Love and translation, and love as translation, are among the central concerns of Fracture, Neuman’s latest book to appear in English, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The novel maps the imprint of global catastrophe on the individual through the extraordinary life of Yoshie Watanabe, a hibakusha whose career as a marketing executive for a Japanese multinational spans four countries across five decades. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the narration toggles between an omniscient telling of Yoshie’s reckoning with the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and first-person reminiscences from Yoshie’s past lovers in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid. Fracture is a novel of literal and metaphysical entanglement—of time, history, and collective memory, the “spooky action at a distance” of disaster and trauma, and what Judith Butler calls our “generalized condition of precariousness.”
If love and literary translation are alike in their grammar, then Fracture seems to suggest that the collective memory of catastrophe and the tightroping act of simultaneous translation are perhaps alike in theirs: selective, revisionist, omissive, fictitious, censorial—less an honest record of what has transpired than a myth-building performance.
Fracture reclaims the small gestures of individuality amid disaster that the mythos of collective memory aims to erase. In a road trip to the fringes of the Fukushima exclusion zone, Yoshie ennobles the rituals of a small town trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in an irradiated landscape: an old man tending to the plants of his evacuated neighbors, “convinced they’ll be returning shortly or at least that if he does the watering, they’ll come back sooner”; a disabled train ticket collector lingering in the local station awaiting resumption of service for the trains he considers family; a lonely innkeeper practicing the ancient art of kintsugi, mending broken pottery to expose and emphasize its cracks rather than conceal them. “As he walks the emptiness of Hirodai,” with the intention of meeting each of its residents in mind and the boyhood memory of wearing long sleeves to cover his atomic scars in the heat of Tokyo summer still fresh, “[Yoshie] feels he is fulfilling an ancient fantasy. To contemplate what life looks like when there should be no one left. A posthumous perspective.”
Shortlisted for the Premio Dulce Chacón and the Premio San Clemente Rosalía-Abanca, Fracture was named one of the best books of 2018 by El País. Andrés Neuman’s illustrious career as a novelist, poet, and essayist began at the age of 22 with his debut novel, Bariloche, which moved Roberto Bolaño to remark, “The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.” Echoing Bolaño, Teju Cole has said that Neuman is “destined to be one of the essential writers of our time.” Named one of the 22 best young Spanish-language novelists by Granta, he has since been the recipient of the Hiperión Prize for poetry, the Alfaguara Prize, the Spanish National Critics Prize, and a Special Commendation from the Jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. El viajero del siglo, published in English as Traveler of the Century, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and shortlisted for both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Hablar Solos, translated into English as Talking to Ourselves, likewise garnered recognition on the Best Translated Book Award and International Dublin Literary Award longlists. Though primarily known as a novelist, Neuman has also published a story collection in English—The Things We Don’t Do, again selected to the Best Translated Book Award longlist—a travelogue—How to Travel Without Seeing—and several books of aphorisms. A fixture among the Best Translated Book Award finalists for his fiction, Neuman is also a translator in his own right, most notably bringing the work of German poet Wilhelm Müller into Spanish. Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books and editor of Three Percent, has said of Neuman’s accolades, “I can only imagine how many articles would be written about an American author who’s done as much, and received as many awards at such a young age.”
—Henry Ace Knight
Andrés! Before this strange new reality materialized, you had planned to spend part of this past summer in the USA to celebrate the occasion of Fracture’s publication in English. In late May you sent us this beautiful visualization of an excerpt from Fracture on one of the novel’s central motifs, the Japanese art of kintsugi, with the following addendum: “Hopefully these few words and images might also resonate like a prospect of hope—the art of reconstructing ourselves, by identifying and collecting our own pieces.” What a welcome note of optimism and call to introspection that was. How has this phase of relative isolation been for you? How do you normally prefer to work, and how has Covid-19 affected your rhythm?
Well, rather than in optimism—which is a sort of preconception, just like pessimism—, I believe in the radical value of life. That includes wounds, damage, and therefore reconstruction. We seem to be a contradictory species, as equipped for destruction or self-destruction as for resilience. Both extremes belong to us and fascinate me, and both are definitely in the novel.
