![]() The imperfect tense is used to talk about how things used to be ‘back then,’ or ‘back in the day.’ In other words, it’s a kind of fairytale tense that expresses a world still alive with magic. And that event, which occupied no more than a fragmentary in my life, eventually led me to write an entire book.Īs for the matter of tense, it is true that the French language makes a distinction between the half-past, or the imperfect tense, and the definite past, which is used to talk about things that have already ended. The man came back during the Gulf War, and so I was very conscious of the overlap. ( laughing)Īnnie Ernaux: Living through a tragic event on a global scale, and simultaneously, a very private tragedy of my own, was something that really happened to me. The difference between the past tense and the imperfect tense…these sort of things really stand out when I’m reading a text in a foreign language. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the temporality of the book was extremely interesting to me. It is as though the very grammatical tense of the sentences captures the shock of witnessing a political massacre-the way it completely transforms you. It was very interesting to me, because this way of thinking according to grammatical tense is not something that really exists in Japanese. Usually we do that unconsciously-but you do it intentionally, which is what’s so impressive to me. And it’s from that perspective that the world of the book is created, by getting rid of all the excess stuff. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of something hitting us out of left field-and just like that, our lives are changed forever. But at the same time, the war in Iraq is happening, or any number of other things. People go about living their individual lives. If you look at the Japanese reviews of A Simple Passion, people always seem to focus on the ‘passion’ part of it, which I understand, but personally I was much more interested in the book’s attention to the everyday. I don’t know how it is now, but when I first published that book, very few readers were sympathetic to it. It’s very encouraging, because of course I was very intentional in how I wrote it. So I appreciate you saying that to me, Annie. They were like, how much longer are you going to keep writing about boring stuff like how much milk the baby drank, or how soft its poop was? ( laughing) In the book you just mentioned, Woman Running in the Mountains, I actually included a baby diary in the text, but people didn’t react very positively to it. Pregnancy and childbirth are things that concern women, after all, so when I wrote my novels I wanted to express those things through a woman’s words-and all the more so because I experienced them myself. In Japanese, a lot of the language around pregnancy and childbirth was coined by men, which makes me terribly uncomfortable. What I’ve learned from your texts is just how much drama is contained within women’s work, how much of it deserves to be articulated and contested. If this were any other topic unknown to men, writing about it in such detail would render it a universal phenomenon, and they’d hail it as a new discovery. It’s such a dazzling text, it’s almost disorienting. And the passages about breastfeeding and motherhood, the descriptions of how little boys act, the problems that come up at daycare-all of it is rendered in such detail, and these are things that have never seriously been taken up to this extent in the history of literature. While literary influence often mirrors geo-political hierarchies, with writers outside ‘the West’ far more likely to be familiar with the work of writers within it than vice versa, Ernaux was well aware of Tsushima’s work at a time when few others in Europe and the United States were-to the extent that she included a quote from Tsushima’s novel O Dreams, O Light! in the epigraph to her 2000 novel Happening: “I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end.”ĭuring their conversation, Ernaux and Tsushima communicated through an interpreter named Shigeki Hori, who is also Ernaux’s main translator into Japanese, and the resulting dialogue was published in the fall 2004 print edition of Mita Bungaku, a Japanese literary journal.įor example, the way you write about the experience of childbirth is so beautiful, though the woman has no idea what is going to happen to her. Along the way, they offered deep and generous readings of one another’s work, revealing the extent to which their literary approaches converged along common themes and concerns, even as they wrote from distinctly different literary traditions. In 2004, Yuko Tsushima and Annie Ernaux, two of the most groundbreaking feminist writers of their generation, met in Tokyo to discuss everything from motherhood, abortion, and the Iraq War, to the ongoing challenges faced by women writers in France and Japan. Yuko Tsushima photo courtesy of Bungeishunju.
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