April 1
It’s been five years now since I started working as an editor for an art and literature magazine. An experienced writer gave me an advice the other day, saying that I should "do something so radical that it might cost [me my] job, and carefully devote [myself] to editing good books." Now that I'm in my sixth year and look back, I realize that I've never done something really "radical", nor "devoted myself carefully" enough to my work. I'm so shocked that I lock myself up in my office in the middle of the night and read the latest edition of the revived "Waseda Bungaku" magazine. In an interview, critic Hasumi Shigehiko comments that "The prosaic style of novels as 'physical, fictional texts made of finite letter symbols' is just as new an invention as Foucault’s 'human', but most […] humans still don't face the unruliness of this recent invention seriously enough." This has a quite stimulating effect on me and gives me some new energy.
April 5
Even though I just arrived here at my house in Misaki with the last train last night, I turn on my heels and go back to Tokyo, to catch a recital event with Furui Yoshikichi, Saeki Kazumi and Kawakami Mieko at the bar "Fuka" in Shinjuku. While such events are usually followed by late-night parties, I intend to take the last train again and return to Misaki. But there are so many things I want to talk about, and so many people I want to talk to, that it’s already after five in the morning when I take a look at my watch. Saeki, the Kodansha editors and myself are the last to leave the bar at dawn.
April 6
A little later than planned, I'm on my way back to Misaki. On the train I read "Nakahara Masaya’s Daily Work Report 2004-2007" (boid). "February 14, 2006. Someone from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) comes and tells me that they cut off my electricity if I don't pay last December’s bill. I'm honest and tell them that I don't have enough money, and a little later, my electric power supply is all cut off. Well, that’s just natural so I don't complain. I guess I'll have to spend some time in the dark and think about what to do. Maybe I'll even come up with something revolutionary that I'd never come up with under normal circumstances…" Another piece of writing that wondrously animates me. Once in Misaki, I spend the rest of the day working on manuscripts while thinking about the brilliance of Nakahara’s "revolutionary" discoveries.
April 7
The latest edition of Kodansha’s "Gunzo" magazine features the results of this year’s Oe Kenzaburo Prize. This second award goes to Chelfitsch leader Okada Toshiki, whose name should sound familiar to REALTOKYO readers, for his first collection of novels, titled "Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari" ("The end of our special time"). It was originally published by "Shincho", which makes me especially happy. Imagining that Oe read about 120 (!) books that were published in 2007, and eventually chose Okada’s, really moves me, but at the same time this result also reflects an astonishing awareness of an emergent crisis that threatens the state of literature. "I have been sensing foreboding signs in novels published as literary books based on art and literature magazines (as it is done in this country in order to maintain the standard of literature) these days. The fundamental causes of this lie in the brutally honest recognition in journalism that literary books don't sell, and at the same time in the deformation created by million-selling mobile novels (the way of selling which alone is palpably distorted). […] Young authors are affected by this, consciously or unconsciously. If this trend continues for another five years, that would be the death of modern/contemporary literature, which emerged in Japan about 120 years ago, and restarted 60 years ago." The above-mentioned statement from Hasumi and Oe’s understanding are in my view not contradicting, but they both express compellingly actual problems. This is surely one of the situations that require "something revolutionary one would never come up with under normal circumstances."