In Spain, where I live, total confinement lasted four months. Like everybody else—besides the losses, pain and, financial issues that this terrible situation has caused—, I found the isolation period odd, uncanny, as well as somehow revealing. We were forced to de-automatize every aspect of our daily habits, like in a tremendous exercise in observation that any of us would have wanted to try. Remaining stuck for so long reminded us of a number of things, I believe. The essential importance of simple things and small pleasures, which we tend to take for granted, but can suddenly become luxuries that we yearn for. Personal bonds with our families, friends, and partners. The gift and limits of technology, which cannot satisfy all of our needs or replace physical presence as the digital industry likes to pretend. It also triggered an interesting reset of the ways in which we relate to bodies, both our own and others, always full of fears, desires, and memories. And it shook our conflicting relationship with mortality, of course. Even the deniers (there are too many everywhere!) appear to be doing that in their own way, refusing to acknowledge their own vulnerability, perhaps because deep inside they are afraid and need to perform some alleged invulnerability.
When the restrictions were lifted, going out into the street again was a dreamlike experience, wasn’t it? Everything seemed like a fragile representation, a simulation of something that was about to vanish. There was a sort of resurrection feeling, a relearning of every single detail—something quite close to poetry in the most powerful sense. On one hand, it felt like starting anew. On the other, though, something very basic was broken. Some kind of lost innocence, the impossibility of going back to our previous state. As one of the characters in Fracture puts it: “What the authorities fail to see is that catastrophes spark revolutions that no one would otherwise attempt. We all want to return to normal, but I wonder if we can or if we should.” This makes me hope, for instance, that our global consciousness around the Black Lives Matter movement can be sustained.
On a more intimate level, the most moving moment of those immediate post-confinement days was to reencounter my father, who has a heart condition, after several months without seeing him. We agreed to safely meet in the street. We greeted each other with a bow, in the Japanese way. We smiled only with our eyes, both thoroughly masked. And not knowing what to do, we simply began to walk in parallel, staring together at the horizon.
How do I normally work, and how has all this affected my rhythm? To be honest, I ceased long ago to expect ideal writing conditions. I’ve found that to be a kind of delaying tactic, a self-delusional pretext: ‘I would gladly make some piece of art, but we’re facing such difficult times right now!’ Well, the most interesting art is usually made in difficult times. That’s precisely the point. Writing and reading create the conditions you need, so I prefer to think of them as part of our survival capacity.
It was truly uncanny to read Fracture at this particular historical moment—amid this global pandemic, with the climate crisis looming and the movement for Black lives gaining traction in America, the novel has an urgency and immediacy to it that I’m still processing. Witnessing the ongoing theater of the absurd of the American Covid-19 response, your meditation on disaster and collective memory in the context of Fukushima led me to revisit Kathryn Schulz’s essay in the New Yorker on the earthquake poised to devastate the Pacific Northwest, likely within our lifetimes. In Fracture, you write: “The city’s obsession, its nervous system, is prevention. Containment. Isolation. Ditches. Firebreaks. Anti-seismic constructions. An entire urban plan based on future disasters. The result is a dense weight of trust on a surface of fear.”
And yet, even with this type of disaster preparedness baked into our urban plans, it never seems to be enough—the surface of fear always seem to overwhelm the dense weight of trust. Mr. Watanabe is skeptical of the term natural disaster because even with geological and weather events, the scale of the damage is proportional to the precautions taken against them, and the courage (and trust in science) to enact these precautions is a human choice. As Watanabe discovers for himself from the firsthand accounts of people on the fringes of the Fukushima exclusion zone, anti-seismic constructions and containment measures are no substitute for political courage: in Fukushima, the government has artificially raised the radiation exposure levels approved for human consumption in order to prevent the collapse of the farming industry, for example. Meanwhile, the Oregon state government just last year—four years after Schulz’s article raised the alarm about the Pacific Northwest’s vulnerability to and ill-preparedness for a massive tsunami—repealed a law banning new development in the state’s tsunami inundation zone. So much of Fracture centers on the universality of disaster—no catastrophe is strictly localized; in creating the conditions of cognitive dissonance allowing disaster to arise or be exacerbated, and in erasing the experience of it from the collective memory, we are remarkably consistent. As Watanabe puts it: “the previous day’s earthquake may have moved the whole country by a couple of meters, and shifted the earth’s axis by ten or fifteen centimeters. Nothing occurs only in one place, he reflects, everything occurs everywhere.”
