On Sunday, March 3^rd, I was fortunate to be able to attend the final day of the first Tokyo International Literary Festival (東京国際文芸フェス), which was held at Waseda University (早稲田大学).  The festival featured several well-known writers from outside Japan – including Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Nobel laureate JM Coetzee – as well as several prominent Japanese writers such as Risa Wataya (綿谷りさ), Mieko Kawakami  (川上未映子) and Hideo Furukawa (古川日出男).

Below are some notes on the three sessions I attended:

1) Writing Home Away from Home – Junot Diaz, David Peace, Hideki Furukawa (古川日出男)

This session focused on the writers’ various relationships to Tokyo and how this relationship affects (or would affect, in the case of Diaz, I believe) the way they write about the city.  This excellent topic allowed the writers to discuss a variety of issues, including:

• the way we can never fully know a city; we can only understand it in pieces, never as a whole.   A frustrating, fascinating experience.
• Diaz’s experience of foreigners living in Japan was interesting, when he said that gaijin opinions about Japan/the Japanese tend to reveal more about gaijin than about Japan/the Japanese.  This is generally true of projection onto the Other (think about European portrayals of Africans).
• writing about your home country can be easier when you’re not there (Peace).
• Furukawa’s work seems to focus a lot on horror and supernatural portrayals of Tokyo.  His performance of his work was extremely intense and varied a lot in pace, tone and volume.  Apparently he records his own audio-books.  Pretty cool reading!
• It was interesting how Peace’s own career in some sense mirrors my own.  He wrote four books (I think?) about the place where he grow up before he began to write about Japan, at which point he had already been here a very long time.  I also thought what he said about wanting to know Tokyo’s history so that he can teach his children about it was quite moving, because it’s the city, after all, where they grew up.  Lastly, I thought what he said about Tokyo not being Paris or Rome or London or any of the other open-air history museums of Europe but instead being a place where discovery is rewarded (i.e. hidden gems) was absolutely spot-on.

2) Border Crossings—Literal, Cultural, and in Translation – Natsuki Ikezawa (池澤夏樹), Nicole Krauss, John Freeman, Akihito Nakanishi (中西玲人)

To be honest, in comparison with the first intriguing topic, this session felt a bit vaguely focused.  Nonetheless, few interesting points arose:

• the idea of representation (mainly Nakanishi and Freeman, but also the other two speakers) – literature is always an imperfect representation of reality but the imperfections are what is most interesting (true with visual art too).  If it was perfect, what would we say about it!  A fairly basic idea, but conveyed in a clear and meaningful way.
• the author vs. the writer – this one was all Krauss.  She said she thinks the reader interacts with the “author” (i.e. the all-knowing, all-seeing creator of the text) when reading a novel than a festival attendee with a “writer” (i.e. someone sitting on a stage trying their best to answer on-the-spot questions).
• Ikezawa talked about his fascination with Ryszard Kapuściński’s depictions of Africa in comparison with those of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, two writers I admire very much.

3) Closing Reading – JM Coetzee

Hearing JM Coetzee read from his novel The Childhood of Jesus was one of those great experiences that I can hardly believe I experienced.  I went into the reading with no real previous knowledge of Coetzee or his work, which left less chance of one of those “this person is famous so they must have been good” experiences.  His prose was witty, immediate and linguistically stunning.  Not just any writer can get the words consubstantiation and poo into the same paragraph and make it all sound natural.

Three things Coetzee’s reading made me ponder:

1) Sound.  Keep reading your work aloud, again and again and again.  Read it as if you are performing in front of an audience.

2) Using Big Words.  Weaving unusual English words such as consubstantiation naturalistically into a novel requires similar tactics used to incorporate non-English words.  Let the meaning unfold through dialogue or contextual information, rather than direct authorial intrusion/explanaion/definition.

3) Talent.  A lot of people in the world play soccer.  They can’t all be Lionel Messi.  A lot of people in the world write.  They can’t all be JM Coetzee.  Just accept it and keep kicking/scribbling.

The translator’s remarks were very interesting.  She said Coetzee’s work was very difficult to translate for many reasons, including the fact that a lot of Spanish appears in The Childhood of Jesus.  Not easy to translate Spanish inside an English text into Japanese! Some of the jokes were also difficult to translate.  One joke in particular used the words “pig meat” instead of pork in a humourous way.  In Japanese, pork is simply written as 豚肉 (“pig meat”), so the humour was lost.

Shosuke Tanihara, who narrated the Japanese translation alongside Coetzee’s reading, was also superb.