by Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre ~ Review: Haliax Herald, January 2011
I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.
Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice. “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.”
When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding. The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity. He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!
Translated from French by David Homel.
Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978. He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return). His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006. He lives in Montreal.
