The Word Book by Mieko Kanai

Author:Mieko Kanai [Kanai, Mieko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Voice

Why was I drawn to the momentary sound of wings,

more fleeting even than the moth itself?”

In dreams of another

“So long as you live, you keep on aging”

—from Yoshioka Minoru, “Water Mirror”

Ten or more years ago I was told by older friends about ideas for a great many novels that probably remained unwritten in the end. They resembled confessions of the secrets of someone’s parentage, or whispered confidences regarding love affairs that would create difficulties for “the other man’s wife” if revealed. And certainly there were among them ideas like as-yet unpolished gems that would yield impressive short stories if handled with talent and the technique that comes with long years of experience. Why, then, did they not write them? I cannot, however, deny my own slightly perverse sense of triumph at their not having written them. This wicked sense of triumph regarding those who attempted to write but could not was something that often filled me with rapture. To put it clearly, I held them in contempt. It was not simply that I disliked the literary obsessions that their attitudes, the look in their eyes, and the words they spoke so naturally revealed; I in fact could not endure them. Why shouldn’t these writers come to grief? I took an aggressive stance, and mocked the ideas for the stories they were trying to write and their innocent literary obsessions. Even now I can recall with feelings of regret several scenes like that, but (as the sensitive reader will have understood already and hence there is really no need to write it here) I too had ideas (childish ones) for a story I was trying to write, and innocent literary obsessions of my own. In short, they and I—though I would never have admitted it at the time—resembled one another.

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