I’ve been back in Japan for a week now. I’m completely back into the swing of Japanese life. I’ve lost the indescribable floating sensation I had during the journey, and with a strong grounding in reality, I’m back to life as usual. It is said that planes have the biggest chance of crashing during take-off and landing. When people say they got off to a bumpy start, or that they had a rough landing, or something along those lines, these remarks stick with me. But this time around, not only did I have a turbulent patch both before and after my business trip abroad, it was also unbelievably hectic throughout my trip to The Hague.

In Japan, we try to bring as much closure as possible at the end of the year. We call this “nenmatsu shinkou” (lit: deadlines before the year’s end). I wonder if people elsewhere also have this. Around New Year’s, all the companies shut down, and because the printing presses are closed, work picks up speed even more than usual. This means that writers are faced with rush deadlines. Even though Japanese employees are workaholics, they usually take their free days around New Year’s. In a nutshell, this means that all writers in Japan are chased by their nenmatsu shinkou deadlines and struggle to meet them. It’s the same story for me now. I thought I would be free from words while I was in The Hague, but because I had to write 3 columns, I was constantly preoccupied with them. Before and after returning to Japan, it was as if I was being hunted by words; my head and my computer screen were crowded with them. I would of course be concerned if my screen were a blank slate, but I am really getting sick of this life where words spread everywhere like a disease.

My morning begins with my daughter calling “wake uuup!”. While feeding her, giving her juice and getting her ready to go, I listen to the clumsy words she babbles in her child’s voice. I understand what she is saying and respond to her demands. After leaving her at the day-care centre, I switch on my computer and completely submerge in a sea of words. When I return from this sea of words, I connect my computer with the Internet, check my work e-mail and do some light household chores. I read the material from my book, allow my eyes to pass over the manuscript and somehow I surrender to the words. When I am in a café and someone next to me says something interesting, or when I encounter something of interest, I jot it down. When I pick up my daughter and ask her “what did you do today?” and when my husband, who is an editor, comes home, almost automatically we start talking about literature. The world is filled with words. Sometimes I would like to spend some time in a shack on a tropical island, without television, computer, magazines, books or any such things, even though I know full well that I too am a criminal, guilty of bringing words into the world. At this point in my life I can only be free of words when I’m doing some housekeeping, for example, or taking a bath. When I see people craving for words, I have the feeling that they are possessed by something. I want to spend my time in peace. I used to think that back when my daughter constantly cried and screamed, but now she’s bigger and uses words all the time, I cannot help this thought from growing even stronger.

When I go home after having talked to people all day, I want to spend some time in silence at home. Sometimes when I come home worn out from a day of chattering, I want to watch TV, read a book and talk with my family. I don’t know if this is because we live in a world full of words, but there is a certain part of people that can only be healed by words. And there are other things that make me feel better, such as sweetly stroking my head, getting a massage, or sex – but I am only healed by things such as reading a book, people paying attention to me or a deep conversation. I wonder if people who are composed and shaped by words involuntarily exhibit such traits.

Every day, my daughter drags her picture book along with her everywhere, and she goes on about wanting to read it. She asks “what is that?” about fifty times a day. She wants to use the words she has remembered, and while applying them in every situation, she soaks up even more words. When we were in The Hague, her vocabulary suddenly expanded. So far, whenever we’ve gone abroad, my daughter always makes tremendous leaps in her Japanese. I think this is due to some kind of mechanism in which the inability to understand words is equated to the collapse of your ‘self’. Searching for words entails dependence on language. When you see your own likeness, determined by words, it is a beautiful but vulnerable creature, revealing itself as love for humanity. I think I’ll keep on using words, abusing them, and telling stories with them after all.

Cerebellum: Hey chief, what’s up? You seem pensive.

Cerebrum: Well, I’m having a ball here, but you know me…

Cerebellum: Oh boy, now don’t start that again. You really just don’t know how to have a good time, do you? You’ve always got a bone to pick.

Cerebrum: Watch it buster! I don’t have to answer to you – you know better than that, don’t you now?

