First of all, I’d like to thank conference
organizers to give us this opportunity to show you a very interesting and
moving documentary film on Levy Hideo. I firmly believe that Levy is one of the
most interesting novelists writing in Japanese today, and that is already an
understatement. Because what he has been attempting to do is something that no
one else in history has even dreamt about. An American writer who grew up in
Taiwan and Hong Kong as a child, choosing Japanese as his language of expression
and writing obsessively about China, about the US and Japan, about his own
radically threatened sense of belonging that results in his self-fashioning
through an almost compulsive self-exile.
Levy started his career as a scholar of Man’yo shu, Japan’s earliest imperial
anthology of poetry, and his perspective on the historicity of this language is
overwhelmingly broad. He made his debut as a Japanese-language novelist in 1987
with 『星条旗が聞こえない部屋』A Room Where the Star-Spangled
Banner Cannot be Heard, and with his subsequent
novels, essays and travel writing established his singular place in the current
configuration of Japanese-language literature. Not only transnational but also
highly trans-lingual in nature, his works offer unprecedented moments where
different dialects of Chinese and Japanese mutually provoke critical thinking.
And this film, that you will be watching shortly, will shed a light on what was
hidden beneath his intimidatingly keen linguistic sensibility. Now let me tell
you how this film came about.
In the Spring of 2013, Sasanuma Toshiaki,
who is the author of the first monograph written on Levy Hideo, organized a
symposium called “East Asian Contemporary Literatures and Language of the
Periphery” at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan. Levy Hideo was invited to
this symposium as a keynote speaker and I as a discussant. Now, if you were a
reader of Levy’s work, you would immediately know what the name of Taichung
meant for him. It is the town that he grew up between the ages of 5 and 10
before relocating to Hong Kong with his mother. He left Taichung in 1960 and
didn’t once return. In fact, in spite of his obsessively repeated trips to Mainland
China (I think he’s been there more than a hundred times by now) he had avoided
any return to Taiwan before this with one single brief exception in 2005 that
took him to Taipei and Taitung as a Japanese writer. But even at that time he
avoided going to Taichung. And of course there was a deep psychological reason
for this avoidance of half a century.
So this trip to Taichung in March 2013
would be Levy’s first return to his childhood hometown in 52 years. As a child,
he used to live in an area called “model village” (mofanxiang) in a house built
by colonist Japan and was taken over by the Kuomingtan officers. So the place
is rife with the traces of modern East Asian history, too. Sasanuma and his
colleagues at Tonghuan University offered to help Levy find his old home. On
hearing this, I immediately suggested that we should film and record the whole
process. I asked my friend,filmmaker Okawa Keiko, to accompany us on the
journey. She agreed on the spot and followed Levy around like a shadow or a
woman ninja dressed in black. This documentary is essentially a work of Keiko
alone; cinematography, recording, editing are all hers. And then there is Wen
Yuju, a young woman novelist and a former graduate student of Levy’s, herself a
Taiwanese raised in Tokyo and speaks and writes Japanese as a (quote-unquote)
“native” speaker and writer of Japanese, joined us to witness everything that
happens on the trip. The result is this film.
Here is a quote from my friend Doug
Slaymaker of the University of Kentucky that concisely describe the nature of
this documentary:
This documentary chronicles the author’s
anxiety-filled return from the Tokyo where he now writes in Japanese to the
childhood home of English and Chinese in Taiwan. This journey takes us across
five decades to a “home” that has lived only in memory, a child’s unreliable
memory at that, and has long enlivened Levy Hideo’s imaginative landscape. It
is a space that he has written of, across various languages, but has avoided
returning to.
Now is the time for you to witness what
the video camera has witnessed and recorded. I, as the producer of this film,
sincerely hope that you’ll like it. The film lasts 53 minutes. We’ll discuss
about it after the projection. Thank you, and let’s begin.
