Dany Laferriere - I Am a Japanese Writer

TINY, WELL DESIGNED objects, made for the eye and the palm, have spread across the planet. They attract the skin, beg for an absentminded caress, the kind you might give the cat. The cat is a living object. We know the hand’s taste for the black, oblong object. How to touch the heart of an object? Is it an issue of volume or body? Extreme pleasure is bound up in this comfort. At its center, each object contains a miniscule object with the same configuration. An object at the heart of the object. Its hard core. Empty. A step into the void. Tropics. My gaze has been conditioned by tropical fruit. Round, colorful, perfumed and edible. With a nut in the center. A fruit that will become one with our body loses its mystery. Whereas our relation with the object can’t go beyond the surface. The object penetrates us, but we can’t touch its heart. It is as impenetrable as a samurai. Yet the object spreads and gives us the illusion of warm contact. There are so many of them that we have stopped paying attention to their presence. With no modesty, we undress in front of objects. We eat as they look on. We quarrel in their presence. We have sex right in front of them. And we keep devising more objects, which end up, in turn, sculpting our lives. More and more frequently, living bodies must use objects to touch. The domination of the object in our sexual lives is undeniable; the emergency rooms at hospitals have seen their share. Japan is frantically fabricating handsome objects that have no function. Why? So we’ll fall in love with them? Is there a greater plan behind it all? Do the new objects ready to invade our shores intend to replace our pets? We need to rethink our relationships with the mineral world. The animal and vegetable realms are losing emotional ground. As for the object, it never grows old. I always carry my own personal movie camera on me; it is the only object that knows how to see.

AFTER THE SHOW, I go with Midori and her gang to an opening on Sherbrooke Street, across from the Museum of Fine Arts. Just girls: Eiko, Fumi, Hideko, Noriko, Tomo and Haruki. The courtesans of Princess Midori. Along with an androgynous photographer by the name of Takashi — so flat he reminds me of a lighter in Kate Moss’s palm. Midori looks at the big banners hanging along the columns of the museum, advertising the primitive painters show.

“I’d like to see that show.”

“Didn’t you read in the paper what happened to Bjork?” asks Hideko, leaning so close to Midori that she brushes her ear.

Everyone in the group knows that Midori has the most sensitive ears. They are the seat of all her sensations.

“Don’t you ever do that to me, you understand?”

Midori turns on her.

“Do you understand, Hideko?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. . Why are you making such a big deal?”

“She’s right, Midori,” Fumi says.

An observer paying the slightest attention would understand quickly enough that in this princess’s court, the same intrigues take place as in any other. Midori is the sun around which revolve the seven planets, giddy and sad. So giddy and so sad that I wonder if I’ll be able to tell the difference. You don’t see the tears that flow inside them, but you do hear their manga laughter. I’ve spent endless hours looking for signs that might distinguish one from the other. They never stop orbiting, which makes it hard to pin them down. Above all, this is a group. You can’t study one member until she breaks away a little. I film them in my head in cinema-verité style. A short black-and-white film. Distant, discreet, I film them from my point of view. No editing. And no hesitation about using my imagination to fill in the conversations I’m too far away to hear, or the hidden emotions. We all do that. Takashi is leaving tomorrow to do a photo essay on Yoko Ono, whom Midori calls “yesterday’s grandmother,” but we know he’ll be back. No one ever leaves the group for long. Yoko Ono has a weakness for nubile young boys, but “Widow Mao” (razor-sharp Eiko’s name for her) has no chance against Midori. Midori: a “fresh talent,” the writer Ryu Murakami called her, in a long article in the New Yorker about the next generation of pretenders to Yoko Ono’s throne. Her voice makes you think of Basquiat’s first graffiti in the New York subway: both crude and sophisticated. Tomorrow begins the duel between Midori and Yoko Ono as seen by Takashi. He’ll photograph Yoko Ono. He hopes to bring back a lot of new information about Yoko and lay it at Midori’s feet. The widow knows she’s being spied on. Every young Japanese woman is working to crack the mystery of Yoko Ono in the hopes of dethroning her. Ono is the goddess of discord. The woman who has survived it all. Thanks to her, we’ve understood that hatred is an emotion sometimes more durable than love. Takashi will get a close-up view of how she has fought off the hatred of every Beatles fan in the world. She told Ryu Murakami that she’s still holding fast, “halfway down the slope.” Her position protects her from the herd of noisy, average talents. Midori is situated between Bjork and Yoko Ono. Murakami concluded that there are three groups of artists: a small group with exceptional talent, a very large group with enough talent to survive, and a third group, much smaller than you’d think, of really mediocre people. The public, interested only in what is rare, often prefers a lowgrade artist with a good agent over a middle-grade artist with just as good an agent. According to Ryu Murakami, our era likes everything that is rare — even if it’s bad.

RIGHT NOW, a little drama is being acted out in the left corner of the room, by the window. Midori has no idea what happened to Bjork. Since information is at the heart of power, she’s pretending to know. Never show your hand until you must. It takes nerves of steel to stay in the circle. You have to know how to keep quiet. No one gets close to Midori easily. I have observed the crafty politics of space that surround her. One at a time, the girls revolve around her light. Hideko nearly burned her wings a little while back. She got too close to Midori. There’s no flow chart. Each must decide where to place herself in the hierarchy, and what risks she’s willing to accept to keep her spot. A single surprised or scornful look from Midori, and the imprudent adventuress is dismissed from the circle. That happened to Haruki, who spent the rest of the evening trying to win back her place. Tomo is her last recourse. They carry out lengthy confabulations. Zoom in: Tomo talking to an evasive Midori. Tomo is her bodyguard. She sleeps at the foot of her bed. Every afternoon she trains as a wrestler at the Park Avenue Y. Close-up on Takashi’s face. He’s telling me every detail about the life of the group. Takashi loves wearing makeup, and this lets him go wherever he wants. He travels in both worlds. In fact, there is only one world, since men talk about women and women talk about women too. For the last three years, Takashi has been photographing the lives of women’s washrooms. Makeup, gossip, tears. Naked faces. Tomo lives for Midori, who hardly ever looks at her. You don’t look at the one looking at you. Tomo suffers, but in silence. She’d even defend Midori against herself. Midori is a perfectionist who sometimes sinks into depression. The other girls know they must never say anything about Midori when Tomo is around. Takashi points to a girl lighting a cigarette. Fumi is the most brilliant of them all; she speaks eight languages fluently and is doing her doctorate on Françoise Sagan. She has read everything Sagan has written, and knows every detail about her life — a real expert. You’ll see, Takashi told me, Midori will never confront her in public. She’s the mind behind her shows. She’s a quick thinker, but she can be nasty too. Noriko could tell you more about that. Who’s Noriko? The girl sitting on the floor, back against the wall. Listen, you won’t be able to recognize them after just one meeting. It took me a whole week. They don’t look that much alike, do they? No, but they move in a pack; you think you can tell them apart, and suddenly they melt into a single person. They have their periods at the same time. Noriko is pretty interesting, you’ll see.