Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas sat gazing at the man-made landscape before him — a miniature mountain, a stream running into a pond, stone lanterns and a bridge — all forming a harmonious whole, true to the Japanese ideal. Across from him stood a brown, wooden tea pavilion with a green copper roof. The sounds of birdsong and running water mingled with the faint rumble of the surrounding city. Jonas took out his dictaphone and removed the cassette, began to pull the tape out, slowly hauled out the cassette’s innards, until the entire tape lay in a tangled mass in his lap. He did the same with the camera film, the pictures of himself and Morita and, without thinking about it, tied a knot in the whole lot. Right next to him a gardener was clipping a bush; it gave off a pungent odour, a mixture of spice and perfume. Beyond the trees Jonas glimpsed one of the white corner towers on the wall, a sight that reminded him of something he had once heard: that a Norwegian marble quarry had supplied stone for the new Imperial Palace here in Tokyo. That was always something, he thought, reminded also of how he and Ørn — on one of the few, but memorable, expeditions instigated by Ørn — had made a tour of Oslo to look at buildings constructed out of Grorud granite. With pride, true pride, they had paced round the foundation walls of the Palace and the Historical Museum and stood outside the University Library, admiring the plinth of the building. Even the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s gravestone had come from Grorud. It was really the same story with the marble from Fauske, the only difference being that this stone now sat outside of Norway.

Feeling a little more cheerful, Jonas lifted his eyes to the soaring buildings of the banks and big corporations in the Marunouchi district on the other side of the wall and the moat; he was dazzled for a moment by the sun reflecting off their façades — and, perhaps, by the thought of the vast power which, like Sony, these multinational concerns represented — companies each one of which boasted a greater turnover than the GNP of some countries in Europe. A new, almost invisible, capitalist power was in the process of conquering the world, including little Norway, without anyone noticing.

The thought of Sony reminded him of something: towards the end of their conversation, Morita himself had brought up the subject of Norway, or more precisely, of Edvard Munch, mentioning something to the effect that he was a great admirer of Munch’s work, particularly The Scream. The Scream , Morita felt, had to be Norway’s answer to the Mona Lisa . Was it for sale? Jonas just smiled, it never occurred to him that Morita might be serious; how could he know that Japanese buyers would later be prepared to shell out nigh-on a billion Norwegian kroner for a single European painting without so much as a murmur. ‘And do you know?’ Morita had said as Jonas was leaving. ‘When I tried out the first Walkman on a friend of mine, I used a tape of Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto. It gave the perfect demonstration.’ Jonas had smiled at this too, taking it as no more than polite chitchat. But now, only hours later, he spied another, very different, dimension to these snippets of conversation.

It is not entirely true that the city of Tokyo has no centre to it. Jonas Wergeland was sitting not far from the new Imperial Palace, built on the ruins of the Tokugawa Shogun’s residence, Edo Castle, which, for the Japanese in ancient times, represented the hub of the world. But now all power had been removed, also from the Emperor. Jonas Wergeland was sitting, in other words, at a centre that was devoid of meaning. And he also felt that he was at the centre of — nothing. As if he had been sucked into Nothingness. All of a sudden he understood why he travelled so much. He was a pilgrim, a man on an eternal quest for a sacred spot. And he had found it here, all the world’s altar, the empty centre. Here, right here, anything could happen.

And perhaps it was this very emptiness, this sense of a vacuum, which generated the extraordinary pressure necessary to prove to Jonas Wergeland that human beings are also polymorphous, that they too can assume different forms, as carbon can crystallize into something other than graphite. Here, in Tokyo, he finally found his other possible, maybe even optimum, form: a form which he had, in a way, possessed for a long time, though he had never acted upon it: his diamond form. Jonas Wergeland felt, in other words, an original idea working its way through, like a shoot rising out of the sludge of run-of-the-mill thinking: no more would he content himself with bringing ideas home, he — the perception made his head spin — was going to be someone who took ideas out, for others to copy. Thanks to what Morita had said about Munch and Grieg, he realized that instead of simply exporting stone — or G-MAN saws for that matter — Norway would have to concentrate much more on producing concepts, yes, fictions, pure products of the imagination. Norway sold energy, after all, so why not sell people’s ideas too? The last time Norway had made a great leap forward it had been on the back of hydroelectric power — now everything was going to depend on brainpower. People were willing to pay for that too, and pay a lot — a powerful man like Akio Morita was proof of that. Jonas Wergeland sits in the middle of Tokyo, surrounded by the clamour of one of the biggest cities in the world, in an empty centre, and has a vision — a few seconds of clear-sightedness which will determine the course of his life for many years to come: the great hope, for him, for Norway, lay in being able to offer knowledge, a different kind of knowledge. Because of all products, knowledge had become the most valuable. The future lay not in hardware — white goods — but in software — grey matter.

Jonas Wergeland knew in a flash what he was going to do, he was going to make a television series about just such people as Munch and Grieg, and he would do it so well that it would become a piece of merchandise, a programme in two senses of the word, and one so attractive that it could be exported. On the threshold of the millennium, the Japanese would not just be asking for marble, or toothbrushes or smoked salmon from Norway; they would be asking, they would be begging for, television programmes about enterprising Norwegian men and women, programmes whose worth rested not on a material but on a symbolic foundation. As with the Grorud granite, this too was all about spreading the local Norwegian bedrock, only in this case on a much larger, international, scale. That was his, Jonas Wergeland’s, future, not creeping around the offices of foreign demigods like a copycat, a spectator, a parrot with a tape recorder in his hand.

He had been in possession of this clue for a while, but only now did he see that the Japanese lacquer casket he had been given by his grandfather when he was a boy was a precursor to the television set. TV too was a black box just waiting to be filled. With symbols. At home he had even placed one of the dragons he had finished, a head covered in carvings, on top of the television, as if he had always known.

Jonas Wergeland got up from the bench. Before he left the gardens he threw, he hurled, the ruined cassette and film into a wastepaper bin, coils of tape on which Akio Morita’s words and image had left invisible traces. In his mind he could already see the Grieg programme, saw how fantastic it would be, he jogged through Tokyo — in a spiral, it seemed to him — back to the hotel, in order to scribble down some of the ideas that were simply pouring out of a brain under pressure.

It is not so surprising, when one considers Jonas Wergeland’s traumatic fear of the dark, that he should have had his momentous vision in the Land of the Rising Sun.