Death Sentences (34 page)

Sakakibara and Keiko looked at each other again.

That wasn't possible.

If he had been born in 195i-that would make him the same age as Sakakibara.

But the old man standing before them with the vague smile was sixty if a day.

"Dear, don't you think it's about time ..." Keiko suddenly looked at her watch in agitation.

There was a slight tinge of fear in her voice.

The old man was ... unsettling. Or maybe it was a joke, and they just weren't getting it.

Anyway, there was something off about him.

uh

Sakakibara looked at his watch, too.

He was still trying to make up his mind.

After all-this old guy had known the name Who May.

"You're right. And we still have to pack ..."

With these trivial words, Sakakibara looked once more at the old man's large eyes.

"Before we go, I mean, before we go back to Japan, could I talk with you again? Could you tell me more about Who May?-"

Smiling all the while, the old man shook his head resolutely.

"That's all there is. That's it. I have forgotten. I have forgotten everything. Please don't make me remember any more. Or else..."

The old man shook his head firmly two or three times.

"Or else I would be overcome with loneliness. I would be unable to sustain my job as a watchman of time ..."

With these enigmatic words, the old man closed his mouth.

And then he looked away.

An expression of sadness played across his face, and a trace of satisfaction.

2'homasLamarre

Like Kawamata Chiaki's other novels, Death Sentences moves quickly, reads rapidly. Nearly every sentence is set off as a paragraph, and sentences are short, simple, and on the whole, regular and complete, which imparts a great deal of energy to the sentence, visually and verbally. Exceptions to the ruleparagraphs of two or three or (rarely) four compact sentencesconfirm the overall sense of the power and simplicity of the standard sentence. But such simplicity is not that of, say, Gustave Flaubert, where limpidness is tortuously wrung from language with endless revision, resulting in awkward yet striking rhythms. Nor do these sentences strive for imagistic effects, such as those commonly associated with haiku poetics, in which carefully turned and juxtaposed images and terms are designed to afford snapshots of an uncertain reality. Largely eschewing lyricism and incongruity, Kawamata's style is to some extent a familiar one for readers of Japanese popular fiction or "light novels." In such works, the approximation of sentences to paragraphs is often calculated for its punch, either comedic or action packed. Unable to hold on to a phrase, the reader is compelled forward.

Yet Kawamata's style introduces a wrinkle into the headlong movement of sentences, an idiosyncratic gesture, almost a stylistic tick that begins in previous novels such as Hanzaishi no kagami (Mirror of an antiexistent soldier, 1979) and Kaseijin senshi (A prehistory of Martians, 1981) but is first fully realized in Death Sentences: precisely because the regular, almost generic sentences are unremarkable, they highlight and release the force of punctuation, which is initially most palpable in the rote gesture of a full-paragraph stop at the end of each sentence. The sentence as diction and image recedes; punctuation comes to the fore but without providing imagistic, lyrical, or poetic orientations. Punctuation is activated, not only in the use of periods and quotation marks but also in the form of parentheses, ellipses, dashes, and paragraph breaks. While the rhythms of punctuation soon feel normal and unobtrusive, they nonetheless set the stage for some truly interesting temporal and conceptual effects.

On the one hand, while the thoughts of characters are often clearly delineated with parentheses and easily translated in the first person, Kawamata makes frequent use of the free indirect style: following a sentence or a group of sentences presenting an action with a clearly designated actor, there is a shift toward the thoughts, reflections, or perceptions of the actor, which could as easily be rendered in the first person or the third person. For instance:

Yet he continued to be carried away.

(Where am I going ... ?)

... he didn't know. Harado's countenance appeared before his eyes.

It makes sense to use "I" for the thoughts in parentheses, but the next sentences ". . . he didn't know. Harado's countenance appeared before his eyes" might equally be rendered ". . . I didn't know. Harado's countenance appeared before my eyes."

Sometimes literary critics hastily attribute this overlap or confusion between first person and third person to the structures of the Japanese language, to its tendency to omit pronoun and other subject markers when the subject is already sufficiently obvious. In this instance, however, this stylistic gesture is not reducible to the linguistic effects of a national language-and indeed, one of the themes of the novel is that literary effects are not confined to language narrowly conceived in national terms: the magic poem or phantom poem in Death Sentences exerts its effects across languages and media. While Kawamata is deploying certain features of the Japanese language, he is drawing on the stylistics of free indirect discourse, which has literary life that extends from (at least) Flaubert to Anne Rice. Take Flaubert's famous turn of phrase in Madame Bovary: "She no longer played the piano: Why play? Who would hear her?" It is impossible to attribute these sentiments entirely to the character or to the narrator.

Kawamata does something analogous when presenting perceptions, recollections, and ruminations, especially of his principal characters-Andre Breton, Sakakibara, Sakamoto, and Carl Schmitt. Yet by using parentheses primarily to convey thoughts in the first person, he forcibly drives a wedge between first person and third person, which tends to create a divide between thought and action. But then he makes thoughts and actions feel indiscernible in another register-that of perceptions, impressions, recollections, and experiences, which slide away from their attributed subjects, creating a space in which the concrete subjects of action, whose goals may initially feel unambiguous, dissolve into a singular (but not unitary) subjective trajectory.

