, warming the canned beer in his hands, repeated longingly: “I miss Mongolia.”
Dashnyam’s study in the Soviet Union happened by chance. With the aim of solidifying its empire, the former Soviet government took the policy of urging satellite nations to send their brightest boys and girls to the Soviet Union so that they could experience several years of boarding school, receive intensive training in the Russian language and Marxist-Leninist thought, and then go back to their home countries to become new leaders. One-party rule always incubates corruption. Each nation’s high government officials naturally packed off their own children to the program. Frustrated with all the lazy idiots arriving year after year, the Soviet government decided to change its policy: it would return to the true principle of Communism and bring in the commonest of all children, the children of hunters, farmers, and fishers. Sons of a hunter, Dashnyam and his younger brother were selected. The two boys must have excelled in their local school; perhaps their father was also a leading figure in their village—though this is pure speculation. Quite predictably, things again did not turn out as hoped. The commoners’ children proved to be, if anything, even more incompetent than those of the elites. The government abandoned its new policy after only a few years, but by then Dashnyam and his brother had begun studying in the Soviet Union. Or at least that’s how I understood his story. He later returned to the Soviet Union to earn his doctorate and then, once back in Mongolia for good, became involved in the independence movement. The Soviets’ laudable policy of letting in the children of commoners ended up coming home to roost.
Dashnyam also wrote poems with romantic refrains like “I think of you.” He told me that there was a young Russian woman he was in love with back in his student days in Moscow, a woman who was blonde and beautiful. Yet when they finally reunited a few years ago, after the Soviet Union fell, she had gained weight—“like this,” he said, using both hands to suggest a belly even bigger than his own. When a man talks this way about a woman he once loved, it usually comes off as a cheap shot. Dashnyam’s tone and manner, however, suggested that life’s all-too-predictable course left him nonplussed, or richly amused, or both. He did not sound vulgar at all.
“You are a very important person,” I said to him on some occasion.
“Everybody is important,” he amended instantly. He was the kind of person who immediately came up with a response like that despite his rudimentary English. Apparently, one’s true worth shows through regardless of how well or how poorly one speaks a language; everyone trusted Dashnyam as a man of character.
Gintaris was the name of Dashnyam’s young Lithuanian poet friend. He liked to fish, and he often went to fish in the Iowa River. Like bonsai, fishing happens to be another hobby often associated in Japan with stoop-shouldered retirees. I don’t know how it sounds in the Lithuanian language for a young man with spiky hair and pierced ear to count bonsai and fishing among his hobbies. I do know that connotations differ according to the language, so it must not sound as funny as it does in Japanese. One day he caught a big fish and, not knowing what to do with it, let it swim in his bathtub all week. Dashnyam finally stepped in and cooked the fish. Once you caught something, you ate it—that was the philosophy embraced by Dashnyam, the hunter’s son. “But it didn’t look very good, so I didn’t eat it myself,” he added, laughing.
Historically Mongolia had a much longer relationship with China than with the Soviets, but I never saw Dashnyam talk with either of the two male Chinese novelists, to whom I took the liberty of mentally attaching nicknames. The one who wore jeans and sat with his legs wide apart was “the country dude,” and the one who looked smart in a white suit, almost as smart as the fabulous male impersonators in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, was “the city dude.” The country dude’s real name was Yu Hua. On the alphabetical list of IWP participants, his name came last, and I had not gone far enough down the list to find out who he was. He himself did not understand a word of English, and when we saw each other in the hallway, he would rush into his room with a smile as if he wanted to vanish into thin air. Initially I didn’t give him much thought, but soon I began to hear his name associated with a film. When I became curious enough to actually go through the list, I learned that the acclaimed director Zhang Yimou had made a film based on Yu’s novel To Live that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994. We had a celebrity among us! (He later became a frequent New York Times contributor.)
From South Korea, there were three male writers. In descending order of fluency in English, the first was a poet who had earned his doctorate in English literature at the University of Iowa. He owned a car, so he would invite me on rides, saying, “C’mon, Minae!” and motioning his head toward his car like an American. He would take me and the other Koreans to a Korean or Japanese restaurant. As the four of us busily moved our chopsticks, I sensed as I always did the tender ways in which East Asians living in the United States relate to one another, creating a momentary safe haven, as it were.
The second Korean was a young novelist who had an easy laugh and kept taking photographs. Unsurprisingly, the two men were both surnamed Kim. The one who had lived longer in the United States put his surname last and called himself Ethan Kim. The other one, a direct import from Korea, called himself Kim Young-ha. I kept getting their names confused. Kim Young-ha liked to visit hot springs in Japan. I’m not sure if his fondness for hot springs had anything to do with it, but he later kindly played a role in getting my inordinately long novel translated into Korean. Only when I visited Seoul did I learn that he is a prominent novelist in Korea.
The third Korean, Jeong Han Yong, who had the least command of English, was a poet with a singularly serious expression, like many Japanese of a past generation. Once when he appeared before an audience, he stroked his short hair, smiled bashfully, and said, “I got a haircut,” acknowledging what he had done for that day’s presentation. That one sentence made the audience howl with laughter, delighted to find out that this man who had until then barely opened his mouth had a charmingly self-mocking sense of humor.
