Words of Sunset From the Land of Rising Sun
I write this column from a high-rise in Tokyo—a city I feel an irrational intimacy with, thanks to Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami. To be honest, I feel an irrational intimacy with all of Japan because of the Japanese authors I’ve read over various stages of my life—Yukio Mishima as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Yasunari Kawabata on returning home to India, and Kenzaburō Ōe while becoming a dancer. For a decade now, a single dog-eared book has sat on my desk—Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s slender meditation on aesthetics—In Praise of Shadows. These writers have infused my entire sense of Japan. Their ideas settle one on top of the other, disregarding the centuries to create a palimpsest of a country that is part dream, part imagined and part real.
For three weeks, I have travelled around this archipelago, which looks to me like a curvaceous femur adrift in the ocean. I have watched sumo tournaments and street festivals, visited ancient Shinto shrines and the newly minted Toto (the toilet not the band) museum, and all the while I’ve been recalibrating my ideas of Japan—pitting what I’ve read against what I’ve experienced. In many ways, it has been a direct synthesis of what I’ve been trying to do in this column for four years—mashing together books and travel, words, movement, conversation, adventure.
Books lead you to places real and imagined. They unleash ideas and emotions take you to places you never thought you wanted to travel. A question that has preoccupied me, and as a result, which I’ve inflicted on the 100 or so writers I’ve interviewed for this column has been: what is the role of memory and imagination in your work?
I quizzed them on their earliest memories, about how they invent memories, about the unreliability of memories. I asked them whether they incorporate these memories, or whether the trees which grow from the mud of their imagination are rootless, having nothing to do with reality at all. I asked them what the point of writing and books was. And they have all unswervingly attested to the power of story, of language, of poetry.
And poetry… It has been a privilege to share a large part of this space with poets. It has perhaps never been an ideal time to be a poet, but in this particular age, where book pages in newspapers are shrinking faster than Polar ice caps, it has been a luxury and a gift to use this space to engage with poets. Not to critique them, as so often tends to happen between peers, but to converse with them, and in a way, to enshrine and validate poetry itself.
I leave you with borrowed words from Tanizaki—that dog-eared book I’ve been carrying with me everywhere. Tanizaki, who wrote about seeking for “shimmers” in the “visible darkness,” but most importantly, about the value of shadows. “In the mansion called literature, I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”
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