And so, if we accept, for instance, that special operations cop Sakamoto enters into the body of Martian soldier Carl Schmitt and later into the young poet Hu Mei or Who May, it is not in small part because these subjects already share perceptual experiences and memories at the level of literary style: they enter into an enlarged version of "Who May," of that anonymous "And who may you be?" Indeed, even though Andre Breton and Sakakibara serve as interlocutors for the character Who May and thus remain distinct from him, they are already part of this larger "Who May?" It is in this manner that Kawamata's use of punctuation in conjunction with the free indirect style, in contrast with the laboriously wrought objectivist betise that characterizes the omniscient style of Flaubert, leads to a different sort of objectivism-of subconscious perceptions, experiences, and recollections. And it is here that Kawamata offers his take on the mission of surrealism-to afford an exact, objective, practically clinical approach to the workings of the unconscious mind-which he fulfills in an admirably offhand, casually demotic style.

Readers quickly reach the end of the book. Nonetheless, while Death Sentences is written to encourage you to rush forward sentence by sentence, ultimately, you do not reach the end; rather, the entire book turns beneath you. It folds back on itself, taking its readers with it. Its prose verges on poetry or verse in Maurice Blanchot's sense: "Prose, a continuous line; verse, an interrupted line that turns about in a coming and going.... The first turn, the original structure of turning (which later slackens into a back and forth linear movement) is poetry."'

What is truly remarkable about Kawamata's novel, however, is that it deploys this simple yet powerful style to offer a vision of the history and politics of French surrealism; a surrealist genealogy of science fiction; a reflection on media networks and interpretive communities; an exploration of the power of words and sentences, of translation and transmission; and an entirely original and timely meditation on questions of sovereignty that pits surrealism against fascism, evoking Andre Breton against the political theorist of German fascism, Carl Schmitt, who appears as a mercenary in a future war on Mars. These dimensions of the novel all hinge on an experience of time, on a global yet multipronged transformation of received ways of articulating relations between space and time.

For instance, in addition to its twist on free indirect discourse, in which the magnification of punctuation allows for a subjective merging of characters that turns the headlong race to the end of the story back on itself, there are larger, more overt disturbances of the straightforward linear movement of time. The prologue begins near the end of the story, with Sakamoto, head of a special operations squad, tracking and killing a woman who is "afflicted" by a text titled "The Gold of Time." This is not an unfamiliar temporal disturbance. It is redolent of the generic unities of detective or suspense fiction in which the story begins with the crime and then returns to the events leading up to it. Indeed, the prologue of Death Sentences appears to introduce readers to the genre milieu of undercover drug enforcement, only to introduce a twist near the end: the dangerous "stuff" is not a narcotic, at least not of the usual sort. The narcotic stuff is a text, and for some reason the cop can't keep his nose out of it. The prologue, then, does not simply begin the story out of order in accordance with the dictates of the genre. It evokes and breaks genre expectations: instead of some familiar variation on drug wars, with a casually recursive gesture it offers us an enigmatic text, apparently more addictive and powerful than any drug. And now the leap to Andre Breton in Paris 1948 is not merely a matter of relating events out of sequence. It is not simply a matter of a scrambling of chronology or a shift in genre, say, jumping from a detective story to literary history. In a sense we are still in a detective story, but the killer that must be tracked down turns out to be a phantom poem, an incantatory verse. The text thus begins to turn around another text, spiraling into it, and anticipating the figure that dominates Death Sentences-the vortex.

The figure of vortex occurs in so many registers. Not only are the effects of the poem itself described as a vortex, but also the narrative structure and style inscribe vortices: the seemingly straightforward, rigidly structured lines of intrigue and expression gradually curve beneath us, folding back. Again, this is not primarily a matter of sudden plot twists. The straight line turns out in retrospect to have been curving all along. While the jump to Mars in the final chapter may seem to come out of the blue in narrative terms, not only has the text consistently foreshadowed the red skies of Mars, but the flight from Earth, like that of the soul from the body, also describes a trajectory that folds back on itself. What initially feels like a resolute departure or radical break brings us back to the body and to the earth. Our world is no longer described by the physical confines of a globe, of a sphere suspended in empty space around which we orbit. Our world is a space-time vortex. Space travel, then, is a matter of neither instantaneous teleportation nor carefully engineered vehicles and trajectories. Souls lift from bodies only to be sucked into the gravity of other bodies, other worlds.

Still, it is one thing for a novel to insist on a figure such as a vortex. It is entirely another matter to afford an experience of our world as a vortex. This is the challenge of Death Sentences: beyond showing a vortex, beyond telling of a vortex, it strives for a "vortical experience." The novel thus introduces vortical effects at so many registers of the text-that of style (its take on free indirect discourse), of representation (the space-time vortex), of plot (a nonchronological presentation of events that allows the story to begin again), of pacing or timing (long stretches of waiting that do not advance the plot followed by rapid developments and omitted actions), of words (the use of puns or rebus-like words), and of the use of rebus-like characters (most obviously, Who May). By inscribing vortical effects in so many different registers, Kawamata's text takes on a kind of poetic force, which is not without risks. For, if we can evoke Blanchot's notion of poetry as an "original structure of turning," we might also recall Mikhail Bakhtin's critique of the "centripetal force" of poetry, whose monologism he contrasts to the centrifugal dialogism of the novel.' In other words, by using the same kinds of effects in different registers of the text, Death Sentences verges on pure isomorphism, making the prose feel somehow figural and poetic, yet by the same token (in Bakhtin's view), running the risk of eliminating a sense of dialogue, of engagement with otherness, and thus opportunities for dissent.