A novelist from Argentina named Leopoldo also volunteered to help get my long novel translated into Spanish. He and I were not particularly close during my residency. In fact, we hardly spoke. His kindness was unexpected—puzzling, even. But life is nothing but a series of inexplicable events anyway, so I decided to simply feel grateful for his generosity. When I ran into him at night in the hotel hallway, he would swiftly edge his compact body against the wall and walk past me with a smile. He had a sharp face and always walked barefoot, his feet full of life, the nerves reaching to the very tips of his energetic toes. As I watched his agile body glide by, I could not help thinking of a wild leopard. After the program, I didn’t hear from him for several years, but by the time the Spanish translation—my first in a Western language—was due to come out in Buenos Aires we had begun to exchange frequent e-mails, and I even learned to close mine with an affectionate Abrazo!
Whereas Leopoldo the Latin American exuded a touch of animal wildness, Matthias from Germany predictably, almost comically, reeked of civilization. It may be because his tall body was topped by a perfectly shaped cranium that looked for all the world like a specimen of the Homo sapiens brain that had reached its evolutionary goal. It stood out even more because he completely shaved his head. As days went by, I took to calling him by a nickname, too. “Hi, Perfect Cranium!” I would greet him. At first, Matthias laughed off my greeting with an “Oh, no!” I’m sure he was aware I was teasing about the Nazis’ eugenicist claim to be the most advanced race. Later he half-admitted that he shaved his head to showcase its superb shape. Men with fine appearance seem too resplendent. The more I lose my youth, the more resplendent they seem.
Shimon from Israel was a vegetarian. Marcin from Poland, who spoke no English, seemed to spend all his time drinking hard liquor in a philosophical silence. Barolong from Botswana was as enormous as a sumo wrestler. Young Gregory from England had rosy cheeks that would have nicely matched one of those curly silver wigs you see in eighteenth-century portraits. Paddy the Irishman spoke with a wonderful Irish lilt.
Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.
WRITERS ARE WRITING, MOREOVER, IN RICH COUNTRIES AND poor countries alike.
Traveling in a foreign country for even a week makes you painfully aware of the economic status of your own country. Living in a foreign country for an entire month with people from a wide spectrum of rich countries to poor sharpens your awareness even more. The dollar had heartbreakingly different meanings for writers from different countries. Thanks to Iowa’s low cost of living and the accommodation provided by the IWP, I found the modest daily stipend more than enough to cover my everyday expenses. With it, I not only splurged on ready-made food at the student union but also dined out and occasionally even satisfied my morning craving for French toast and sausages by walking into the center of town, braving the still-chilly air. I bought amenities like toothpaste and shampoo at the co-op without looking at the price. I went to the movies. I went to coffee shops. Being from Japan, I wasn’t tempted to save the daily stipend to take back home. I also felt comfortable in knowing that if I ever ran out of money, I could exchange some of the Japanese currency I had brought along. Despite Japan’s recession, the yen provided me with as great a sense of security as if I had bullion gold bars to fall back on.
Things were different for writers from poor countries. If they economized on their daily stipend and took the extra dollars home, they could live on that amount for a while. They could help their aging parents or their children in college. Since cutting down on accommodations was not an option, they cut down mostly on food. The common room that served as both kitchen and dining room had only a microwave, but this did not deter some writers from cooking nearly every meal on their own. When we went on excursions on the minibus and stopped for a meal en route, writers from poor countries stood around munching on the snacks sold at the counter while the rest of us sat at a table in a diner. And whenever there was an event with a free meal, even those who were always holed up in their rooms would somehow get wind of it and appear. Free alcohol was consumed with stupefying fervor. If one carelessly left a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the common room, it would be empty by morning with absurd certainty.
I was particularly sensitive to the want of money among other female writers in the group. Take, for instance, Yevgeniya from Ukraine, who was on the same minibus to Minneapolis. In spite of her august name, she was a genial, down-to-earth woman who told one obscene joke after another and shook her small, slightly rotund body as she laughed. One day, on another of our excursions, during a pit stop at a gas station I saw Yevgeniya holding some gloves inside the adjoining convenience store. She was contemplating whether to buy them for her sons, as if she had all the time in the world to make the decision.
She turned her serious gaze toward me as I stood nearby and asked, “What do you think of these?”
I could not very well respond, “They look cheap. I wouldn’t buy them.” The thickness of the gloves told of the severe winters in Ukraine.
One evening, as the two of us were walking back to the hotel, she looked at the streetlights, sighed, and said, “Kiev is a sad town. It’s dark. And miserable.”
