There was a time when it was a breeze for a foreign writer to be invited to spend a year in residence at an American university. We gladly accepted the proposal because it was implicitly accompanied by a promise of a pleasant life on a modern and well-equipped campus, with the added possibility of spending part of the night reading lazily or passionately slumped on a soft sofa in the library. . All this in exchange for one lesson a week in front of admiring students. One day, while passing through the University of Virginia, I was struck by the imprint left by my glorious predecessor William Faulkner in residence in 1957-1958: it was unanimously agreed that he had spent his time boozing and to ride a horse, which explains why he often fell from it. Don’t try unless you are protected by your Nobel Prize in Literature.
Nowadays, it becomes risky, even if we don’t forget to leave the door of the amphitheater open after class. Japanese Haruki Murakami, 74, whose novels (The Ballad of the Impossible, Kafka on the shore, 1Q84, The Murder of the Commander…), translated and rewarded everywhere are an event with each of their publications, in fact the experience. The darling of American students, long after the stunning Vladimir Nabokov who taught comparative literature there in the 1940s, he is currently spending a semester at Wellesley College, a very selective women’s university in the humanities near Boston (Massachusetts). We learn to detect unethical practices behind deceptive facades and we already archive the diversity of life experiences of trans, non-binary and gendered students on campus. Why not ? After all, when Uniqlo announced that it was marketing t-shirts featuring quotes from its novels, it caused almost as much buzz on social media as the announcement of its appointment as Visiting Professor in the Humanities. in Boston.
At the beginning of the year, from one seminar to another, people wondered about the nature of the voice of the narrator in several of his short stories and he got away with a platitude about the feminine part that each man carries within him and his own search to flush it out; after which he had to conceptualize the situation of a novelist in the times of Covid and the Ukrainian war; then he had to work on “what fiction says about the genre”. Obviously, impossible to get out of it. Thus, we no longer bring students into the universe of an artist but we draw it to their concerns. It’s always good to move the lines – but in what direction? Really, it was worth bringing from Japan a writer so renowned for his talent for mixing surrealism, science fiction, magic realism, the strange, the irrational, the fantastic, universally adored for his ability to create detached, disenchanted, disillusioned characters to ask him such a question?
“I’m just a writer”
It would have been more interesting to ask him about The City and its uncertain walls (in France at Belfond in two years) which has just been published in Tokyo. But when we learn all this from The Wellesley News controlled entirely by the students, that they warn in the introduction that their newspaper operates on ancestral lands stolen from the Massachusetts tribe and that they are committed to asserting indigenous sovereignty while pledging to hold Wellesley College accountable to the needs of the indigenous peoples and its indigenous students, we say to ourselves that deep down, there is nothing there that is only very normal. After a tea ceremony with his wife Yoko and members of the university’s Japan Club, he had to face similar questions again, but this time from professors gathered in a symposium on the theme “Women without men”.
It was perhaps at this moment that Haruki Murakami, known for his aversion to literary analysis, let out a heartfelt cry in front of his audience: “You know, I’m only a writer. The only thing I can really talk about is: HOW TO WRITE!”. But we trust him to hold on until the end of the university year. Having already participated in the Boston Marathon six times, this great athlete seems equipped to survive this new test.