Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

That he should wind up in a shop selling electronic goods was inevitable, and of all the astonishing new products he found there, nothing astonished him more than how much smaller things had become. He had had a Sony Walkman for ages, but on sale here — he could hardly believe his eyes — was a Sony Watchman, a tiny, flat television set, not much bigger than a pocket calculator and in Jonas’s eyes as much of a masterpiece as a Renaissance miniature. He just had to have one of these, and it was as he was standing with the box in his hand that he was struck by an irresistible impulse: he would speak to — no, not merely speak to — he would interview Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. Not for television — that would be too complicated — but for a newspaper. ‘It’s probably impossible,’ he said to himself as he stood there eyeing the Sony logo, the best-known trademark in the world after Coca Cola, ‘but I will, I must, do it.’

And thanks to his impressive business card and a few carefully considered words written with a calligraphy pen purchased in the Kyukyodo stationery shop in Ginza on the NRK notepaper which he had had the foresight to bring with him, and thanks, not least, to the fact that Morita chanced to be in Tokyo just then — a stroke of luck to which Jonas Wergeland turned a blind eye — two days later, with a newly acquired dictaphone in his pocket, he was bowed into Morita’s office in Sony’s flamboyant headquarters on Gotenyama Hills in Shinagawa on the south side of the city. Jonas knows that this is a huge scoop, and he has already made a deal with an editor back home in Norway; he can just picture how people’s eyes will pop when they open their Saturday paper and turn to the sensational double-page spread: a Norwegian having an exclusive tête-à-tête with Akio Morita, one of those men whom some would say exercised more power over the lives of ordinary people around the world than any national assembly.

One might well ask what possessed Jonas Wergeland to do this, Professor. Because, even though he did have genuine admiration for the Japanese gentleman across from him, who seemed — perhaps because of his mane of white hair — to be surrounded by a nimbus of wisdom, the deeper reason lay, of course, in that old, niggling suspicion that he was a middle-of-the-roader — something which, so far, his television career, despite all the respect, despite all the attention, tended to suggest. So yet again it was his extraordinary calibre that Jonas Wergeland was endeavouring to summon up, or have confirmed, as he sat there conducting his carefully prepared interview with Akio Morita, an individual who had helped to change the world in which Jonas lived and even shaped the medium from which he earned his living: television. For a second Jonas felt as though he were talking to God, his creator.

Such a thought would surely have been far from the mind of Morita himself, with his steel-rimmed glasses, his white shirt and dark tie, as he sat there describing the history of Sony, from its early beginnings just after the war right up to the present day. ‘Our aim was always to break new ground,’ he said, ‘and we knew that we had to export in order to survive.’ Morita had lived in New York in the sixties and spoke very good English. Jonas was struck by his charming manner, his un-Japanese candour and, not least, the honesty with which he answered questions about management techniques and the difference between the American and the Japanese styles. This is going to look great in print, he thought exultantly as Morita was rounding off with some pearls of wisdom about business management and the world economy. Before he left, and after they had duly posed together for the photographer whom Jonas had hired, he thanked Sony’s founder heartily.

Not until he was in the lift did it occur to Jonas that he had just met the man who had been the ruin of Vebjørn Tandberg and as such was, in a way, the reason why his own little flutter on the stock market had come to such a sorry end.

Some hours later he was sitting in the café at the top of the Akasaka Prince Hotel, an extraordinary half moon-shaped skyscraper designed by Kenzo Tange, the architect responsible for the ultramodern sports stadiums which, as a boy, Jonas had seen in television broadcasts from the 1964 Olympic Games. And it really was like being on the moon. Far below him spread the whole of the centre-less city of Tokyo, looking as though it were floating, was in motion, and in that chaotic mass down there Jonas actually thought he could make out a spiral formation, like a galaxy. On the marble-topped table in front of him lay a postcard he had written to Kristin, a card with a picture of the cherry trees in blossom, because his daughter collected pictures of trees. He had also bought a pretty lacquer casket in which he hoped she would keep her sacred things, as he had once put the puck and the silver brooch in his casket. Jonas returned his attention to the enormous slice of Queen Elizabeth chocolate cake, sat there congratulating himself, hundreds of feet above the ground in a shimmering blue and white room. And then, in the midst of his triumph, while he was sitting there patting himself on the back as it were, an enormous wave of despondency — not to say, nausea — washed over him.

Suddenly it was all so clear — and not simply because he was so high up, with such a stunning panoramic view: he was nothing but a spectator. He could travel halfway around the world, but he would always be a spectator. He was a Norwegian, and as such born to be a spectator. Here, in Tokyo, he had the ghastly feeling that Norway was not represented at all, not as an active participant. No, wait — there were a few products: in one shop he had seen a toothbrush manufactured by Jordan, and if he visited a bookshop he might find a book by Thorbjørn Egner about two little dental demons called Carius and Bactus — as if all Norway had to offer to the Far East — to the whole world, for that matter — was a moralistic injunction to keep one’s teeth clean. While the Japanese had permeated everyday life, even in Norway, with technology, from the cars on the roads to the sounds and images in living rooms, the Norwegian contribution to the world was stuck at the level of goats’ cheese and woollen mittens. Looking at it from here, from the top of the crescent-shaped Akasaka Prince Hotel, in this magnificent Asian amphitheatre, Jonas Wergeland realized that Norway was but a part of an obscure and totally inconsequential periphery.

The blue interior no longer shimmered. Jonas sat there surrounded by marble and mirrors and looked out over Tokyo. ‘It was as if a scream ran through me,’ he said later. The Morita interview was not a triumph. It was a sham. An adolescent fancy, a bit like collecting autographs — or having one’s dream of kissing Brigitte Bardot come true. Jonas could not help thinking of ordinary people who had their pictures taken with celebrities, as if securing themselves lifelong proof that they were not, after all, invisible or insignificant: ‘I interviewed Akio Morita!’ The truth slid over him like an unseen roller of lead: he had never been anything but a walking tape recorder, it seemed that he was forever doomed to copy others, to merely be someone who repeated or reproduced the thoughts and ideas of great people. And although up to now he had proved to be a master copyist, a true virtuoso in his field, he would have given a lot — everything — for the ability to create something with a dash of originality. All at once he felt completely flat, as if he had been just about to reach a finishing line but now found himself back at the start.

It was in this frame of mind that he took the underground further down the line and got off at Tokyo station, a little, redbrick Renaissance castle; from there he made his way across the moat, through the Otemon Gate in the steep wall encircling the Imperial Palace, and into the palace gardens, perhaps because he felt that he had to be out in the open, otherwise he might suffocate. He plodded glumly along paved paths and eventually found himself in the middle of the Imperial Palace’s East Garden where he sank down onto a bench, surrounded by flower beds, small coniferous trees and rhododendron bushes and by office workers armed with handy cardboard cases containing chopsticks and a little marvel of a lunch: minuscule dishes arranged as neatly and delicately as chocolates in a box.