But the times when I became distressingly aware of my own good fortune were not when I was with someone like Yevgeniya, who heartily shook her body as she laughed. They were when I was with someone like Ligia, a writer from Poland. Ligia is the name of the beautiful daughter of a deceased king in the famous novel Quo Vadis—written in 1895 by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz—that I’d read as a girl; I secretly gave her this name because she had all the makings of a princess. She was a philosopher who never showed up without perfect makeup, looking rather regal among us. On that day of my first excursion with the other writers, as we arrived at the hotel in Minneapolis, we were told that we were to share rooms, and I learned that Ligia was to be my roommate. I went pale. I had enough difficulty sleeping by myself, and now I had to sleep alongside a stranger? And a foreigner at that? At my age? If only I could discreetly tell Chris that I would pay out of pocket for a single room! But I feared creating a reputation as a spoiled Japanese. Matter-of-factly, I took the card key and put on a smile toward Ligia, who also smiled back at me. What did she think of sharing a room with me, I wondered.
I was unpacking in the bedroom when I heard Ligia cry out as she opened the closet near the entrance.
“Look! Look! Someone’s left a robe here!” One can always tell a woman’s voice of envy when she finds something beautiful.
As I approached, Ligia touched the sleeve with one hand and whispered, “It’s silk.”
“Oh, that’s mine,” I said awkwardly.
It was an ash-gray coat that I had bought after much hesitation nearly ten years earlier and had cherished ever since. Both the exterior and the lining were silk, and it had heavenly light down padding. It stained easily, however, and I always tried to take off the stain with benzene only to end up spreading it even more, whereupon I would rush to the cleaners—something I’m usually too lazy to do. When part of the lining wore out, I took it to the store where I’d bought it, and though they no longer had the exact same fabric, I had them mend it nonetheless. It was easy to wear, and despite its simple cut, it had a rather grand appearance. That Ligia called it a “robe” rather than a “coat” seemed somehow appropriate. In anticipation of the colder Minneapolis climate, I had packed the coat in my overnight bag, and as soon as I entered the room I’d hung it up to get rid of the wrinkles.
On its own, not draped around the mid-size (here in the United States, the child-size) body of a middle-aged woman, the silk coat had regained its aura and hung in the closet looking elegant and dignified.
Ligia was a pretty woman. By some trick of the genes, white people tend to age faster than Asians, and though still at the peak of womanhood in her mid-thirties, she already showed a flower’s subtle signs of fading. But even that added to her charm, and she exuded the characteristic self-awareness of an attractive woman. Of the two of us, she would have been the more appropriate owner of the “robe.” I could not help feeling that she must be thinking the same thing as she murmured, “So beautiful!”
The dreaded night came quickly.
With a glass of water and all kinds of sleeping aids at my bedside, I waited primly in bed, wearing my pajamas. For a long time, I heard water hitting the washroom sink. Then Ligia emerged. To my astonishment, the regal lady was wearing a babydoll—a fluffy, translucent mini nightgown. She also had a big, white bath towel wrapped around her head, like those beauties in American soap commercials I used to admire as a child, back in the golden years of babydolls. It seemed too much for someone who had only been washing her face. (Couldn’t she have just put on a shower cap, I wondered. Or used a hair band?) Oblivious of my bewilderment, Ligia then went straight to the dresser, sat on the chair in front of the mirror, and started putting gobs of cream on her face. Her face immediately began to shine. I watched, mesmerized: in this day and age, is there a cream that you slather on like that after washing your face? I thought of my own tiny jar of expensive “night cream,” which I use only sparingly. Was it possible that the historical development of eastern European women’s makeup was still stalled at the stage of “cold cream”?
It was amusing, after all, sharing a room with a stranger.
As Ligia got into the bed next to mine, we started to talk, a bit out of courtesy. The one Polish person I knew was a poor and alcoholic former Solidarity member named Henryk whom my sister used to date in New York. I told Ligia that my sister, now also back in Japan, was still in touch with him and that both my mother and I, along with my sister, sent him some money when he lost his job and was on the verge of having his electricity cut off. At this point in the story, Ligia suddenly sat up. “So typical!” she cried out. “That’s why I hate Polish men. They grow up completely spoiled by their mothers and sisters, and they come to believe they’re some kind of geniuses, and yet in the end, they can’t even manage to make a living. It’s terrible!” She directed her fury at the ceiling, glaring up and menacing it with clenched fists. “Oh, how embarrassing! I’m so ashamed!” It was as if a disgrace of the entire Polish nation had been exposed halfway around the world. I was shocked myself. My sister’s boyfriend Henryk indeed grew up completely spoiled by his mother and sister and had come to believe he was a genius poet. But how could she have guessed all that?
Ligia had a brilliant mind, as a philosopher should, and an outstanding command of English, having grown up speaking it at home because of her grandfather, who was a great Anglophile and once a man of property. Either he or his wife was half-Jewish, and the family seems to have gone through layers of trouble to avoid the concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. Born after the war, Ligia only heard about this family history. What she does know firsthand is the Soviet oppression that followed. “In the sense that it lasted much longer, it was worse than the Nazis,” she reflected, her shining face still turned toward the ceiling, though she now lay quietly, flat in bed. She and her family were made to share with strangers a stately manor her grandfather had built long ago. Ligia was someone who could have and would have appreciated all the luxuries money can buy, but instead, tossed about by the vicissitudes of Poland’s destiny, she did not even own a coat that befitted her.