With this ubiquity of disaster in mind, and the depressing inevitability of climate change causing ever more of them, I’m curious, what challenges did writing a novel about disaster pose? How did Fracture originate for you?
I totally agree with what you point out about the universality of disaster. That’s the underlying metaphor of the novel, in a way. Climate change or the current pandemic, for instance, undoubtedly require our full concern. But to handle them more effectively, in a deeper manner, we probably need to rethink the way we see borders, identity, and our sense of belonging. That is, the entire cultural frame that has made those problems worse. Instead of restricting ourselves to a local approach to widely collective issues, or always emphasizing our national affairs, I feel we also need to give some space to a comparative, transnational approach. The strongest response for many of our most serious threats is international cooperation, a serious commitment beyond geographical limits. And that definitely includes imagination, art, and fiction. It’s often more feasible to approach that commitment through fiction and metaphor rather than mainstream politics. As for every nation’s absurdities . . . I’m afraid that absurd has become a sort of transnational homeland! Most of us tend to feel that our country is the most insufferable one. In a way, that reunites us! (And explains why we so desperately need to read and travel as much as we can.)
As you mentioned, after Japan suffered its biggest earthquake in March 2011 (followed by the tsunami and nuclear disaster), I was truly moved to learn that our planet’s axis had shifted. That’s why I chose that quote from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz for the epigraph: “If something exists somewhere, it will exist everywhere.” Beat that visionary line today! Environmentally speaking, that’s an essential idea. Sooner or later, poetry is always right, isn’t it? but that line seems to speak to the transmissibility of both our very best and very worst: we’re basically a viral race. The pandemic we’re fighting now only shows how short-sighted—and dangerous—it may be to believe that what happens elsewhere in the world has basically nothing to do with our own lives. There are actually no frontiers for what matters the most. That’s why the novel plays with borderless forces that can affect everybody, everywhere—energy, economy, fear, desire, love.
While it’s true that some aspects of Fracture seem now to connect with our urgent debates, maybe that speaks not only about the anticipatory power of literature, but also about our gift as readers, to reread every story in order to better understand our present. Every single book is a translation device between moments and spaces that appear to be distant. Expounding upon one of Italo Calvino’s old ideas, we might argue that books never cease to say what they have to say. That’s because we move, and books are definitely one of our best modes of transport.
In an essay called “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect,” Judith Butler theorizes that we are all unified by a state of “generalized precariousness.” She argues that no body is invulnerable, that by our unwilled proximity to others and mutual capacity for destruction, each of us is bound up with the other, interdependent, co-vulnerable. She writes of the “regulation of affect”—the nationalistic ambition of the state to police which lives are considered valuable, therefore grievable, and which are not. In her analysis, the program of nationalism is to elevate lives that, through public mourning, can become iconic images of nationhood, and to construct a national identity whose destructiveness is considered righteous and whose destructibility is unthinkable. The state controls affect by shifting frames of moral perception, so that “certain lives are not perceivable as lives,” and state violence against them is excused. Crucially, for Butler, lives can only be seen as valuable and grievable to the extent that they are seen at all. In Fracture, through the narratives of Watanabe, Lorrie, and Mariela in particular, you write so gracefully about catastrophe—Hiroshima, Fukushima, Chernobyl, the Argentine dictatorship and the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, etc.—collective memory, and public mourning. In tandem, the sweeping scope of the novel and its treatment of public tragedy’s imprint on the individual make for a powerful illustration of Butler’s “condition of generalized precariousness.”
Do you believe the historical novel has a role to play in making the lives of those denied value and public grieving by the state more perceivable, and in making our interdependency/co-vulnerability more visible?
I certainly admire Butler’s body of work, no pun intended! I’ve always found her theories revealing, and I feel that her classic notion of performative identities is also a powerful tool to understand how literary characters work. Curiously enough, we often seem to find it easier to identify ourselves with remote fictional lives than with our own real neighbors, which only shows how deceiving and complex the notion of identity is. Characters are empathy machines. As Rebecca Solnit (who wrote a brilliant piece on the Fukushima accident, by the way) puts it, the whole point of literature is to be able to experience being others. I think that’s at the very heart of what we experience through art. And now that you mention it, Butler’s most recent work on vulnerable bodies seems to have a lot to do with one aspect of the novel, which is how the characters deal with the scars, wounds, and fractures of their bodies. Which is moving to think about, considering that they are all imaginary beings, like ghosts who find they have bones and flesh! Maybe that’s what fiction is about.
