Fear and disgust under the rising sun: "Japan has no hope, it is a country for grandparents"

• NOA DE LA TORRE

  @ndelatower

  Valence

Updated Thursday,30march2023-00:11

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Haruki Murakami, the eternal contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, confessed that reading it for the first time gave him "pure astonishment". The Economist has dubbed her "Japan's new literary star," The New York Times elevated her to "feminist icon" after her international bestseller Breasts and Eggs and her novel Heaven was nominated for a Booker Prize in 2022. But Mieko Kawakami (Osaka, 1976) shakes off the labels.

The first: "I'm a little afraid that they say I'm the new representative of Japanese literature because I'm not." The second: "I don't like to be pigeonholed as a feminist writer because I don't like to be put in a category" ("I make human literature," she says). And, certainly, hers is an unclassifiable trajectory, which defies any conventionalism and moves away from what would be expected of an author who made her literary debut as a poet back in 2006.

Because Kawakami is a writer, but also a singer, and before she stood behind the counter of an appliance store and the bar of a bar.

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"My story is probably unusual," he admits with a laugh and, seriously, asks: "In Spain are the writers all university students?" She has always been struck by what her colleagues in the United States tell her, where it seems that one can hardly get off the beaten path: "They go to a writing course at the university, they are looking for an agent ... If not, it's very complicated to be a writer. Of course, it is a profession that the poor cannot aspire to."

And it is said by those who, on top of that, compare their creative process with something as childish, sticky and delicious to the point of sugar cotton. She composes lyrics (with or without music) spinning the rod. "I pick up a subject, ideas come to me, I think about the scenes... And that's getting big and swelling, taking shape like cotton candy."

We interviewed Kawakami by Zoom on the occasion of the publication in Spain of his novel Heaven (Seix Barral), a heartbreaking story of bullying seen through the eyes of his two victims: two teenagers who discover themselves as friends by sharing the pain and questions about the violence of their peers. Kawakami sugar turned out not to be sweet.

He declares himself a fan of Murakami: "Although we have been around for about 30 years, the important thing I learned from him, but I'm trying to do something different." His style, in fact, plays little or nothing with the surrealism of the renowned Japanese writer. Theirs is about serving reality raw (unsweetened, of course). "My intention is not to express what Japan is but to convey the essence of the human being. And the loneliness of life is what we share around the world."

Like the one that unites these two students in Heaven, for whom friendship is summed up in cleaning up together their own blood spilled in the gym to please their bullies. After the blows, you have to scrub the floor to erase the trace of the crime, to hide that one of the two have been kicked in the head as if it were a ball. That is his loneliness.

Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami.OSAMU YOKONAMI

The protagonist victim of humiliation lives it like this: "Probably those tears were because we had nowhere to go and we could only live in that world in that way. They were tears caused by the real fact that there was no other world to choose from. They were tears for everything, for absolutely everything that existed."

For Kawakami, "where there is a very strong light there can be shadows as well." "It's an important thing in my stories: if you want to write about light, you need shadows, and if you want to write about shadows, you need light." In Heaven, friendship and violence are inseparable from each other. Violence makes friends: between those who suffer it and among those who use it.

The author reflects on why it is so widespread among young people. "In the case of Japan, I think it has to do with desperation. Japan is a rich country but has no hope. Patriarchy is a disaster, there is too much inequality and young people are lost. They don't know how they have to live. Some are dedicated to stealing and perhaps consider it a kind of revolution. They're doing a bit of Robin Hood. That's how far we've come."

There is a passage in the book that drew special attention in his country: the dialogue between the victim and one of his executioners, in which the latter explains his own reasons for being one. "It doesn't make sense. But what's wrong with it not having it? If that's what is good." The senselessness of violence is what gives meaning to violence. According to the author, "the bully talks about violence as if it were his hobby; It's unfair, but it's reality."

The search for that meaning is what devours inside those who do not understand why cruelty is cruel to it. For her friend, the other victim of bullying, there is no other explanation than the divine one: "There must be a god who sees absolutely everything and who, in the end, gives meaning to everything we have suffered, to everything we have endured." Light is darkness.

Kawakami chooses this young woman, Kojima, to shape another of the ideas that fly over his work: the pressure on the female body. In the case of the adolescent victim of abuse, it is she who chooses to stop eating as a way of being and respond to a world that does not understand her. Again, the author emphasizes that it is a topic with which her readers around the world feel identified. Now, she points an accusing finger at her own country: "Feminism in Japan is something totally alien to a part of society."

"Politicians are still men. The economy is still in the hands of men. And the best way to survive as a woman is to like a man. That is the most likely option to achieve happiness, "laments Kawakami, who denounces that in Japan the mentality that a woman who dresses up does so "to find a man to support her" is still rooted. "Many women aspire to be housewives because, in Japan, the more you work, the worse your health."

Kawakami has a hard time stopping. Machismo sneaks into every corner: "In Japanese, the word husband literally means master. This already tells us a lot about what Japanese culture is like," he says. How else to understand a country that takes 11 years to authorize the morning-after pill and only a few months to give free rein to Viagra? "It's a country for grandparents. That's why no one has children anymore, they can't be raised in this environment. Men also don't know what it's like to raise a boy, so when they talk about conciliation they just talk nonsense."

Kakami's speech goes even further to dismantle the image that usually transcends the Asian country, starting with that of technological progress: "In Japan there is a feeling that there is no innovation. There was a time when we were creative, but now Korea or China are winning the game and Japan is going to become a country for tourists." Kawakami, raw.

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