As our parting approached, she looked gloomier, the shadows under her eyes turning darker. “When I go back to Poland, I have to teach at the university again. You won’t believe how low our salary is.” She lived with her cat in a Warsaw apartment.
The one I ended up becoming closest to was a female writer from Norway named Brit. Soon after we met, we started having drinks together, enjoying the breeze at restaurants with tables set out on the sidewalk to make the most of the fading summer light. We also went to the theater together. Red-haired and freckled, Brit was exceptionally personable, and for someone who was a writer, she had refreshing common sense. On top of being a Scandinavian, she was a translator, and so she spoke very good English too. But those were not the only reasons I became friends with her. We both came from rich countries, making it easy for us to do things together. Many writers did not allow themselves even the small luxury of going out for a cup of coffee; we two could drink beer, munch on tacos, and confess our sins of frivolous spending as the sun went down, turning the blue sky purple-red. We could also talk about whatever film was showing. Just about then, Lost in Translation, set in Japan, was playing in town.
And then, there were the diverse political situations.
Living with other writers, I saw for the first time what I had only known abstractly before: people write not just in rich and poor countries but also in various political climates. Being able to participate in a program like the IWP meant in itself that you came from a country that was functioning, at least minimally. In a totally dysfunctional society, the profession of a writer would not exist. Still, not all writers enjoyed the kind of peace I took for granted, almost indolently, as a Japanese.
For many writers, the freedom of speech, first of all, was not a given. Take, for instance, the Romanian poet Denisa. Probably because of Romania’s linguistic and cultural proximity to France, when she threw out “Bah!” in a dismissive tone, or shrugged her shoulders with both hands raised, she somehow looked French. Besides, she was a stylish woman who didn’t look anything like my image of someone from a former Eastern Bloc country. Yet her mind remained obsessed by her memory of where she and others had to draw a line in “dealing with state power.” Under Soviet rule, the state censored not only literary content but also form, and even toward the end of the twentieth century, there still remained such absurdities as not being able to publish free verse. Should one compromise with the state in order to make a living and so lose one’s dignity as a writer (and as a human being)? Or should one refuse even if it meant going hungry? Having had to make such choices still haunted Denisa, and it was as if she could not not talk about it, either in public or in private.
And, of course, there were writers currently facing state suppression. What I gradually came to understand, for example, is that the Chinese “city dude” who looked so smart in his white suit was actually a warrior fighting for freedom of speech. Having relocated himself to New York, he was editing works that writers dared not publish in mainland China, distributing them for the Chinese readership spread around the world. His English was still quite basic, and we didn’t go beyond greeting each other in the hallway, but when he found out that I was leaving earlier than everyone else, the night before my departure he slipped under my door a short story that he had written which someone had translated into English. Reading it on the airplane, I felt I was getting to know him for the first time.
The story has a tragicomic plot. The protagonist’s grandfather is raised poor, but after the Cultural Revolution breaks out, the authorities discover that his ancestors had owned some land. Labeled as having “landowner’s blood,” he is imprisoned and tortured and spends the rest of his life half deranged. Eventually, he suffers from septic poisoning, upon which he receives a series of blood transfusions. His body is now infused with “peasant’s blood.” He is overjoyed. Yet he is also full of regret. If there was such a convenient method, why didn’t he think of replacing his “landowner’s blood” with “peasant’s blood” before? Cursing his own ignorance, he begs his son and grandson to go through the same procedure as soon as possible. On his deathbed, he feels comforted in the thought that his blood is now entirely cleansed; he has nothing to fear in the afterlife and can die in peace, and so he does. The second half of the story takes place after the grandson arrives in New York, whereupon it turns into a fantasy. Failing after all to ride the wave of capitalism, one day the young man has an idea: why not transfuse Coca-Cola into his arm! Suddenly everything begins to go smoothly. The story is a critique of both Communism and capitalism; I found the first half both sadder and funnier.
And there was also a writer from Myanmar—a country under military rule—who actually defected to the United States during his residency. Wearing sandals and a colorful sarong, this man, well past middle age, was always walking quietly but briskly down the hallway of our hotel, spreading a tropical aura in the fluorescent-lit space. To my pleasant surprise, he was a Japanophile and told me he quite liked Harp of Burma, the Japanese children’s story about a World War II soldier who turns pacifist and becomes a monk in Burma. Whenever we met, he would greet me with a full smile and a cheery “Banzai!” Perhaps he had been taught to say it as a child in a Japanese-run school. In foreign countries, banzai is often interpreted as a Japanese war cry; in Chinese films, evil Japanese soldiers shout it while stabbing tied-up Chinese with bamboo spears. It would have been too bizarre for me to respond to his greeting in kind, so I hid my discomfort and responded with a cheerful American “Hi!” He also knew polite Japanese greetings like ohayō gozaimasu (good morning) and sayonara (good-bye), which he said he’d learned in elementary school. One time he even sang a Japanese children’s song for me. His hoarse voice echoed under the blue Iowa sky, reminding me of a time when Asian children were made to sing Japanese songs under the tropical sun; the recent, yet already distant, history of the Japanese Empire came back with unexpected vividness. He seemed to read English but did not speak it much, so everyone only thought of him as a quiet, harmless man. Then rumor began to circulate that he had made a request to the U.S. State Department seeking political asylum; we soon found out that his request was granted. Since the State Department grants political asylum only when there is a demonstrable probability that the applicant will actually be imprisoned upon his return, this writer was apparently perceived by his government as a danger to his country. We all found it hard to believe; we speculated that probably, having abandoned his country, he would never get to see his family again. But he didn’t seem particularly sad. He continued to briskly walk down the hotel’s hallway in his traditional attire, spreading a tropical aura.