Some prejudices attached to nationalism (and very much present in the arts) can indeed have harmful consequences, leading us to all kinds of exclusions. That’s why it’s so important to develop a feeling of closeness to what appears remote, or to those whom we’ve been taught to consider essentially different. I see it as a political statement, as well as a literary one: instead of fearing the other, try to understand how they think. I’m not talking about appropriation but about exploring hidden borders. In this sense, Fracture is not just a story about a Japanese character or a foreign land: it’s about the exchanges and conflicts among distant cultures when they come into contact. In this case, between Japan and some of the countries where I’ve lived (like Argentina, Spain, and France), or with which I’ve had a strong, conflicting connection, like the United States. I was obsessed with the idea of telling a nomadic story that was also a sort of exercise in comparison. I guess that’s precisely an approach that only a foreigner would have chosen. I see Mr. Watanabe as a stranger in his own birthplace. He’s been migrating for so long that now he’s neither from here nor there: he’s become a person in transit. There was also my own displacement and family background at play here, of course.
As for historical novels, the French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius said once that history is the novel of facts, and that novels are the history of feelings. From this point of view, all novels are historical to some extent. Not only because every single narration, explicitly or implicitly, deals with its historical period, but also because feelings, though we tend to label them as timeless, are actually transformed through time. Tinder’s models of love are certainly not identical to those of the Middle Ages.
In Fracture, as you say, I was keen to tell a story that explored the difficulties to convey our vulnerabilities even to the people we love. Mr. Watanabe seems to fail to find the right time, tone, or context to talk about what happened to him to his loved ones. He’s a deceptively silent person. Sometimes he speaks too late, and the other person is hurt by the delay. Sometimes he tries to speak too early, and they get overwhelmed. Some people ask him too much about it, so it’s him who feels intimidated by their interest. And other people feel a bit uncomfortable when he talks too much about it, so he has to be careful again, coming full circle . . .
On a collective level, it often works in a similar way, I think. There seems to be a kind of structural silence that applies to different generations, for different reasons. Another character, Mariela, the Argentinian translator, says that for the first generation of every genocide, there are no words yet for their experience. But for the following generation, those words become inconvenient, unmentionable. And then for the one after that, the tragedy seems so far away that it’s unimaginable: it can’t have happened, or could never happen again. In a way, all countries will always be in one of these phases.
What better representation of this “generalized state of precariousness” than the spirit of kintsugi—the notion that we are brittle as ceramic, that rather than repress our fractures we should bare them honestly, and in our embrace of the damage, dignify its centrality. This novel has much to say about the nature of trauma, memory, and time, and the healing potential of kintsugi as a metaphorical practice, at both individual and collective scales. Yoshie—whose very existence, as you put it, is a radical act—never returns to Nagasaki, and “on the eve of his tenth birthday . . . had become an emigrant.” He fears that returning would contaminate his “prenuclear memory. The one he’d preserved in a glowing capsule of play, affection, and ignorance. Without the erosion of the future.” When he is compelled after the 2011 earthquake and nuclear meltdown to travel to Fukushima, he meets Mr. Satō, the innkeeper on the outskirts of the exclusion zone. Himself a practitioner, Mr. Satō asks Yoshie if he does kintsugi, to which Yoshie replies, “You could say that.” It’s this very understated and profound moment.
Would you say that Mr. Watanabe’s mere presence in the exclusion zone—and his ambition to meet all of Hirodai’s remaining inhabitants—is not only a personal act of kintsugi but also in some sense a collective one?
Oh, definitely. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to apply that principle of repairing by showing the cracks, of reconstructing the present and giving it a future without denying the past, not only to objects but also to people, love, and politics? That’s at least what the novel attempts. Bodies and things are reunited by the metaphor of kintsugi. In the end, as you say, Mr. Watanabe’s excursion towards Fukushima can be equally read as an intimate solution and a social move. Actually, he is a sort of collective individual, a fictional reflection of multiple real people that I’d researched and reimagined. He’s made of many lives in many places, and seems to carry the memories of many people.