Cerebellum: Come on, chief. Shoot! What’s eating you? You know I’m always here for you. You do the philosophy bit, I make sure everything’s up and running. So, what’s going on?

Cerebrum: I’m bothered by the whole “event” status of this thing.

Cerebellum: In what way?

Cerebrum: Well, I’m having a grand ol’ time here. I’ve seen a few smashing gigs, which I’d never have heard of otherwise. But I have the feeling that such events run the risk of making the frame more important than what is being presented in the first place – the image itself, as it were. Just a moment ago, during a concert, everyone in the first row was recording the show – they only saw the concert through their mobile phones. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly common, isn’t it? Art as an “event”. We’ll only show up if it’s packaged properly. Primarily, we’ll only buy the book if the cover, the author’s picture, and his or her biography appeal to us – and then, as one among many other factors, if the story and style are up to par. Comics are now dubbed “graphic novels”, although nobody can tell me just what this means – it just sounds way cooler.

Cerebellum: Such is life, chief. Like it or not, we react to superficial sensations. And we delve in deeper afterwards.

Cerebrum: Could be, junior. But I have the feeling that nobody even bothers to go the extra mile anymore. The event commemorates the short-term memory. Events mark the crisis of permanence. To put it in Walter Benjamin’s terms: nowadays we are left with mere sensations. We no longer get the full experience. And to top it off – with books, for example – not only is there the danger that the whole rigmarole surrounding them would overshadow their content but what about texts that are not suitable for being paraded in the context of a sexy event? As you well know, the books that I appreciate most are the very ones that seem unappealing and tedious at first glance. Musil, Proust, and – since this is the Netherlands – much of Bordewijk.

Cerebellum: Chief, you are such a wet blanket when it comes to this.

Cerebrum: Humphf, and off goes junior again with his incorrigible optimism. Dishing up “life goes on” and such platitudes…

Cerebellum: Whatever, turnabout is fair play. You said yourself that works or artists which you would never have otherwise noticed can suddenly be illuminated by such a frame, as you’d call it. Furthermore, quality will always shine through in the end anyhow, wouldn’t you agree?

Cerebrum: Musicians such as Harry Nilsson and Judee Sill, or the writer Hermann Broch – do you know them? No, I thought not. You see, nobody knows them anymore, even though they used to be absolutely brilliant. Anyhow, the very notion that the good guys win in the end etc. is the kind of simplistic thinking typical for the minor brain functions. I do however have a theory, which might just solve things.

Cerebellum: Come on then, the suspense is killing me.

Cerebrum: Well then, we cannot block the increasing tendency to react to direct input. You cannot and neither can I…

Cerebellum: Pshaw, you and your sense of humour.

Cerebrum: But as soon as the event becomes common, that which thus far could not be captured in a framework will gain uncommon interest. Then the frame itself becomes the image and vice versa. Events celebrate the permanently new. Once everything becomes new, nothing is new. On the contrary, in this instant, there would be a sudden reversal, in which the complex, the tedious, seem unrivalled in their attraction. Rich experience backfires and becomes sensational.

Cerebellum: Chief, now I think you’ve really blown a fuse. As far as I’m concerned, I far preferred the attraction of Monsters of Folk and the good-looking Conor Oberst. What do you think?

Cerebrum: Do I actually have a choice in the matter, junior? The legwork is your jurisdiction. So you just go right ahead and do your thing. I’ll give it some more thought…

My daughter, who has usually been going to bed at 6pm and waking up in the middle of the night at 3am, seemed to sense that I was planning to go out, because she just wouldn’t fall asleep. In the end, I left her screaming and crying with my husband. It was around 9pm when I left for the festival building. The wind was pleasant and I went from the hotel to the building. On the way I sent an email to my editor in Tokyo from my cell phone. Because there’s a daily deadline for the Chronicles columns, I wasn’t making any progress with the work I’d dragged along from Japan.