Indeed, writers who came from countries with a tradition of freedom of speech were in the minority. Those from countries where there had been uninterrupted peace for more than half a century—countries where World War II inflicted the last major scar—were also in the minority. Barolong from Botswana was born when his homeland was still a part of the British Empire; Shimon from Israel lived in what could suddenly turn into a combat zone; the participant from Bosnia, the group’s only Muslim, had bullet fragments in his knee; the girl-like writer from Vietnam was born in the year her country’s long war finally ended. Latin American writers had lived through military rule or civil war or both. Even the writers from South Korea did not take peace for granted; with their country always preparing for war, men have mandatory military service that is notoriously fraught with horror. One of them told me that he still had nightmares about the hazing he endured: “I’m still in the barracks!” he would cry as he jumped up in bed in fear.
That all these writers just kept on writing, whatever their circumstances, never ceased to amaze me.
WRITERS WRITING IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE
Yet there was something else that never ceased to amaze me—something that actually seemed more amazing as the days went by. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes, they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. Nonetheless, what intrigued me most as I continued to live with the IWP writers was that all of us, each and every one, were writing in our own language. Not only there in Iowa but everywhere on Earth, all kinds of writers were writing in their own language. It made no difference whether a writer’s language had hundreds of millions of potential readers or a few hundred thousand; either way, they wrote in their own language, as if to do so were the most natural act imaginable—as if people had always done so, ever since the human race came into being. Of course, that is far from the truth. If one looks at human history, only in the modern era did the act of writing come to mean writing in one’s own language. While the length of the history of writing varies from language to language, it is often a matter of a few hundred years or even a few decades. And yet, today, writers everywhere are writing in their own language as if people have always done so.
Moreover, at the IWP, for each writer, how deeply this notion of one’s own language seemed to be connected to our feelings for our own country! When the gentle-faced Dashnyam talked in front of an audience, he projected an image of the expansive Mongolian steppe on the big screen from his laptop, played Mongolian music, and described Mongolia’s natural beauty and the way people live in harmony with nature. (His computer skills were impressive.) He spoke less about his country’s literature than about his country. His spirit of rebellion against the Soviet Union seemed alive and well, for he was writing about Genghis Khan, the Mongolian hero who was made the object of criticism in his own country at the height of Soviet influence. He also preferred using the Roman alphabet to the Cyrillic, not only because it was easier to use on his computer, but because the latter symbolized his country’s former oppressor. There was even a movement to resurrect traditional Mongolian script, he told me.
Or take Yevgeniya’s Ukrainian, which is one of the languages that have been tragically tampered with in modern times. In imperial Russia, publishing in Ukrainian was basically banned. The founding of the Soviet Union initially brought about a lift on the ban; to uproot pro-Russian antirevolutionary feelings, the Soviets welcomed the rise of Ukrainian ethnic consciousness and promoted education and publication in the Ukrainian language. Stalin reversed course in the 1930s. The Russian language was reimposed to uproot any anti-Soviet feelings. Language control loosened under Khrushchev, but the fate of the Ukrainian language since then depended on the whims of successive Soviet politicians, leading to a steady decrease in the number of users. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Ukrainian users were already outnumbered by Russian-language users. But the new Ukraine government decreed Ukrainian to be its sole official language. Today, even among citizens who use Russian as their mother tongue, the majority consider Ukrainian their “real” language. Russian is still often used in the media and in official documents, and writers writing in Russian still outnumber those writing in Ukrainian, but all this is likely to change in the future as more writers choose to write in Ukrainian, like Yevgeniya. The recent turmoil can only strengthen national identity among ethnic Ukrainians.
Or take Hebrew, the language of the vegetarian Shimon. People’s passion for their country resurrected this ancient language. It has a remarkably long history as a written language; some even claim that it dates back more than three thousand years. Jews, like so many others, were victims of the turmoil of history, and the failed insurrection against the Roman Empire in the second century C.E. resulted in the Jewish diaspora. Written Hebrew was preserved in scripture, but the spoken language remained virtually unused for nearly seventeen hundred years. The Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century began its renaissance, secularizing the language. Then Hebrew even became one of the official languages, along with Arabic and English, when the British created Mandatory Palestine in 1920. When the state of Israel was created in Palestine in 1948, Jews who gathered there from all over the world began learning Hebrew, which the new generation now sees as its mother tongue. And so a language that had mainly been used in religious rituals was transformed into a modern language; a language that had virtually no speakers less than a hundred years ago now boasts over six million. Today Hebrew and Arabic remain the official languages of Israel, but for the Jewish population, Hebrew is their own language.
