T A B L E+T A L K What was the last book you read that made you laugh out loud? Join the discussion in the Books section of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Allan Gurganus By Dwight Garner (12/08/97) Mark Leyner By Laura Miller (12/08/97) Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S A Certain Justice By P.D. James In her wry new mystery, James introduces us to a lawyer who has "four weeks, four hours, and fifty minutes left of life." (12/16/97)		The outsider page 3 of 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Did you interview cult members? I'm doing it right now. I'm feeling very sorry for them. Those people are young, mostly in their 20s. They're very serious people, idealistic. They were thinking so seriously about the world and value systems. I was born in 1949 and I was in the university in the late '60s, a time of revolution and counterculture. We used to be idealistic, our generation, but it's gone. And the bubble economy came. Those young people are kind of the same, idealistic, and they are not able to belong to the system. Nobody accepts them, and that's why they went to the cult. They were saying that money doesn't mean anything to them. They want something more precious, a more valuable thing. A spiritual thing. It's not a bad idea. It's not wrong. But nobody can offer them what they want, only cult people can do that. They don't have a checking system, to decide what is right and what is wrong. We haven't given them those judging systems. I suppose that we authors have a responsibility for that. If I give you the right story, that story will give you a judging system, to tell what is wrong and what is right. To me, a story means to put your feet in someone else's shoes. There are so many kinds of shoes, and when you put your feet in them you look at the world through other people's eyes. You learn something about the world through good stories, serious stories. But those people weren't given good stories. When Asahara, the Aum guru, gave them his story, they were so tied up by the power of his story. Asahara, he's got some kind of power that's turned to evil, but it's a powerful story he gave them. I feel sorry about that. What I'm saying is that we should have given them the good story. In "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," Toru's brother-in-law, Noboru, is a very interesting character, like a media pundit who goes on TV to talk about politics and economics, but he doesn't believe in anything. He just says whatever is strategic. What inspired him? TV [laughs]. I don't watch it generally, but if you watch it from morning to night, just for one day, you could make up that kind of person. He can talk, but he's very shallow. He has nothing inside him. There are so many of that kind of person in Japan, and many in the States. So many nationalists in Japan are that kind of shallow person. I feel there's some kind of danger in the presence of those people. We can laugh at them, but it's dangerous at the same time. Are you afraid of fascism or something like that? Fascism is not the right word -- nationalism and revisionism. They're saying there was no Nanking Massacre and no trouble with comfort women [Chinese and Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army]. They're remaking history. That's very dangerous. I went to Manchuria a couple of years ago and visited some villages. The villagers told me, "Japanese soldiers massacred four or five dozen people here." They showed me the mass grave -- it's still there. It's shocking and nobody can deny the fact, but they are doing it. We can go forward, but we have to remember the past. We don't have to be tied by the past, but we have to remember it -- that's different. You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very ... metaphysical. I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting. Did you ever sit in the bottom of a dry well, like your hero, Toru? No. But I've always been attracted by wells, very much. Every time I see one, I go over and look in. Do you think you'll go down one some day? No, no. Too scared? Too scared. I read some writings by people who dropped down wells. One story, by Raymond Carver, was about a boy who dropped into a well and spent a day at the bottom. It's a good story. He's a very realistic writer. Yes, very realistic. But the subconscious is very important to me as a writer. I don't read much Jung, but what he writes has some similarity with my writing. To me the subconscious is terra incognita. I don't want to analyze it, but Jung and those people, psychiatrists, are always analyzing dreams and the significance of everything. I don't want to do that. I just take it as a whole. Maybe that's kind of weird, but I'm feeling like I can do the right thing with that weirdness. Sometimes it's very dangerous to handle that. You remember that scene in the mysterious hotel? I like the story of Orpheus, his descending, and this is based on that. The world of death and you enter there at your own risk. I think that I am a writer, and I can do that. I am taking my own risk. I have confidence that I can do it. But it takes time. When I started to write this book and I was writing and writing every day, then when that darkness came, I was ready to enter it. It took time before that, to reach that stage. You can't do that by starting to write today and then tomorrow entering that kind of world. You have to endure and labor every day. You have to have the ability to concentrate. I think that's the most important ingredient to the writer. For that I was training every day. Physical power is essential. Many authors don't respect that. [Laughs] They drink too much and smoke too much. I don't criticize them, but to me, strength is critical. People don't believe that I'm a writer because I'm jogging and swimming every day. They say, "He's not a writer." Do you scare yourself when you write these dark things? No, not at all. Not even in the scene when the evil being is coming through the hotel room door to get Toru, or when the soldier is skinned alive? Doesn't writing those scenes upset you? OK, yeah, I get scared. When I was writing those scenes, I was there. I knew that place, I knew. I can feel the darkness. I can smell the strange smells. If you cannot do that, you are not a writer. If you're a writer you can feel that in your skin. When I was writing the scene of the skinning, I was so ... it was so horrible, and I was scared. I didn't want to write it, honestly, but I did it. I wasn't happy when I was doing it, but it was so important to the story. You can't avoid that. It's your responsibility. It sounds like when you feel scared about writing something, you decide to pursue it. You can't escape from that. There is a saying in Japan: "When you want a tiger's cub, you have to enter the tiger's den." SALON | Dec. 16, 1997