Amélie Nothomb - Fear and Trembling

“Give me the files.”

Two hours later, she had finished the entire stack.

I SPENT THE day like a zombie. I was hung over. My desk was smothered in wads of crumpled paper covered in erroneous sums. I threw them away one by one.

I found it hard not to giggle when I saw Fubuki working at her computer. I pictured myself the night before, sitting naked on the keyboard, my arms and legs wrapped around the machine. And now there she was, placing her delicate fingers on the keys. It was the first time I’d felt any interest in computing.

The few hours sleep I had had under the trash had not been enough to extricate my brain from the fog of numbers. I was wading through the wastes, looking for the ruins of my mental landmarks. Meanwhile, I was already feeling a relief that was almost miraculous: for the first time in weeks, I was not tapping away at a calculator.

I was rediscovering a numberless world. I was coming back down to earth. It seemed strange that after my night of madness, things continued as if nothing serious had happened. Granted, no one had seen me hopping naked from desk to desk on my hands, or French kissing a computer. But I had after all been found asleep under the contents of a wastebasket. In many other countries I might have been thrown out for that kind of behavior.

There is a singular logic to this. You find the most outrageous deviants in the countries with the most authoritarian systems. These countries also show relative tolerance toward staggeringly bizarre behavior. No one knows what “eccentric” truly means until they’ve met a Japanese eccentric. I slept under the trash in the offices of a major corporation? So what. Japan is a country that knows the meaning of “losing it.”

I started playing my little bit parts again. It would be difficult to describe the pleasure with which I served tea and coffee. These simple gestures, which posed absolutely no challenge to my poor brain, helped me put myself back together.

As discreetly as possible, I started updating the calendars again. I forced myself to look busy the whole time, so afraid was I of being sent back to the numbers.

A great event crept up on me before I knew what had happened. I met God. The loathsome vice-president had asked me for a beer, probably thinking that he wasn’t fat enough as it was. I brought it to him with an air of polite disgust. I was just leaving the Obese One’s lair when the door to the neighboring office opened. I was face to face with none other than the president himself of the Import-Export Division of the Yumimoto Corporation.

We looked at each other in amazement. My dumb-foundedness was understandable; there I was, face to face with the lord of Yumimoto. His was less easy to explain. Did he even know I existed?

“You must be Amélie-san,” he said, in a voice that was extraordinarily beautiful and refined.

He smiled and extended his hand. I was so amazed that I couldn’t produce a sound. Mister Haneda was a man of about fifty, with a slim body and an exceptionally elegant face. An aura of profound goodness and harmony emanated from him. He looked at me with such genuine goodwill that I lost what little composure I still had.

He left. I stood alone in the corridor, incapable of moving. The president of this place of torture—in which each and every day I was subjected to humiliations each more absurd than the one before—the master of this Gehenna was this magnificent entity!

It surpassed understanding. A company managed by a man of such manifest nobility should have been a paradise of refinement, a place of fulfillment and gentleness. Could it be possible that God reigned over hell?

I was still frozen in stupor when the answer to my question was delivered unto me. The door to Mister Omochi’s office opened.

“What the hell are you doing there? You’re not being paid to hang around in the hallways!”

All was explained. At Yumimoto, God was president, and the Devil vice-president.

FUBUKI, ON THE other hand, was neither God nor the Devil; she was Japanese.

Not all Japanese women are beautiful. But when one of them sets out to be beautiful, anyone else had better stand back.

All forms of beauty are poignant, Japanese beauty particularly so. That lily-white complexion, those mellow eyes, the inimitable shape of the nose, the well-defined contours of the mouth, and the complicated sweetness of the features are enough, by themselves, to eclipse the most perfectly assembled faces.

Then there is her comportment, so stylized that it transforms her into a moving work of art.

Finally, and most importantly, beauty that has resisted so many physical and mental corsets, so many constraints, crushing denials, absurd restrictions, dogmas, heartbreaks, such sadism and asphyxiation, and such conspiracies of silence and humiliation—that sort of beauty is a miracle of heroic survival.

Not that the Japanese woman is a victim; far from it. Among the women on this planet, she hasn’t actually drawn the shortest straw. She has considerable power. I should know.

No, if the Japanese woman is to be admired—and she is—it is because she doesn’t commit suicide. Society conspires against her from her earliest infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: “If you’re not married by the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll have good reason to be ashamed”; “if you laugh, you won’t look dignified”; “if your face betrays your feelings, you’ll look coarse”; “if you mention the existence of a single body-hair, you’re repulsive”; “if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you’re a whore”; “if you enjoy eating, you’re a pig”; “if you take pleasure in sleeping, you’re no better than a cow”; and so on. These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren’t taken so much to heart.

These are the messages that these incongruous dogmas bully into the Japanese woman:

“Do not dare hope for anything beautiful. Do not expect to feel any sort of pleasure, because it will destroy you. Do not hope for love, because you’re not worthy of it. Those who love you will love you for the illusion of you, not for the real you. Do not hope that you will get anything out of life, because each passing year will take something from you. Do not even hope for anything as simple as a peaceful life, because you don’t have a single reason to be at peace.

“Wish for work. There is little hope, given your sex, that you will get far up the ladder, but perhaps you will serve your employer. Working will earn you money, which will give you no pleasure, but might be of some advantage to you—such as when it comes to marriage. Because you should not be so foolish as to suppose that anyone could want you for yourself.

“Apart from that, you can hope to live to a ripe old age, although that should be of little interest to you, and to live without dishonor, which is an end in itself. There ends the list of your legitimate hopes.

“Here begins the list of duties:

“You must be irreproachable, for the simple reason that that is the least you can be. Being irreproachable will have no other reward than being irreproachable, which must be neither a source of pride nor a pleasure.

“Not a moment of your life will be ungoverned by at least one of these duties. For example, even when you are in the bathroom for the humble purpose of relieving your bladder, you are constrained to ensure that no one will hear the trill of your stream. You should therefore flush continuously.

“If even these intimate and insignificant aspects of your existence are subject to commandments, remember what sort of constraints weigh on the truly important ones.

“Don’t eat much, because you have to stay slim, not for the pleasure of seeing people turn to admire you in the street—they won’t—but because it is shameful to be plump.