Or take Norwegian, the language my friend the red-headed, freckled Brit was writing in. Starting in the late fourteenth century, Norway was under Danish rule for over four hundred years. During that time, Danish was the written language. After the country was liberated from Danish rule in 1814, a movement arose to come up with a national written language; much debate and experimentation followed for over a century until Norwegians eventually settled on two official languages. One is called Bokmål, or “book language,” based on the Danish that was already familiar to Norwegians. When foreigners now study Norwegian, they learn Bokmål. The other is called Nynorsk, or “New Norwegian,” a language with less Danish influence, single-handedly created in the mid-nineteenth century by a linguist named Ivar Aasen, who collected regional dialects from all over the country in his quest for a true national identity. As I understand it, Nynorsk can more vividly portray the traditional, rural life of the people who endure long battles with the severe climate, both by the ocean and in the mountains, away from the cities. It is also far richer in vocabulary.
Brit, who grew up in a fishing village, writes in Nynorsk even though she often uses the language in an urban context. That she chooses to do so means that she is deliberately limiting the number of her readers, for, though both Bokmål and Nynorsk are taught in school, Norwegians who actually read and write Nynorsk make up only about 12 percent of the population. The population of Norway is five million—12 percent of that is about six hundred thousand. This figure is not much different from the population of Suginami Ward—one of twenty-three wards in the city of Tokyo, where I live. For a Japanese writer like me, it would seem as if you were writing for your neighbors. According to Brit, though, many Norwegian writers choose to write in Nynorsk because the language is more colorful and they feel more deeply connected to it. It’s a very poetic language, almost too poetic, she told me. People like Brit are writing in a language they feel is their own language, even if that language was artificially created only a century and a half ago and has only several hundred thousand readers.
All writers are writing in their own language, as if to do so was their mission in life. Walking down the hotel’s empty hallway at night, I could sense the writers’ presence on the other side of either wall as they sat facing their computer screens and writing, each in his or her own language. I could feel not only their presence but their passion and commitment. For every one of them, there were surely thousands of others similarly tapping on a keyboard or scribbling in a notebook, writing in their own language. Even as I acutely felt the dedication of those IWP writers on the other side of the wall, or rather, because I felt it so acutely, I could not help thinking about a major change that history is making us go through: English is becoming a universal language such as humans have never known before.
There is a hierarchy among languages.
At the very bottom are the languages that have only a limited number of users and circulate only within a small tribe. Above those are the languages that circulate within an ethnic group, and farther above are languages that circulate within a nation. And on top are the languages that traverse a wide region of ethnic groups and nations.
Today the rapid increase in communication among different people is bringing about two extraordinary changes in the linguistic landscape. The first concerns the languages at the bottom of the hierarchy. These languages, most of whose names are not known to the rest of the world, are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Of the approximately six thousand languages on Earth, it is often predicted that more than 80 percent may disappear by the end of this century. In the course of history, many languages have come into being and disappeared, but today languages are dying at an unprecedented rate, just like the plant and animal species affected by environmental change. The second change in the global linguistic landscape concerns, of course, the rise of the English language. There has never before been a universal language of this scale, a language that is not confined to any one geographical location, however vast, but sits atop all other languages and circulates throughout the entire world. This change could not leave other languages unaffected.
What exactly is a universal language? Some predict that Mandarin Chinese will become the most powerful language of the twenty-first century because it has the largest number of native speakers. Indeed, learning Mandarin has become a worldwide fad. Such a prediction, however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. What makes a language “universal” has nothing to do with how many native speakers there are, and everything to do with how many people use it as their second language. It is high time we stop confusing the two figures. To be sure, changes in the world economy and population will likely make not only Chinese but also Spanish and Arabic more important than they already are today. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that any of those languages will ever dethrone English and be used among people of diverse nations. Certainly, Americans will not be using Chinese to trade with Russia or India—another country with a fast-growing economy and a mind-boggling population—anytime soon. (In fact, the rise of India, a former British colony, will only strengthen the dominance of English.) Spanish has the second largest number of native speakers, and the number is growing, but it’s also unlikely to replace English. With the third largest number of native speakers, English is a big language in its own right; but that is not what matters. What matters is that English is already used and will continue to be used by the greatest number of non native speakers in the world.
The rise of English as the singular universal language resulted from an accumulation of historical coincidences. There is nothing intrinsic in the English language that made it attain such prominence. It is far from easy to learn. (A recent study found that it takes much longer for an infant to learn English than, for example, Spanish; the world would indeed have been better off if Spanish had become the universal language.) Unlike Latin or Classical Chinese, universal languages of the past, it did not develop primarily as a written language. With Old Norse and Norman French mixed into what was originally a West Germanic language, the grammar is messy, the vocabulary daunting, and the spelling cockeyed. And, for many nonnative speakers, English pronunciation is a nightmare.