Something you hardly ever find on foreign books, but is commonplace for Japanese books, is an ‘obi’, a title strip wrapped around the book. An obi covers approximately the bottom quarter of a book and is printed with an eye catcher, a quote, or a reference to the novel. Generally, the editor decides on the text for an obi, but for a number of reasons, I had to think up the text on the obi for my next book myself. As I was walking, I typed the text for the obi, which was already a few days overdue, and this distraction caused me to trip occasionally on the cobblestone pavement.

Furthermore, the deadline for the title of a series of novels, which I’ll start next month, has already passed. I always think of the title after I’m all done writing, meaning that I’ve developed the habit of postponing this concern until the very last moment. Once again, I hadn’t been able to come up with a good title, even though I’d finished the first version. In order to hand in the title on time, before Tuesday morning, the least I could do is send it Monday evening Japanese time. Frantically wondering about what to do, I was still stumped, and the more impatient I became, the more my thoughts reached an impasse.

Once I’d reached the building, my head cleared again. After talking to a few people, some who I knew, and some whom I didn‘t, I visited a few of the festival spaces. First I looked at the things I wouldn’t be able to see in Japan, and once I’d had a fair dose of that, I wandered around for a bit.

I once heard the following story. When Japanese people go on a trip and don’t take pictures of tourist attractions, they believe there is no remaining proof to show that they had actually been there. They take pictures with all the famous spots listed in the guides as a backdrop, allowing them to return home satisfied. For the Japanese, travel takes work, meaning that they are preoccupied with documenting themselves at tourist attractions. Hence Japanese people cannot enjoy travel. This is something similar. Maybe I’m a bit obsessed with this story, because I often wander about aimlessly.

When my legs finally stopped walking, it was already past 11pm. It was a big building. I was just in time for the start of a band that launched into their set singing intensely. As I was on the balcony, I felt quite disappointed. By the time the second song started I still didn’t think much of it and I started looking around to find the exit. By the time the third song started, I thought it wasn’t so bad after all. The fourth one started, and I thought I would buy their CD when I got back home. Then came the fifth song and I listened to the constantly rising melody, and from the innermost part of my body, a feeling of calm enveloped me. Slowly, I started to relax, but at the same time, I seemed to turn rigid. As these thoughts passed through me I realized that I had been saved by music once again.

Four years ago, music saved me. I could not escape a sense of isolation and mistrust of the world, not even with medication and talking to a shrink, no matter how much I cried and how many words of comfort were spoken to me. But when I heard a certain CD, it was if I could let everything go at once and calm down. I listened to that CD and even collected all the band’s CDs. Before I knew it, I was released.

I was saved once again, in another country listening to songs by bands unknown to me. Even though I did not realise that I was bound by something − no, by someone − I was freed, saved. Possessed by my work and the care for my daughter, wandering around the festival where I didn’t want to miss anything − I just couldn’t remember exactly what I wanted to do.

Mr. Andriessen is walking his golden retriever Spot down the Lange Houtstraat. The yellow-orange light of the street lanterns twinkles through the black trees. Fog lingers in the air. Sporadic honking, laughter from the pubs. Spot hunkers down to do his business.

Meanwhile

Annie Clark, who goes by the name of St. Vincent, is playing a riff on her electric guitar. She presses a pedal with her right foot, the riff is looped. She starts singing along and launches the pre-recorded organ sample with her free hand, and as it swells into a crescendo, she flips on the drum computer. The song emanates a dreamy mood. The guitar sounds loud, and Clark’s voice is powerful, but the harmonies and the sound of the organ are as soft as cotton candy.

Meanwhile

a few hundred kilometres away is Waterloo. The friction of the air masses against the balcony of a panoramic terrace looming over one of the most important historical European battle stages produces a whistling sound. A robin pops up its head and then tucks it back into its feathers. During the day, hundreds of tourists’ shoes have ground the bones of the French and Prussian soldiers a few millimetres deeper into the soil.

Meanwhile

the so-called Girl with the Pearl Earring stares into the darkness of room 16 in the Mauritshuis, with slightly parted lips, looking at Delft’s church tower in the painting opposite her, which was painted by the same hand as her creator. Every three seconds a red lamp flashes on the ceiling.

