Akira Mizubayashi: The music of words

Interview by Agnès Bardon and Laetitia Kaci

UNESCO

You often say that you ‘inhabit’ French. What do you mean by this? 

It is a way of indicating a feeling of closeness to this language, which was not mine at the beginning, but which has been in me for almost 50 years. It is also a way of saying that I do not live in France. I live in Tokyo, where I have always worked. During my formative years, I lived in France for a while, first in Montpellier and then in Paris. Since then, I return to Paris at least once a year. Although I don't live in France, I do live in the language of this country.

Why did you choose this language rather than another?

It is a long story, which goes back to my encounter with the Japanese philosopher Mori Arimasa. When I was about 18 and preparing for my exams, I came across one of his writings. It was a revelation. He was living in Paris at the time, which had led him to give up the extremely prestigious status of professor of French literature at the University of Tokyo, and he kept a kind of personal diary. The way he spoke about the French language – and European culture in general – made a deep impression on me. Indeed, although he had been practising French since childhood, taught it, and was a specialist in Pascal and Descartes, he wrote in his diary that, basically, he did not understand French and had to start learning it again from scratch. 

When I read this sentence, coming from this teacher who had more than 40 years of French practice behind him, an infinite space opened up. I realized how deep a foreign language can be. That’s when I decided to follow in his footsteps. Even before I studied French at university, I started listening to the daily lessons that were being broadcast on Japanese national radio at the time. My delight started there. 

How does one come to write in a language that is not one's native tongue?  

For me, French is a kind of musical instrument. I grew up in a family where we listened to a lot of music. My brother played the violin. I played the piano myself for a few years. As I had first learned French through lessons on the radio, my initial contact with the language was auditory, almost bodily. It was through music that this language entered my ears, my whole body.

Since I decided to make French my instrument, I have led the life of a music student, practising 14 hours a day, without it ever being a discomfort. On the contrary, it is a source of joy. Very soon, I started to write by imitating the phrases and examples given in the lessons. So, from the beginning, writing became a form of daily practice. 

At first, a foreign language is like an obstacle, a rock that has to be broken, using a dictionary. The first step is observation. You notice recurring elements, such as the use of a tense. As soon as I discovered a few characteristic traits of a writer, I would reproduce them. So, I wrote a series of pastiche notebooks imitating the style of certain writers like Zola or Flaubert. 

I filled my notebooks with the feeling that I was leading a secret life, because I was living in Japan. My studies also led me to write a dissertation and then a thesis in French. I also wrote articles on Enlightenment authors. But although I had always written, I had never thought of publishing anything. It was beyond my dreams. 

During a dinner at the home of my friend, the writer Daniel Pennac, whom I had met in Tokyo, I met the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. He asked me a lot of questions about my background. He was curious to know why a young man living 10,000 kilometres from Paris should want to learn French. I answered all his questions very carefully and at the end of the dinner, as he was also a publisher, he suggested that I write a book about my relationship with the French language. At first I thought he was joking, but he was very serious. Back in Tokyo, I started to write Une langue venue d'ailleurs, which is a kind of linguistic autobiography, with an acute awareness that these pages were going to be published. It was liberating. I felt that I was leaving a kind of prison imposed by my first language and was being born into another world.

Your first books, Une langue venue d'ailleurs and Mélodie, chronique d'une passion [Melody: Chronicle of a passion], are stories. How did you make the transition to fiction? 

I have never written fiction in Japanese. I have published literary criticism and reflections on the Enlightenment. I have only dared to venture into fiction in French. After the unexpected success of Une langue venue d'ailleurs, I already had the idea of writing about Mélodie, a dog I lived with for 12 years and 3 months. She was a very important part of my life. After she died, she came back to see me every night and was extremely present in my dreams. I had to write something about this animal, to thank her in some way. Jean-Bertrand Pontalis not only didn’t try to dissuade me; he encouraged me. So, I wrote Mélodie, chronique d'une passion. 

I had also long had the idea of writing about Mozart, who is a great love of mine. I already had some ideas for this book, which I had imagined as a narrative essay, but the death of Jean-Bertrand Pontalis interrupted this project. I felt orphaned. That is when the French writer and journalist Roger Grenier, at Gallimard, introduced himself to me and suggested that I turn it into a novel. That's how I decided to transform my essay on Mozart into a project for a novel, centred around the Marriage of Figaro. And that's how I moved, very gently, into fiction.

Music plays an essential role in your work, both in the narration and in the composition of your books. Is writing another way of composing?

Yes, writing a novel is, for me, like composing a piece of music. With Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms, some themes are laid down from the start. Sometimes the composer has to grope around, looking for the seeds of a theme, until, after a more or less long wait, that theme emerges. This is the case in Beethoven's Second Symphony. Once established, these themes give rise to variations. They return in other forms, different yet recognizable, as in Bach's Goldberg Variations, which advance the same theme, while weaving in an infinite number of differences. In my books, I like to set out a theme at the beginning and pick it up again later. I think it's like in music. When I succeed, it is a moment of pure pleasure. 

Are the books you write in French translated into Japanese?

No, not at all. I exist in Japan as a professor of French language and literature, as a researcher, but not as a French-language author. I would be happy for them to be translated, but I don't want to do it myself, because my books were conceived directly in French, without passing through the mediation of the Japanese language. If I were to translate them, I would be tempted to betray myself, to deviate from my own text. I would feel torn between the desire to rewrite and the duty to translate. Ame brisée is the only novel to have been translated into Japanese, in 2021. I agreed to translate it at the request of a producer who wanted the book to be adapted by a Japanese filmmaker.

Do you see yourself as a bridge between Japanese and French cultures?

That was not my original intention. It’s not the reason that I decided to write in French. Having said that, I was born Japanese, to parents who don't know a word of French, I grew up in Japan, I went to school there. The Japanese language is inscribed vertically within me. I live with Japanese social, family and friendship memories. In my novels, Japan is very present. I can't do it any other way. I live in Japanese and French at the same time. 

Since Japan opened to the Western world in 1868, during the Meiji period, it has introduced many elements of European culture. I am therefore doubly determined by my personal history, which makes me exist through the intermediary of two languages, as well as the history of my country, which chose to open to the world. Unconsciously, elements of Japanese aesthetics, culture and linguistic sensibility inevitably shine through in my books in French. Without intending to be, I am certainly a kind of boatman, ferrying between the two cultures.