Nonetheless, once a language comes to circulate widely, its circulation accelerates at a snowballing pace regardless of its intrinsic characteristics. The more people use it, the more new users it gains. Indeed, an analogy can be made between language and currency. A currency that many people use in transactions comes to be used by even more until the process reaches a critical point and that becomes the world currency. This principle of self-generating propagation—which, at some point, operates independently of how the initial process began—guarantees that the American dollar will continue to circulate as world currency for quite some time even after the relative decline of the American economy. The principle applies to a greater extent to language, a far more self-sustaining entity than currency.
And there is more. Today the added technology of the Internet is accelerating the spread of English. This universal language can now easily leap over the man-made walls of national borders as well as natural walls like the Himalayas, the Sahara, and the Pacific. Apart from political, economic, or legal barriers, there is nothing the new technology cannot cross. Just how long human civilization as we know it may last is more uncertain than ever in today’s world. Yet there is a strong likelihood that English will continue to grow as the universal language, with more and more nonnative speakers using it for at least a few centuries into the future—or even for as long as human civilization as we know it persists.
What will be the fate of written languages other than English one hundred or two hundred years on? Some populations will be cherishing their own language even more than before. Others will witness their language’s fall—a fall that begins innocuously but all too soon becomes irrevocable.
Many linguists would dismiss such pronouncements as nothing but the idle talk of a layperson. The main current of linguistics today as I understand it is to grasp the structures of language based on phonetics. That means treating languages with and without writing as of equal value. Such a framework allows no room for the idea that written languages may fall. For linguists, languages cannot fall; they merely change. For them, a language dies only when its final speaker (or, more accurately, its final listener) disappears. When I talk of a language “falling” or “dying,” I’m referring only to the possible fate of written languages, especially those that once achieved greatness by capturing and celebrating life—and at the same time celebrating themselves for performing such a wondrous task, each in its own way. What a loss it would be if such languages were reduced to mere shadows of their former glory. Just as civilizations fall, so can languages, too.
Perhaps because writers tend to be night owls, the minds of my fellow IWP writers seemed to become sharper at night. When I occasionally came across them in the hallway late in the evening, they didn’t look as though they were going to unwind after a day’s work; rather, they had the alertness of a soldier on the way to the battlefield—or the fierceness of a nocturnal animal on the hunt for prey. Their minds apparently occupied with their writing, they barely uttered a greeting before going in their rooms and shutting the door. Left alone in the hallway, I pictured them sitting in front of the computer screen and starting to move their fingers across the keyboard, already absorbed in the world they were creating with their words.
To a writer, the fall of one’s own language means nothing less than the fall of one’s national literature, of which every writer is a bearer. Did the others ever think about the future of their national literature? Did they ever consider the possibility that, having come into existence at a particular point in history, their national literature may have already peaked and be on its way to a fall? What would they say if I suggested that in a century or two, many national literatures may no longer be what they once were? What did they think of the significance of English becoming the universal language? Did they ever stop to ponder such things as I did?
Whenever there was some public event, ten or so of us showed up. Afterward, we walked back slowly under the broad Iowa sky, struggling to converse in English, not an easy task for many. The weather remained clear day after day. If you didn’t notice that the leaves on the trees were turning yellow, it was as if time had stopped. Debating in any language is not my forte, so I did not bring this up while walking with the others, but I grew more and more haunted by the idea that we might be a group of people headed for a downfall. Every time we went on an excursion, we boarded the two minibuses, always more or less divided along the lines of whites and Asians. But in the sense that we might be headed for a downfall, we were all the same.
There was an exception. In addition to our two Anglophone writers—Gregory from England and Paddy from Ireland—Barolong, the poet from Botswana, wrote not in his mother tongue but in English instead. He was a manly man, big both in height and in weight, and I found his physical presence too intimidating to chat with him casually. He probably had no idea that a small Asian woman like me was interested in his being there. His participation seemed to me to symbolize one of the paths that more and more writers like him could take in the future.
Checking the map I had bought, I found that Botswana is just north of South Africa. It became independent from Britain and formed a republic in 1966. Barolong, born in 1957, must have been in elementary school at the time. His family could not have been poor, for he told me he had lived in England with his family for a while and attended secondary school in London. Yet—contrary to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that writing requires “a room of one’s own”—according to an anecdote he shared with us in his talk, his first published poem was written kneeling at the side of his bed, the only space that was all his own; so perhaps his family was not rich enough to let him continue his education in England.
For most people in Botswana, including Barolong, their mother tongue is something called Tswana. Under the British protectorate rule, English was the sole official language. It was only after Botswana’s independence that Tswana became a legitimate medium of written communication and gained the status of official language, alongside English. Now some Botswanan writers write in English and others in Tswana, and between the two there is tension. When I asked Barolong why he chose to write in English, he answered that the secondary school years he had spent in England made him more adept at it—at least, that was his explanation. And, as if to atone for the sin of ethnolinguistic betrayal, he was working on English translations of Tswana proverbs. I found it fascinating that Africans with a command of Western languages are now taking over the task of those Western missionaries and anthropologists who once traveled to far-off Africa to collect regional folktales.
