In Black and White by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Author:Jun'ichirō Tanizaki [Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780231546256
Publisher: Columbia University Press

6

Once he had taken care of the disposition of the cash and realized that by some means or other he had to come up with ten manuscript pages by eleven thirty, just the thought of sitting at his desk made him feel sick. Ten pages within that time: given that one page was four hundred characters, that meant four thousand characters in two hours! Unless his head ran as fast as a sewing machine, there was no way he could work so quickly. Even writing a letter was not easy, yet creative writing required the writer to put out much more energy. A writer’s craft required that he announce grandly, “Truly, I’ve never worked over a piece as much as this one,” or “When I look it over, I see that there are a number of things I don’t like, and so I need to work on it some more.” At his usual speed, this much would take him two or three days. Given the current situation, it was all right with him if all he wrote was nonsense, but even to write nonsense required thinking time. To start with, he had absolutely no memory of what he’d written in the ten pages he’d already handed over to them, because at the time his only concern had been to extract the money out of them. All he remembered was the title, “To the Point of the Murder of the Man Who Wrote ‘To the Point of Murder’ ”; he couldn’t even remember the opening paragraph. After all, he had started to write it some two weeks earlier. Then ten days or so passed, but he’d completely abandoned his work after running into Cojima on the night of the fifteenth, and it had stayed in the drawer where he’d stuffed it until the clerk came from The People on the evening of the sixteenth. So that meant he had written the tenth page during the night of the fourteenth, and for the three days after that—the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth—all he’d produced was utter commotion, with the Cojima incident, the matter of the money, and the Fraülein incident, and it felt to him as if another ten days had passed. Until now, when he’d been handing over five or ten pages every two or three days, he’d still have the last page or even half page with him, or if not, he’d at least have copied out the last line of the last page and would continue from there. But this time, far from leaving some margin—what words the last line ended with—not only had he not written anything, but he had completely forgotten whether it ended with conversation or narrative or something in between. Maybe he still had a page or two that he’d messed up in writing, he thought, so he searched through the desk drawer. It was so stuffed with paper trash that he could hardly get anything out, but in the back he did find two or three pages of manuscript paper on which some confused words had been scribbled.

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