"Shincho" March '08 issue

When you're doing a monthly magazine, you automatically adopt a monthly rhythm also in private life. During the first nine or ten days of my monthly cycle I usually have time to meet people, read, or watch movies or plays. In the last ten days I get increasingly busy writing, editing and proofreading as we approach the printer’s deadline for the next issue. The period in between has a bit of everything.

There’s also a subliminal annual rhythm. Once every year we're doing the Shincho and Mishima Yukio Awards, each of which requires several months of preparation. As the printers don't work during the holidays in April and December, we have several days less time to put the respective issues together (which means that, first ad foremost, the writers have several days less time to finish their articles).

Now, when you're working for a magazine that is more than one hundred years old, with a bit of exaggeration I'd say that I sometimes seem to feel the mag’s connection and relation to a century of ever-transforming human thinking, on a different level from those monthly and yearly cycles. For example, it happens that an author born in the 1920s responds to a casual request for a short text with a vivid transcription of his memories of World War 2. Or a young writer born in the '80s, whose statements reflect a situation between the demise of the modern and the advent of the Internet age, which obviously puts the screws on the young man or woman. Of course, it also happens that I get knocked down by the power of a text written in the Meiji era, at the dawn of Japanese modernism. The four days covered in the diary below were dominated by my impressions of the rhythms of months, years and centuries.

January 16

Tanaka Shinya "Kireta kagami" (Shincho Publishing, late February '08)

I'm waiting for the results of this year’s Akutagawa Prize together with Tanaka Shinya, who was nominated for the Prize for "Kireta kagami" (serially published in Shinsho). Unfortunately he was not selected this time, but considering his developments in the two years after receiving the Shincho Prize, I'm sure he’s already aiming for his next goal. "Kireta kagami" portrays an old family in a provincial city, whereas the author managed to compress the time flow of an entire century in only 24 hours of the story.

Later I attend the banquet celebrating Kawakami Mieko’s "Chichi to ran" that eventually won the Prize. Where there’s turmoil, you can always find editors like myself… I have an extensive conversation with writer A. even after the end of the party, and we continue our chat at a bar in Shinjuku until just before daybreak.

January 17

I write a text announcing the next issue for our PR magazine and website, and later attend the opening party of Berlin resident Hanayo’s photo exhibition at Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza. I've been following her work ever since being involved in her first photo book, "Hanayome"(1996), and even now her photographs still look so strange that I believe there must be some kind of dwarf sitting in her camera that messes around with everything she photographs. There’s plenty of that devilish feel in "Magma", Hanayo’s newest photo book that is introduced in this exhibition, but at the same time it also seems as if the artist has thrown in additional depth this time. I leave the gallery for the "Nekome" bar in Shinjuku, where I meet artist B. for a brainstorming on a talk event project. Hanayo herself shows up shortly after 2 a.m., and the artist I'm here with has in fact been an old friend who knew Hanayo since the time when she was a geisha in Mukojima. Again, the night is almost over when I arrive at home.

January 18

I meet artist C. in Ginza in the afternoon somewhere in Kagurazaka, and catch Furukawa Hideo’s "recital gig" at Shibuya O-Nest later in the evening. Furukawa’s voice faces competition with the soundtrack of Nijikama Taro’s and Susuki Yasufumi’s electronica, to an extent tha if they turned the volume up just a little bit more, that would render the recital completely inaudible. My brain is working to full capacity distinguishing between words and noises, which turns out to be a thrillingly novel kind of experience.

January 19

This month’s fish is the Spiny Squirrelfish. It’s an extremely beautiful fish with exquisite white flesh, and so rare in the area that even the experienced "Maruichi" owner and other professionals from the local fishing industry aren't able to identify it instantly.

For the first time in a while I can afford to go to sleep without setting my alarm clock. In the evening I catch Nibroll’s dance piece "Romeo OR Juliet" at Setagaya Public Theatre. It’s only the third time that I see Nibroll, so I'm not really in the position to talk about them in public. What I can say is that I somehow couldn't warm to the company the first two times, but this time’s performance - the antagonism between imagery and dance in the first half in particular - is absolutely compelling and elevating. Watching the images of countless insects that closed the show makes me think of Azuma Hiroki’s "Animalizing Postmodernity", which in this case could nicely be modified into "Insectizing Postmodernity". At the venue I meet Chelfitsch leader Okada Toshiki and exchange a few thoughts on the piece with him, before returning - with a brief stopover at my Kagurazaka office - to my house in Misaki.