Meanwhile

I try to recall a term coined by the contemporary American author John Barth – I suspect cosmopis would be the word, but could this be right? It refers to the state of total paralysis when confronted with a large number of possibilities, in shorthand, pathological indecisiveness. After St. Vincent’s next song in Waterloo, I could leave for God Help the Girl in the Buchanan, or the Low Anthem in the Royal, or outside onto the Houtstraat, or stay put and keep on listening to St. Vincent, who strangely reminds me of an acquaintance Céline. Is it possible that Céline has an American twin who she never told me about? Or perhaps it is Céline herself, leading a double life? I try to distract myself from these immature musings by continuing to try and recall if Barth’s term was actually cosmopis or cosmosis.

Meanwhile

The 18-year old Sara van den Berg is standing aimlessly in an altered chambermaid’s outfit (short pink mini-dress, a skewed pink hat) as part of the so-called Book ‘n’ Bar in the foyer of the Royal Theatre. The marketing department at Paagman bookstore had the bright idea to present their goods in an ‘unusual’ manner at the Crossing Border Festival – somehow sexy – which lead to the choice of this particular outfit, that Sara van den Berg had to wear, along side three other promotion hostesses this evening. From a tray dangling from her shoulders, she goes about selling her books. During the performances there is hardly anyone in the foyer. Sara van den Berg is not convinced that it was such a good idea to have accepted this advertising job, which, according to feminist standards, places her in such a compromising position.

Meanwhile

Spot has done his business. Happily wagging his tail, he follows his owner, who during the nearly endless time of waiting has continued walking a few steps ahead.

20 november 2009, 21:02

In Japan I do not write until I have decided to. I think about what I want to write, about what I can write, about what I should write. I devise a plot; only then do I start writing. Before I actually get started, I stare at my computer, at the sky, at my feet, or I make notes, I scribble memos. When asked to write an essay in Japan, the deadline is usually a month later. For a short story the margin is two or three months and for a series, or a new piece of writing, you normally get over a year. All this to say: writing this series of columns is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.I was surprised when I was asked to write a column three days in a row, but I thought somehow I’d manage. But when I really tried to get started, I felt a pang of anxiety that I would not be able to make it.The deadline for the column was today at 5pm. It is now 7:30pm. I am doing my very best, but writing columns is such a battle with myself right now – and with my screaming and crying daughter. I am unable to write when she is running around the room; I thought I’d be able to write once I’d tucked her in for the night, but then she roamed around the bed for over an hour. There was no other option than to ask my husband to watch her for a while and move to the lobby to write there. After about 20 minutes, however, my husband showed up downstairs with the baby in the stroller. She just keeps on crying and screaming, he said. Finally, I am now writing while ignoring my daughter, who is right over there, perched in my husband’s arms, and calling out to me: “Mommy, come back!”. It was a mistake to bring my daughter to this festival in the first place. In Japan it’s very hectic to combine both the care for my daughter and my work, but during a trip there is nobody else to lend a hand. This is the first time that I have been forced to combine my work and the care for my daughter is this particular way. Because I am bound to my daughter’s sleep cycle, which has her going to bed at six in the evening and waking up at 3, I am exhausted and on the verge of vomiting. Nevertheless, when I am done writing this column and putting my girl to bed, I will go to the festival as agreed. When I return to my room, I’ll pack up my things, take off my make-up and return to bed. But even then, my little girl will wake me up at three in the morning.It may sound as if I’m only complaining, but I do get the sense that The Hague is a terrific city. Yesterday, I took it easy because of my lack of sleep, which meant that I didn’t get to see any live acts. I still thought the atmosphere at the festival was relaxed and comfortable. Well, let me just tuck my little girl into bed, and off to the festival it is then.