Already numerous writers from former British colonies write in Standard English, and some, like Barolong, are from sub-Saharan African countries that historically had no written language of their own. I used to wonder what it would feel like to write in a language not one’s own. I also used to wonder if such writing could be considered part of “national” literature. Not anymore. Now these African writers seemed to me to be heralding a new era by embracing the English language and opening a new world with their writing. This may be a perverse thing to say, but they even seemed like a blessed group—not only because they could adopt the English language with such ease but also because they, at least, would not have to watch their literature and language irrevocably fall.
One French expression began coming back to me: une littérature majeure (a major literature). Someone used this expression in reference to Japanese literature when I was in Paris many years ago. I felt that these words, uttered casually at the time, were trying to tell me something important, but I could not pinpoint what that something was. One, two, then three years passed, the expression slowly fading from my memory, only to resurface on rare occasions. And then this invitation to participate in the IWP came to me—providentially, in retrospect.
As I lived under the blue Iowa sky while the leaves turned yellow, surrounded by writers all writing in their own language, and as I began to think that they and I might alike be on the road to a downfall, I began gradually to understand what it was that the expression une littérature majeure was trying to convey, assuredly far beyond the intent of the one who had uttered it. My thoughts turned to Japan’s modernity. And I saw for the first time how extraordinary it was that my country had such an extensive body of modern literature, dating back to the late nineteenth century. I even allowed myself to call the phenomenon a “miracle.” Yet this did not make me feel elated. On the contrary, the more I marveled at the good fortune of Japanese literature in the past, the more despondent I grew about where it was headed in the future.
The month I spent in Iowa felt long. The tension of living an unfamiliar life while enduring poor health made the time pass slowly. Still, the laws of nature ruled as they always do, the sun kept rising and setting, and finally my day of departure arrived. I was planning before returning to Japan to visit New York to see some old friends. Since my heart never took root in America the whole time I lived there, I had few friends worthy of the name. The following scene took place with one friend I did have, a Japanese woman roughly my age, known for her brilliant mind. We went to the same graduate school in the United States, and she was now a professor at a prestigious American university. I had heard the rumor that while working on her M.A. degree in Japan she had knocked other students out by reading Balzac’s entire oeuvre in the original. What knocked me out was her nonchalant remark, “I was good in math, too.” We nevertheless had one thing in common: our love of the classics of modern Japanese literature.
We met one evening at a Chinese restaurant uptown. Neither of us is much of a drinker, but we held our beer mugs like grown-up women should and picked up the dumplings with the long plastic chopsticks that Chinese restaurants in America invariably provide. In our tipsiness, we fumed as we lamented the world and bemoaned Japan.
Her face now red from the bit of beer she had had, my friend said saucily, “You know, when I was little, I used to think that novelists were incredibly smart people with really serious ideas—the most respected people in the whole world. And look at the writers now in Japan. They’ve got no brains. I just don’t feel like reading the crap they write.”
I have no idea what she thought of me. She has a vivacious mind with plenty of room for mischief, so she may have been coolly including me in the category of brainless writers of crap. But rather than feeling hurt, I nodded my own reddened face and eagerly acquiesced: “True, so true!” All the thoughts I had had during my month in Iowa came rushing back and circled in my inebriated mind.
Perhaps both she and I belong to a generation so thoroughly imbued with the classics of modern Japanese literature that we don’t know how to appreciate newer writing. Or perhaps most of the newer writing is in fact of lesser value. Long ago, while I was still living in the United States, whenever I thought of what it would be like to finally go back to Japan and start writing novels in Japanese, an image presented itself before my eyes of a deep forest where stately trees stood tall. I would write in their shadow, quietly and modestly, bits of trivial things befitting a woman. Though this was a sorry image for someone who was already getting a taste of gender equality, I had somehow assumed that my country would still be inhabited by men like the giants Fukuzawa Yukichi, Futabatei Shimei, Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ōgai, Kōda Rohan, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō—men of frightening intelligence, knowledge, and wit. It had never occurred to me that once I was back in my home country I might not be able to find any deep forest where stately trees stood tall. Yet that was what happened. I spotted a tree here and a tree there, but mostly the scenery was flat. Unsuited even for a poetic description like “bleak wasteland,” it was more like a playground where everything was small and clamorous—just juvenile. I was left to wonder whether my compatriots had forgotten that those men I so admired had even existed.
Many people both in Japan and abroad would disagree with this description of the contemporary Japanese literary scene, and they may be right. But even if this description happens to be true, that in itself would be no cause for alarm. In the course of history, every art form rises and falls and rises again. There is no need to fear for the future of Japanese literature—not unless the Japanese language is falling, not unless Japanese people keep on letting it fall or, even worse, keep on doing everything in their power to accelerate its fall (which I’m afraid may be the case) now that we have already entered the age of English.