Ever since I began to commute between central Tokyo and that rural harbor town on the Miura peninsula, I've been thinking about the pros and cons of living in Tokyo. I wonder how writers are seeing it… I suppose that especially young authors, who operate on a still unstable creative foundation, feel the necessity of being based here in the city with all those publishers and editors around. Then there are of course writers who just love life in Tokyo, and naturally those who were born here.
Anyway, if you allow me an irresponsible comment, in my opinion a writer who works all by himself with the simplest array of creation tools, and who can easily send the texts he completed off to wherever they have to go, should be totally free to go and live anywhere in the world. He could live in the Amazonian backland, or doesn't even have to have a fixed address at all (OK, that’s perhaps a bit too irresponsible…) Looking at the TOC of the latest issue with such ideas in mind, I realize that 11 of the 38 contributors are making use of their "freedom to reside outside Tokyo". They're based in Fukuoka, Yamaguchi, Shizuoka, Hyogo, Gunma, France, Osaka, Kyoto (2), Ehime, and the USA.
Dublin-born James Joyce, by the way, ran away to Trieste (Italy) once he was over 20. While teaching English at Berlitz and other schools, he wrote "Dubliners", finished "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" while in Zurich, and authored Finnegans Wake in Paris, before escaping the Nazis back to Zurich where he finally passed away. However, all his works are rooted in Dublin, where he spent his adolescence.
A day in May
I take a Shinkansen to northern Kanto, where I have a brainstorming with author A. He was born and raised in Tokyo, but moved to the countryside around the time when I started shuttling back and forth between Tokyo and Misaki, so we sometimes exchange views on the meaning of "not being in Tokyo." From an editor’s perspective, there’s almost no disadvantage in living far (actually only two hours) away. It’s a little inconvenient that the "bike-bin" motorbike messenger service isn't available there, but I guess that’s about it. Once we meet, we sit down and have a relaxed, extensive talk. To be precise, about ten hours in total, including lunch and a couple of drinks…
Another day in May
I check out Ohtake Shinro’s "Shell & Occupy" exhibition at the Take Ninagawa gallery in Higashi-Azabu. It is quite well known that Tokyo-born Ohtake has his atelier in Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture (getting there from Tokyo takes longer than a flight to Shanghai). Even though his works traveled around the country after the large-scale "Zen-kei" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, somehow it feels like watching the first solo exhibition since "Zen-kei". The news that an exhibition of such significance opened out of the blue at a space the size of a one-room apartment came as a surprise attack. I feel that a painting and a wall alone can make an art happening.
Yet another day in May
I meet author B for lunch in the city. In order to finish his monumental story set in the Tohoku region, where he comes from, he worked for one hundred days without any contact to the editorial office, so that he could retreat into his chamber in Tokyo and accelerate his imagination to the maximum. Those "hundred days" are just over, and when meeting him, it appears to me as if he had been away from this world even though he was in fact right here in Tokyo all the time. Oh, I understand: what this man acquired is a harsh but very productive sort of "free choice of where to live"!
