essay
MY Good Friend in Beijing
TATEMATSU Wahei
For realistically describing the emotions of everyday life, the subtle distinctions of the heart, and the vacillation of human affection, there is no greater genre than literature. However, since literature has no substance without the words in which it is written, when it attempts to leap the boundaries between peoples, the words themselves become obstacles. The very realities of the flesh and blood that creates literature alienate us from communication with others.
Music and visual art present no such difficulties. They both speak directly to the human spirit. Intermediary measures, such as translation, simply aren't necessary. In visual art and music, a person's inborn abilities can be unleashed to the fullest without the filter of translation. I have always been aware of this when I met with writers from other countries, striving to overcome the barriers of language. When an Asian meets another Asian, it always feels oddly puzzling to me that, although our appearances are similar and we generally act the same, we can't speak with one another. I always have the desire to peer into the depths of the other's soul.
The first time I met novelist Jian-gong Chen was in 1986, when 3,000 young Japanese were invited to China by the Chinese government. Various organizations sent representatives, and I was one member of the group representing the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association. To this group of around 30, a suitable Chinese was assigned to act as an intermediary.
Jian-gong Chen wasn't our intermediary, but was assigned to a haiku group, for which he carried luggage and performed other tasks. When I asked around, I discovered he was one of the younger generation of writers in China. With his hard and disciplined body, he seemed the sort of rural novelist you might expect in a proletariat nation. He also appeared to reciprocate my interest in him. After all, I was writing novels in Japan, too. Although we were in different groups, we traveled on the same schedule and stayed in the same hotels. So in the evenings, we would visit each other's rooms and talk into the night, oblivious of the passage of time. At that time, I resolved to read his books and he seemed to want to read mine. I have always been convinced that international exchange is about more than toasting each other at receptions and secretariats.
When I returned home, I asked a suitable person to translate one of his novels and published it in a magazine with which I had connections. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, he was a Red Guard. Then he was sent to a mine near Beijing, where he worked as a laborer. Because his parents were university lecturers and he belonged to the "wrong" class, he had to undergo even more severe labor than others did. He worked hard, and in winter when he took off his sweat-drenched work clothes and hung them up to dry, they would instantly freeze. In the mooring, he would put on his work clothes, frozen stiff as a board.
Jian-gong Chen's life seemed a living record of his country's recent history. You could say the same about my life. Through reading each other's books, an incremental understanding between us began, steps on the path of mutual understanding. Compared to the first impressions I had of him, I came to know him far better through his writing. After that, too, we had more of each other's works translated.
The histories we had lived through, the present environments we were living in, were completely different. But the more one looks at those differences, the less different they seem to become. Whenever I discover another similarity in our seemingly disparate experiences. I am filled with joy. The more one knows someone, the less different the person seems. In Beijing, far across the sea from Tokyo, he was writing books in the same day and age as I was. Later, once when we were drinking cheap spirits that seemed to set our throats on fire in a local bar in Beijing, he said: "It would be interesting if writers around the world, living in, say, Beijing, Tokyo, Manila. Bangkok. New Delhi. Paris. London, and New York, had a competition to write a novel with the theme '1970.' These could be translated and published simultaneously around the world."
This was certainly the kind of big thinking you might expect out of a writer from a continent like China. I don't know how many times Jian-gong Chen and I met in China and Japan. His life gradually took a turn for the better, and I came to know about the changes in Chinese society through him. He became the secretary of the Chinese Writers' Association. From a conventional point of view he had gone up in the world, but he himself had not changed one iota.
When I went to Yunnan in China, he came to Kunming to meet me. We had a very good talk there that was later reported in The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. Although we still can't speak together very easily because of the language barrier, he is truly an irreplaceable friend.
(TATEMATSU Wahei: Author)
