Using the name of Gottfried Kerstin, the old man didn’t just want to meet the terms of his contract with his small self-help publisher.
“I want to publish the most complete book ever written on wabi-sabi. So I need you to get me some original material. If it sells well, I’ll give you a share of my earnings.”
I told him there was no need for that, and that I’d be really happy to help him in exchange for his looking after Mishima, but he insisted that we were partners in this venture. He’d even given me three of the books he’d found on wabi-sabi after he’d scanned the chapters that interested him into his computer.
Flying toward Doha, however, I wasn’t yet ready to immerse myself in a world that was imperfect, ephemeral and unfinished. My life was shaky enough as it was.
Instead of reading Titus’s books, I opened a novel by Haruki Murakami that I had been wanting to read again—A Wild Sheep Chase. I thought it was a masterpiece.
The story begins by recalling the life of the main character in the early nineteen-seventies. As he and his girlfriend are out on a walk—it happens to be November 25, 1970, the day renowned Japanese writer Yukio Mishima commits suicide—they start bickering over the silliest matters, as tends to happen when, for whatever baffling reason, a relationship begins to fall apart.
She tells him about a recurrent nightmare in which a vending machine keeps eating her change.
In the middle of this trivial conversation, Murakami brings the story back to the deep magic of old Japanese legends and talks about birds flying off, swallowed up into the cloudless sky, as the girl draws indecipherable patterns in the dirt with a twig. This is where his greatness lies: in his ability to mix humdrum details that seem to be leading nowhere with sublime touches. At one point the girl tells the narrator: “Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”
I was shaken by these words, because they stirred up something I’d often felt with Gabriela: the feeling that, for some mysterious reason, she was moving away from me—usually after we’d made love. The sex was great but, once she’d come, she’d just lie there staring at the ceiling. If I asked her what she was thinking about, she said: “Nothing.” Which was probably true.
I kept reading on.
The day of Yukio Mishima’s death something died for that couple inA Wild Sheep Chase, without their ever understanding what had happened.
Tokyo Earthquake
I wasn’t prepared for our arrival in Doha airport. I’d slept twenty minutes at the most, and the early hour and a blast of more than forty degrees of heat left me completely stupefied.
What was supposed to be a great modern airport with hundreds of connections was still unfinished, so we had to squeeze into a shuttle bus to cover the interminable distance between where we’d stopped on the runway to the terminal from where the flights to Asia departed.
There, I mingled with a horde of suited executives, fashion victims and djellaba-clad travelers as I went through passport control once again. My flight would be leaving in a couple of hours, so I wandered off to look for the Tokyo Narita departure gate.
I was so tired I could barely hold my head up. I couldn’t wait to sit down on the plane again, cramped though it was. I needed to close my eyes.
I wanted to get something to drink at a bar, but there was a long queue and only one barman, who was working flat out to meet the demand for cappuccinos. Meanwhile, in the luxury boutiques, there were two assistants for every customer.
I availed myself of the airport’s free Internet access to check the news on my smartphone. I gave up when I read that a Russian bank was recommending that people who can’t pay their debts should commit suicide. There was a great hue and cry over this, which prompted one of the directors to claim that it was a joke to scare customers who hadn’t repaid their debts and refused to respond to the bank’s attempts to contact them.
I was about to go back to my Murakami novel when the man sitting next to me decided he wanted to have a chat. His suntan and dyed blond hair made him look like your typical aging English (or so I judged from his accent) misfit.
“Business or pleasure?”
I was about to say “Neither,” but that would have required too much explanation. “Research. I’m writing a book on the subject of wabi-sabi with a friend, and I have to do a few interviews in order to finish it.”
“Wasabi?” He was very surprised. “Well of course you need to mix it with your soy sauce so you can dip your sushi in it, but I’d never have thought you could write a book about it.”
“I’m sure there must be books about Japanese horseradish,” I said, “but wabi-sabi is another matter.”
Since he didn’t ask me what wabi-sabi was, that looked like the end of the conversation. However, after my two lonely weeks, I had a sudden urge to talk, so I asked: “And what about you? Why are you going to Tokyo?”
“I work in Tokyo, in a language academy. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to teach English in that place. They’re nearly as dense as the people in your country.”
I was offended by this oblique reference to my bad pronunciation. After all, I was a lecturer in Germanic philology. Anyway, I said, “What’s it like living in Japan?”
“Quite comfortable for a gaijin. The students respect us, Japanese women are fascinated by us and life’s pretty sweet if you don’t mind the pollution, and radiation from Fukushima.”
“Oh yes, of course . . .” I’d forgotten about the nuclear disaster. Now worried, I asked, “And how are they managing that?”
“Quite well. The proof is that, despite everything, they got the Olympic Games. The Japanese have known how to live with catastrophe since they lost the war. As for me, as soon as I arrived in the country, there was a magnitude 7 earthquake. I was on the twentieth floor of an office building where I’d gone to teach a bunch of businessmen. I really thought that was curtains.”
The man was a good storyteller. His students must have liked him.