After a few days, it is silent. When it is too quiet, my ears seem to feel odd. But I think that after an hour the silence will pass and noise will define my surroundings. I am desperately tired. And desperately miserable. A few minutes ago I screamed and kicked a chair. The room stinks because I ate from McDonald’s last night. The room is a hopeless mess and the dirty laundry is piling up. There are five glasses of orange juice, each of them left untouched; three opened cans of beer; and potatoes spilt across the floor. The entire room is a wreck, but I am aware that trying do something about it would only aggravate things. All alone in the silent room, I stare at a potato that fell on the ground, and I understand that the it isn’t actually a potato, but something made in the shape of a potato. Just as I said that I somehow pity the maggot, which looks like a potato even though it shouldn’t, the listless maggot divided up into a million maggots. Lying on the bed, I look at the transformation from potato to maggot, at the maggots that slowly but surely start to creep on the bed, how their bodies swell surprisingly quickly, and bit by bit they gnaw away at this body. Out of my eyes, my mouth, my nose, my genitals; life disappears from my maggot-coated body which is like a corpse. Before my eyes I can see a large maggot. As if ridiculing me, the maggot looks at me as it slithers by. Dancing maggots, slimy maggots, meandering maggots, bursting maggots, cute maggots, maggots that are suffering from the cold. Slowly I get attached to them. I develop a kind of affection for them.  I understand that the maggots which are slowly spreading through my body are being absorbed inside me. I will be in unison with the maggots. Slowly my feelings for the maggots shift from affection to dependence; the thought that I would not be able to live without the maggots even crosses my mind. Perhaps the maggots started off by crawling out of this body and imitating the potato. Perhaps this body and the maggots were always already one. But if the maggots have left this body, then it is something that is rotting. There are still a few potatoes on the ground. When I look at them for a while, I wonder if they are also maggots. And while I’m watching them, the fork that I used to eat my salad catches my eye. The plastic fork is dirty; there is something red-white on it. The maggots are entirely absorbed in my body; they lose their shape and merge seamlessly with my flesh. I think this has completed me. The maggots convene in my damaged self, reuniting me with my original self. When I leap up, I reach out my hand and pick up the fork from the floor. At that moment something fell out of my eye; I stuck the fork into the round maggot and once again I screamed.

My name is Bunny Steiff, from the Steiff toy factory. I don’t know how much time I have before I disintegrate or get eaten by fish, regardless of whether the ink will adhere to the piece of cardboard I’m writing on, or whether my sentences will be intelligible. Or even if this message will ever be found… For the sake of clarity, however, let me start at the beginning and tell you how I ended up in this predicament. I first saw the light of hall E in Steiff’s toy factory in Giengen on 22 August 2009. My backside was stuffed by hand with wool and plush. My arms, legs, and finally my head, were hand-sewn with stitches, which wasn’t painful. I measured 20 x 12 cm (incl. ears). I was ready to roll. But to make sure that I could officially be called a Steiff fluffy bunny, I had to undergo the infamous Steiff test as well. Only they could turn a cuddly toy into a Steiff. My coat of alpaca, mohair and plush was subjected to the Steiff fire test; Steiff employees pushed their thumbs into my glass bead eyes and flung me to the ground me with all their might, just to be sure that I could withstand the daily toil of small children in the long run. I passed the test with flying colours and got that which all stuffed animals desire: a golden button in my long, pointed rabbit’s ear with my creator’s logo, and that one sentence which means everything to us fluffies: “For children, only the best will do”.

Together with more than 100 fluffy fellows, I was later brought by truck to the place that we cuddly animals know as purgatory: toy shops. And how long we sometimes have to sit on those shelves! And how uncertain our lives are! How will the child who gets us as a gift treat us? Because that is what we are: gifts. We bring happiness and joy. Thankfully, Steiff has ensured that, as a company, their creations are not available from those distasteful glass machines on damp platforms or in shopping centre windows where strong-armed young folk and drunkards can fish through haphazardly arranged boxes of sweets, cuddly toys or gold rings. To make a long story short: I was destined to end up in Munich airport’s souvenir department, and it was not a child who wrapped me in his arms with a delighted grin, but a more grown-up writer, who purchased me on a sentimental whim perhaps. In the airplane he even held me on his lap, while pouring over a travel guide. He told me about a city near The Hague where the houses are only 30cm high, enabling one to cross the entire world in only a few steps. There are many children there. Perhaps this place, Madurodam, was made especially for toys, I thought, and maybe I’d like to live there someday. Especially when my owner told me that the city was built in 1950 by a couple who had lost their son in a concentration camp, not far from Munich. The whole world should be like Madurodam. An immaculate world. But the houses in Madurodam would only fit us toys (and babies perhaps). The world of humans is full of concentration camps. This impression was confirmed when my owner took me along to an evening event where a Russian and an Italian guy went on and on in English about how greedy people are, and hence how willing to kill each other. I often pity people and I am happy to be a toy bunny — a Steiff toy bunny.