One of the earliest inspirations for his character, for instance, was an incredible survivor named Tsutomu Yamaguchi. First he survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, where he was working. Then he managed to catch a train back home to Nagasaki (trains resumed just a couple of days after the bombing, which pretty much summarizes Japan’s famous resilience) and survived the second atomic bomb, which is almost unthinkable. As if this were not enough, he happened to live for almost a century, which probably made him the closest to immortal that a human being can get. But at the same time, maybe someone much more aware of fragility and mortality than any of us. These inner contradictions obsessed me and made me want to invent a character inspired by them.
Interestingly enough, Yamaguchi died just a few months before the Fukushima disaster, so he didn’t get to see a new nuclear mushroom in his country. I couldn’t help but wonder: How would this person have felt if he had seen it? That was the origin of the imaginary Mr. Watanabe, who ended up having a different life in totally different places, but still remains a ghost brother of the amazing Yamaguchi.
In a review for World Literature Today, Hélène Cardona aligns Fracture with “the Latin American genre of the total novel.” Encompassing postwar and contemporary Japan, late-1960s Paris, Nixon and Vietnam War-era America, late-1980s/early-90s Argentina, and early-2000s Spain, the scope of Fracture is undeniable, but was it your ambition, as Vargas Llosa put it, “to write a book that embraces the totality of reality and appears to be, like reality, inexhaustible”?
That review was so generous! The thing is, novels (and fiction in general) are often able to feel more real than reality itself. Not because of their style or the so-called realism, but because they somehow give us a clearer, more organized sensation of reality, which is actually chaotic and quite impossible to understand. Thus, what we call reality is a fantastic creation of fiction, a mirage of language. It’s an experiment with representation, not a reflection of it. And I’m grateful to literature for giving us that chance.
Tell me about the character of Pinedo. We get this brief glimpse of his frustrations reconciling his journalistic work with his broader ambitions as a writer, and these quite funny, repeated fumbling attempts at reaching Mr. Watanabe, whose story seems to totally consume him. How do you see the relationship between news and literature nowadays? Would you agree with Pinedo’s notion of journalism as the mouth, “the first voraciousness,” and fiction as the stomach, “the absorption of all that material”?
As a reader, I love when relatively small characters hide a potential key to complete the story. I suspect that’s Pinedo’s case. His name, by the way, is a tribute to the late and largely unknown Argentinian writer Rafael Pinedo, the author of a brief apocalyptic masterpiece titled Plop. In Fracture, when Pinedo is walking through a rainy Buenos Aires, I couldn’t resist using that onomatopoeia: Plop . . . !
Anyway, the interesting thing about his character is that you can interpret his role in many different senses. He can be just a secondary character, a sort of ghostly presence around the main characters’ lives. He can also be a complement for Lorrie, as their respective careers span the last few generations of journalism, embodying the increasing precariousness (again!) of the profession. Or as you say, he can certainly be a funny case in point about the relationship between fiction and nonfiction: a doubting reporter obsessed with a story that is both real and imaginary. Or he might even be the narrator of the whole thing, if we wish to play some Cervantine game: Who is narrating who in the end? Who is the final observer?
Last but not least, this Pinedo guy is about my age, so we belong to a generation that both was and wasn’t there when the dictatorship killed, kidnapped, and expelled our people (including part of my own family). We were small children then, so we constantly need to teach ourselves to remember what we almost forgot. Novels are a great tool to make that possible.
As for the relationship between news and literature today, I’m afraid it’s somehow narrowing the margins and freedoms of our literary writing, as well as making us mistake the present (which is a complex thing strongly attached to the memory of the past) for the breaking news we consume every day. As if literature needed to fit into the boxes of current events to remain relevant . . . Paradoxically enough, if we do that, literature stops being necessary, and ends up being engulfed by the stream of information. As Pinedo says: “Truth is important. Except that truth depends less on data than on underlying metaphors.” Maybe those metaphors come from the big stomach of fiction, which is able to absorb reality in slower, deeper ways.
