FROM TOKIO TO EGO AND BACK
I don’t know what have actually happened. Maybe it was déjà vu. Maybe a telepathic contact with the author... Or maybe it was just a change in mentality and the fact that I think like the author has no connection neither with me, nor with the author, but with things that surround the author and me. But let’s go back to the beginning.
A piece of talk between a journalist and a woman I’ve heard provoked me to a reflection that actually nobody is interested in objective stories about how it is. Somewhere, i.e. in Nowa Huta or in Japan. I imagine that my parents’ generation would accept with some kind of indignation the fact that the author of the book, let’s say from his journey to Australia, didn’t put any effort into examining Aborigine’s customs by heart and explaining to the readers the meaning of all rituals (if Aborigins have such at all. Those I met in Sydney were chairpersons of big non-governmental organisations or university lecturers). Today – which I don’t mind – writers have stopped pretending that they go to the pole to study Eskimos’ customs. They go there to meet them. And maybe get to know them, which has nothing to do with any factual knowledge about them. Drinking beer with somebody doesn’t mean that we get to know which of their customs corresponds to our straw figure representing winter, symbolically drowned during a folk ritual in celebration of the coming spring. But we will know which kind of beer Jihn, Taeko or Herman like most, what they think about after drinking it or if they like “missionary” position. It’s a bit like we have finally stopped perceiving this world, which is new and outer for us, as an open-air ethnographic museum, ethnographic funfair or an old lady with beard stirring sensation and we have perceived at last that there are people in this world – some of them completely different from us, others similar – and decided that our experiences and observations, even if they are not true, are not objective and based on shreds of information, they are at least equally important as the objective truth we craved for so far. Maybe, as a matter of fact, that is what globalisation is about.
Just after that my son asked me how many languages I actually know and one woman felt urge to know if I speak Czech. I didn’t know what to say. I thought that actually I’m a fluent speaker of two languages. It also reminded me that countess who, when asked if she speeks Chinese, answered: “I don’t know, I have never tried”. Well, I’ve tried, maybe not Chinese but other dialects and I realized that, as far as we don’t want to earn our living translating or writing in foreign country, the level of our knowledge of foreign languages doesn’t really matter. The simple old rule to speak loud and slowly performs well in the whole world, in fact. I distinctly showed its rightness in Sevilla where, to the old and having no knowledge of any other language than Spanish shop assistant in the souvenir shop, I announced loud and slowly that I want to buy “Madonna Lacrimosa click click” and I immediately was given a postcard with pretty 3D blinking aureole and dramatically tear-stained Mother of God.
So when I entered the “artPAPER” site which, as opposed to the common tendency became from monthly to fortnightly magazine not so long ago, and I started to read the Janusz Paliwoda’s interview with Marcin Bruczkowski, the author of the bestseller <i>Sleeplessness in Tokio</i> [<i>The Stream of the Sleeplessness. Janusz Paliwoda talks with Marcin Bruczkowski</i>]. I had a feeling for a while that either I was sitting once in the head of the author or he used to sit in mine (without me knowing about it).
In the Internet, because I didn’t know who it was, I read that Marcin Bruczkowski, English scholar, went to Japan in the second half of the 80’s. He studied there, taught English, worked, ran a company for ten years. Then he spent some time in Singapur and in 2001 came back to Poland. Thanks to Google search I have also found that he had some problems with palmtop and that he was selling (cheap!) not a bad camera...
“Reviewers have problems with tagging your work – Janusz Paliwoda starts the conversation – What is it actually? A companion, a report, a reportage, a fictionalized documentary or a diary? Or maybe all of it?” And Marcin Bruczkowski replies: “The reviewers’ problem is what it is – the problem of reviewers. I could never understood what kinds of intellectual entertainments are hidden in passion for tagging. I’m (and so is the majority of readers) interested if the book is easy to read, if it gives pleasure and satisfaction, not how it should be tagged. I think it’s easier for me to say what <i>Sleeplessness in Tokio</i> is not. It surely isn’t a diary. I want to wait with writing diaries until 2045-2050 because then the publisher may fit printing it in with my obituary which, what is well known, considerably influences the sale. <i>Sleeplessness</i> isn’t neither a reportage, nor a guide. To creating such genres you are supposed to know something about the matters you’re writing about. I don’t know much about Japan, I don’t have a degree in Japanese studies and I have never buried myself in the secrets of Japan culture. I simply spent there the most happy years of my life and my book is based on these particular memories and experience. Apropos – can’t we just tag <i>Sleeplessness in Tokio</i> as a “book”? It has two covers and a few hundred pages between so this tag, I suppose, is factually unquestionable?”
A moment later the author, responding to the accusation made against him by one of the reviewers, admits that he is sure that there are lots of mistakes in his book, because “writing about the foreign culture is ideologically strange to me. To do it I should have been studied that culture thoroughly for many years at first and I have never been doing it. Instead of writing about Japan, I just show it with the eyes of <i>gajdzin</i> – the foreigner, who found himself there accidentally somehow, not as a result of some fascination of the orient culture or studying it; he doesn’t speak fluent Japanese, now four times too few signs to read a newspaper and knows as much about its culture as about the history of the Puka-Puka isles.”
Tokio described by Bruczkowski contradicts all of stereotypes concerning this city. After ten years spent in “the country of the cherry trees in bloom” (just so) the author comes to conclusion that he still doesn’t know anything about it. The objective truth slips, there is an exception to a rule, because if “somewhere a hundred and twenty millions of people live, we sooner of later find an example for any of people’s behaviours, characteristics, preferences or peculiarities”. He also got to know something about him: “That I don’t like cockroaches. – That I am huge and my feet are inconceivably big, especially for shoes’ producers. – That I can’t be anyone else than I am and the key to success in the strange world is to be yourself.”
Journalist finds that some people expected to find “more culture oriented, religious and historical threads” in Bruczkowski’s book. “Are you going to make it up – I ask – and write a book about, for example, Japanese art and temples?” Bruczkowski’s answer is, as you can predict: “God forbid!”
I can see that, for a half of the page, I am also doing a review of not “The artPAPIER” but the content of my head... Well, such a “tendency”.
Klara Kopcińska
Translated by Karolina Klica
Discussed journals: artPAPIER