SOFT SKIN
AS IT TURNED out, two days later a guy called from New York to rummage through the drawers of my memory. Of course he wanted to know where an idea like mine had come from. Haruki (Murakami was his last name) confided that his father was from Louisiana, a black soldier stationed in Tokyo whom, unfortunately, he never knew. His mother was working in a big sports equipment store in the center of the city when they met. He had come in to buy a basketball. She followed him through the store because of his smell. The smell of black men drove her crazy. The spices went to her head. She could spend hours with her head tucked under his armpit. But that got on his nerves. He wasn’t a violent man, but he could become irritable.
“People talk a lot about the voice, the eyes, but rarely about smell. Yet it’s so important in the animal world. I went out with black men to try to understand my mother’s obsession. What touched me most was their skin. . Some skins are so soft. Like the skin of a mouse. When I meet a man like that, I literally melt.”
“Any man, or a black man?”
“I don’t look at any other kind of man.”
“So you’re in search of your father.”
“That’s what my mother told me. She thinks that made me into a homosexual. But I know what made me gay: a guy from Harlem, a psychopathic killer with skin as soft as a baby’s. I was the only one who knew what he’d done. I would spend hours caressing him in the darkness of an abandoned house where we hid. The mob and the cops were after him. He trusted no one except his mother and me. He used to say I was his little woman. He had to get mad to get a hard on.”
“Mad at you?”
“Not necessarily… He would fly into a rage against anyone, anything, and he took it out on me. I loved it. He would pull out his gun and tell me he was going to blow my brains out. I didn’t care as long as he fucked me. No wonder: I was in love with him.”
“He could have killed you.”
“Yet he’s the one who ended up dead. When he was killed I was in Harlem, at a friend’s place. I hadn’t seen him in a week. I missed his sweetness. Funny: the guy was violence incarnate, yet all I can remember is the softness of his skin. You can’t have skin that soft if there’s not gentleness elsewhere too. I can tell you it wasn’t always easy. .” He sighed. “I heard a gunshot that night. That was the music of Harlem. That’s what gave life its beat — they tell me it’s changed since then. I knew right away. I said to my friend, That bullet was for Malcolm. My friend bawled me out, he told me I must have been sick if I started naming everyone who was killed in Harlem during the night. He told me to go see a psychologist, the whole thing. I burst into tears and I left. I knew where Malcolm hung out, I went there and found him in a pool of blood. He died like a dog. I cleaned him up and called his father. Then I hid and waited, and I slipped away when the father showed up. I wandered for days and nights through Harlem. I wanted to get myself killed too. I did everything I could, but death wouldn’t touch me… Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because you can’t see me.”
“I can’t see a psychologist.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a fan of Woody Allen — that’s what my friends call me in Japanese. We have the same physique. He has a Japanese body. Try it yourself: take off his head and put a Japanese head on him, and you’ll get a Japanese filmmaker.”
“I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead. Otherwise I’ll just be talking to myself.”
“Your father is black, your mother is Japanese, and only black men attract you…”
“But not the same way as for my mother. My mother was smell. I’m touch. Everything is concentrated in my fingertips. The story of my life is a story of electricity. If the lines don’t light up, there’s nothing I can do. But when they do, I’m a goner. Black skin in the darkness is a foretaste of hell. That skin shines brighter than any other. And some things burn harder than fire.”
“Didn’t you ever think you were black?”
“Never.”
“But your father is black.”
“YesbutI’mmymothernotmyfatherImeanI’mawomannotaman.”
He said that as a single word, without pausing to catch his breath. I heard a sharp sob. Then he gently put down the phone.
KAMIKAZE
IS IT A form of suicide or an act of war? The idea of accepting death in order to kill the greatest number of the enemy. People here have lost sight of that simple but efficient method. The body as a weapon of war. That distance from death is impressive. Guys who announce their death and don’t hide from it. Meanwhile, in the West, we’re always looking for a back alley to escape into. We’re ready to throw ourselves at death’s feet just to be spared. The idea of a last chance is written into our Western genes, and it drives Hollywood screenwriters to unlikely acrobatics in order to get James Bond out of every unbelievable impasse. We’re sure that James Bond will never die, and that’s what gives him such importance in our inner landscape. Over there, heroes are the ones who lust after death. The will to die. I discovered that wonderment around the age of twelve as every night I devoured stories of the Second World War. The kamikazes never tried to leap from the plane at the last minute, like James Bond and his kind. It was the first time I’d learned that death could be that way. Except in voodoo. But in voodoo, death often has a sexual aspect. But here was heroic death. Pure death. The modern being is the one who is killed. Who wants to take his place? That’s been the problem lately between East and West. The conflict between two visions of death. One wants to get as close to death as possible, yet without dying. The other blindly follows the straight line that leads right to the explosion. But he doesn’t intend to go up in flames alone. His death will be used to create more death. The surprise effect is strong. Boom! The shattered body. Ecce homo. The dead body in the West was sacred even before Mary, with exemplary gentleness, received the body of her beloved son. The body is reclaimed, embalmed and perfumed, then placed in a box and buried in the ground. Every precaution is taken to forestall its decomposition. The cemetery too is protected. Inflicting indignities upon a body is on a par with incest: a major taboo. The dead body occupies a quarter of our minds. And death itself fills up the rest. There is so little space left for life. The shattered body, unrecognizable. No further chance for farewells. Everything happens at the moment of the explosion. When we die of a heart attack, the heart carries off the rest of the body with its death. In an explosion, everything goes at once. The entire body dies at the moment of death. But with the stupefying progress of medical science, the brain can die while certain parts of the body remain in perfect shape. If it weren’t for that little short in the brain, some corpses would walk to the cemetery under their own power.
THE PUBLISHER OF STOCKHOLM
I HAVEN’T BEEN sleeping well lately. It isn’t easy to sit in front of your typewriter, doing nothing, when you know that someone on the other side of the world is suffering the same pains you are. In this case, it’s my publisher. He can’t write the book for me, though he’d like to. That would spare him an ulcer. All he can do is wait. I once saw a Kurosawa film that perfectly explained the publisher’s function. It was about the shogun who must not move while the battle is taking place. The arrows whistle past his ears but he says nothing and moves not at all. He sits motionless. Impassive. And so my publisher determines the outcome of the battle of writing through his powerful immobility. I feel his presence most strongly when he doesn’t appear.