My first encounter with your writing was through George Henson’s translation of your luminous short essay “Traducirnos,” which I would encourage anyone to read in full over at World Literature Today. “Love and translation look alike in their grammar,” you write. “To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together . . . I read myself reading you. I hear you to the extent that you know how to talk to me.” I couldn’t help but revisit this passage in the context of Yoshie’s lovers, three of whom are language obsessives. The narrations of Violet, a French linguistics student, Lorrie, an American journalist, and Mariela, an Argentinian translator (and to a lesser extent Carmen), prompt a continuum of meditations on language/translation and deliver a real-time window onto the construction of the precarious languages Yoshie shares with these women. Did you have the material of “Traducirnos” in mind as you developed these characters?
Yes, absolutely. You could say that I’m a bit obsessed with those subjects! Maybe it’s because of our early exile from Argentina to Spain, which prompted my brother and me to relearn our mother tongue, so to speak, by translating from one kind of Spanish into a new one in school. Or maybe it’s because of the migrant background of our entire family, which comes from many different places (France, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, etc), languages, and even religions . . . When we were children, my brother and I felt like we were living in one of those Cortázar stories, where there’s some door that opens onto a different reality. Inside our house we were in Latin America. But as soon as we opened the door, we went out to play in Europe. The border between these shores was merely a doorknob. I still write with that sensation.
Circling back to love, we all feel changes in our behavior whenever we try to speak in a foreign language. With that in mind, I was fascinated by the idea of telling a set of love stories where someone becomes partly another person, depending on the language, place, or partner: an ever-translating personality. These characters make all kinds of linguistic mistakes and experience all sorts of intimate misunderstandings in love. Thanks to those slip-ups, they end up learning things about themselves beyond grammar or national mottos. They live in a constant love in translation, where lost in translations have a loving value. None of the four women who encounter Watanabe can speak Japanese, but they begin to deduct it through the way he speaks in their own tongues. The same goes for the couples they form, where love seems like a mode of translation between foreign speakers, and translation seems like a way of falling in love with a stranger. As Violet puts it, in both love and languages our mistakes say more about us than our alleged successes.
As a translator yourself, what are your collaborations with your translators like?
That depends on each translator’s personal preferences, which I very much respect. If they prefer not to be in touch, I’ll never drop a line or send any comment at all. But if they wish to get in touch to share some queries, and seem inclined to exchange ideas about the original, then I’ll offer my collaboration when needed or even a quick reading of the draft. As my fellow translators know, there’s nothing as dangerous as authors who think they’ve mastered the target language, or who seem to believe they could do better than their own translators. Well, I certainly couldn’t!
As far as the English translations of my books are concerned, I’ve developed a very fluent, trusting relationship with my usual translators Nick and Lorenza. They are generous enough to let me in, once they finish the first manuscript. Then the manuscript enters a sort of rereading team phase, which can be exhausting but is also full of beauty and discoveries. As a matter of fact, I will confess a secret to you. Sometimes I find their solutions so remarkable and spot-on that I go back to the original and rewrite it, just to mirror what they did in their translation! Then I become the reverse translator of my translators, which is one of the most enjoyable ways of writing that I know.
Every time a book is translated, I think its author witnesses not only a transfer but also a revelation. They learn what their book was capable of saying, or what it might have said. It’s often claimed that a poor translation can ruin the original, but it’s not so often we remember that good translators are capable of broadening and improving any text. That is why I never entirely expect a translator to respect me. What I really want is for them to invade me, transcend me, lend me their look.
One of the things I enjoyed most about Fracture was its obsession with the granular rituals of travel—a hotel, for instance, as “the combination of a strange place and a portable home. The possibility of a private space where one leaves no traces, or rather, where one’s traces merge with those left by a continuous throng”; packing not as the art of “what to include but what to leave out”; luggage as “an assortment of sacrifices” rather than “a bundle of possessions”; Mr. Watanabe’s reflections on the emotional topography of travel by flight versus by train; his belief that “airports are [not] neutral places. Quite the opposite. He senses in them an overwhelming compactness.” Are you missing these spaces and rituals as the world has come to a screeching stop?
Very much so, I’m afraid. I look at my bored suitcases now, and they seem to belong to some other person from some other world, which makes me strangely sad. Even our sense of home seems to have changed. On one hand, we’ve been staying at our houses for much longer than usual, and our roots there have grown larger. But on the other hand, those roots are subtly weaker now, as we have lost the feeling of coming back home . . . Fortunately, if these days we can’t travel as we used to, we’re still able to read and write fiction. No boarding passes are needed for those activities, so I’ll take them as a good consolation.