But then, around eleven, after the program, the accident occurred. Due to my owner’s carelessness – having turned melancholic, he was staring into the black pond near the Mauritshuis – I fell out of his bag and rolled across the ground into the water. As I sank irretrievably into the depths, I looked into my owner’s wide-eyed frightened gaze.

I have chosen to spend the few hours I have left before my fur, which is fireproof, but not waterproof, falls to pieces, to write my life story on a bit of cardboard with an old pen lying here at the bottom of the pool. I can already feel how the golden button in my ear is coming undone. Oh, I wish I were in Madurodam now! I [illegible] not remain in the world [illegible] However [here the note abruptly ends].

In Japanese, the first person singular (“I”) has several variants. Women generally use “watashi”, whereas men have three different forms at their disposal: “boku”, “ore” and “watashi”. When addressing one’s superiors, “boku” is the appropriate form. “Ore” is a more familiar word, used with friends, with a girlfriend, or other people you are close to. For official speeches, interviews and public speaking engagements, “watashi” would be the common form. If women call themselves “boku” or “ore”, it indicates sexual deviance; if men identify as “watashi”, there is a homosexual connotation.

My father, who used to be a translator, told me about how he encountered a problem with the first person perspective in Japanese while translating a novel by a young writer. In a nutshell, the story in this case consisted of a monologue given by the protagonist, and throughout the course of the book, you gradually learn that the main character is a girl. This gives quite an unexpected twist to the plot.

Because in Japanese gender is already expressed when speaking in the first person, the use of “boku” for the female character would indicate a desire to be more boyish. This would also unintentionally imply an aversion to her female identity. But if the character would call herself “watashi” from the outset, this would give the impression of an effeminate boy. This would thwart the development of a storyline in which the character who is apparently male, actually turns out to be female. In the end, my father concluded that it is impossible to provide a bona fide translation of the misleading English “I”, because in Japanese, the first person is already an expression of identity.

It is also characteristic of Japanese to omit subject pronouns in a sentence. Of course there are almost no novels without a subject’s perspective, but whether it is written in the first or the third person, an explicit subject is not always necessary, as long as it is implied by the context. On the contrary, if the subject were continually mentioned, such as in the previously mentioned monologue, it would establish a strong self-assertion. This makes it possible to emphasize the subject’s position by employing “watashi”. It is currently common practice for an editor to mark all the superfluous “watashi” with red while proofreading the manuscripts submitted by new writers.

I barely speak English, but when I look at the English translation of my novels, my text, which seems to meander across the page in Japanese, looks so meticulous and coherent. And when I give interviews abroad, I have the feeling that my words sound far more logical and calculated.

Translation is troublesome, and the differences between languages pose an obstacle which cannot easily be circumvented. Even considering my command of Japanese and that I speak and write novels in this language, there is an aspect of translation already involved. Because as soon as you’re in contact with other people and you attempt to communicate, there is inevitably a kind of translation at play: with words, body language, gestures, facial expressions, and even the slightest eye movement, etc.

I try to make myself clear by using words to write a novel. But won’t there be essential differences as soon as these words are conveyed in another language and thereby adopt another form? Even the Japanese do not always understand each other. It is possible, however, for people to understand each other’s feelings even without sharing the same words. During my visit to The Hague, I hope to meet people from other countries who understand both my books and me.