You translate one page of Poe a day, first studying the composition of the stories, then the construction of the sentences, all their hidden secrets, their occluded mysteries; their balance of beauty and truth, of passion and terror, humour and sarcasm, the melancholia of their dreams, the alchemy of their poetry, the precision of these sentences, the concision of these stories, the wonder of all these elements, the effect of this totality; his dedication to craftsmanship, his devotion to his craft. This is what you learn from Poe, this is your education, your apprenticeship.
It is a never-ending apprenticeship, to writing, and to language. For literature is an art of words that depends on language for its expression. And so you work ceaselessly to improve the quality of your language, the quality of your writing. And the quality you seek most in other people’s writings is the same as the one you seek most in your own: clarity. You want to write as clearly as possible. You want to express in precise terms what lies in your mind. And so you try and try to do just that. But when you take up your pen, you can seldom write as clearly or as smoothly as you wish. You always end up writing cluttered sentences. All your effort (if you can truly call it that) goes into the clarity of your art.
Yet you know the novel is the least artistic of all the literary genres. The only one that deserves the name of art is poetry. The novel is included in literature only for the sake of the poetry in it. In any other respect, the novel differs little from biography or history. For you, novelists are biographers or historians, relating themselves to the human life of a given age and of a given country. In Japan, the proof of this truth is in the works of the Lady Murasaki and Ihara Saikaku. But the greatest novelists are also always poets, yet always, already impure poets, still obligated to biography, or to history, always, already divided and torn, always, already torn in two; historian and poet, poet and historian.
And so you keep going back, back to the tales, the tales of the past, the tales Aunt Fuki told you, from Uji Shūi Monogatari, from Konjaku Monogatari, going back to the poetry of Man’yōshū, to the language of Hōjōki, always going back, back to the past, long, long ago, mukashi, mukashi …
For suppose you have a particular theme and you want to turn it into a story: in order to express it as powerfully and as artistically as possible, then you need some extraordinary and memorable incident. But the more extraordinary and memorable you imagine it to be, then the harder it is to describe such an incident convincingly if you set it in present-day Japan, for then it seems unnatural, and then the theme is left by the wayside, and then all is lost. But if it is difficult to set an extraordinary incident in contemporary Japan, then the solution is simple: make the incident happen in some remote past (or in the far future), or in a country other than Japan, or both. Then again, if you simply begin with ‘Once upon a time’, and then let the history go at that, then you have failed, too; you have to establish a particular historical time and setting, and then introduce and include some of the social background and conditions of that time, thus making the story seem natural and plausible, thus holding the attention of the reader, the hand of the reader, taking them back, back to the past, making them see the past, making them feel the past, making them live, yes, live the past again, anew …
Yes, from your desk, pen in hand, you will resurrect the stories of the past, the tales once told, lifting the veil, you will raise the dead, raise the dead, lifting the veil, tearing the veil, the veil in two …
Mukashi, mukashi, you are standing under a gate, the Akamon Gate at the University of Tokyo, standing under the gate, watching the rain fall, the rain falling now, the rain falling then, thinking of another gate, a different gate, in another city, a different city, in another time, a different time: the Rashōmon Gate in Kyoto, the grand city gate which once stood at the southern entrance to Suzaku Avenue; now no trace remains, not even a foundation stone. But you know this gate, you have read of this gate in the Konjaku Monogatari, and so you see this gate …
Long, long ago, a man came up from Settsu Province to the capital in order to steal. Since it was still daylight when he arrived, he hid out under the Rashōmon Gate …
In your mind, you see this gate, this once-great gate, as though you are seeing a painting, a moving, living, breathing painting; the gate abandoned and ruined, beneath a sky thick with crows, cawing and circling, a home for badgers and for foxes, standing in the twilight, the twilight now, the twilight then …
At this hour it was still bustling with people, and the man waited patiently under the gate for the city to quieten down. Then the man heard a large group approaching the gate …
‘Ryūnosuke,’ says your friend. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. But I have good news: we will have the place to ourselves …’
Your friend is a student in the Medical School of the University of Tokyo. Now he leads you to the building, he guides you up the stairs, he leads you down a corridor
