David Mitchell: To begin, I’d like to float the observation that every author has a limited bundle of archetypal themes – sometimes as few as one. Writers don’t choose these themes as much as inherit them from the patterns of our lives, and even if we try to expel them from a work in progress, they tend to burrow their way back in. Does this sound familiar? One such theme your new book Patient X: The Case Book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa has in common with everything in that “by the same author” list is mental breakdown, extrapolated to the short-story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Technicolor insanity. Would you agree that this is one of your archetypal themes and, if so, can you speculate as to why?
David Peace: I agree that writers have recurring archetypal themes or preoccupations. Roger Pulvers, the writer and translator, recently raised a similar point with me about what he saw as my interest in “derangement”, but I was genuinely taken aback; I would have said I was drawn to writing about individuals and societies in moments that are often extreme, and often at times of defeat, be they personal or broader, or both. I believe that in such moments, during such times, in how we react and how we live, we learn who we truly are, for better or worse. But even then, I wouldn’t have said it was a conscious choice; I’ve just wanted to try to understand the places I have lived and now live in, and the people I have lived and now live among, and to do that through writing the histories and biographies of those places and people. And so I was drawn to Akutagawa first as a reader, then as a writer, as a way to better understand the country I’ve chosen to live in, particularly its Taishō period from 1912 to 1926, as well as how a writer could or could not then navigate the dark waters of his times, rather than being drawn to him because of his mental deterioration and eventual suicide.
But to swiftly turn that interrogation lamp back your way: I would say you have a preoccupation with the labyrinth and the thread; it’s as though all your novels (and short stories) are part of one gigantic book of maps you are constantly exploring, trying to find the path from this place to the next, from one time to another, and by ever increasingly fantastical ways. All that said, isn’t it always the reader who brings their own preoccupations to the text? In which case, it would be you who has the interest in mental breakdowns, no? So let’s score that round to me, then, and move on …
DM: Nice try, but I’m still backing Roger P’s derangement theory, even though what you say about extreme circumstances being a definer of ordinary parameters is persuasive. (Quite what happens if extremism becomes a whole new normality is, in 2018, a moot point.) The “perception gap” between how you see your own work and how other people see it can indeed be as jolting as the gap between how you and others see you as a person. Especially true for writers, perhaps, whose art and selves are maybe two expressions of one thing.
Labyrinths and threads? They’re undeniably present in my books, though I think of these as motifs or structures more than themes. Although, sometimes structure is a theme. Like you, I want to understand the world. Why are things the way they are, and not as they could be? Besides causality, my recurring archetypal themes seem to include predation and predacity; language and linguistic impairment; belonging and unbelonging – in addition to the themes hardwired into all novels: identity, memory and time. Perhaps a narrative is an investigation of these questions. What answers turn up can be morphing and murky, but the holy grail is, of course, the quest for the holy grail, and not the disappointing dust-trap that sends your contents insurance premiums through the roof.
DP: I think it’s a couple of years now since we last met and I remember you talking in quite some detail about the books to come. According to your Five Book Plan, by now you should be somewhere in the rock world of the late 1960s. Am I right? Or have there been interventions? Diversions?
DM: Yes, I’m now on my late 60s thing. I intend to finish it this year. A couple of side projects have eaten time since I last published – co-translating another of Naoki [Higashida]’s autism books and the Future Library project – but I’m on the next novel wagon now and won’t be getting off until delivery. My editor knows where I live. What are you working on, post-Patient X?
DP: I’m working on the third book of the Tokyo trilogy, which is called Redux. I’ve been working on it for nigh on 10 years and the various abandoned drafts must run to well over half a million words. Redux has been a big part of these last 15 years, since we first met, and been neglected at times because of some of the changes during those years. The routine has fundamentally remained the same: I work from eight to four, seven days a week. But I’m much less confident in my writing than I used to be, and often feel paralysed by doubt. I’ve slowed down: I can’t believe I managed to publish eight books between 1999 and 2009, but I’m very aware there have only been two books since then. But I’m also aware this is not unique to me and I have a quote from Jean Genet above my desk, which keeps me going: “... after a brilliant period every artist traverses a desperate country and risks losing his reason and mastery. But if he comes out of it victorious ...” I work in hope.
Thinking back over the last 15 years, what have been the changes in your “writing life”? By which I mean in both your writing practice and routine, and in your ambitions and hopes for the work itself?
DM: Changes in my writing life since 2003, when we were both freshly en-Granta’ed young turks? On the one hand, not a lot. It’s still the cycle of doing what needs to be done that day, finding delaying tactics, letting the guilt build up until I start writing, writing, it getting dangerously late, going to bed, and starting again the next day. On the other, I’ve slowed down – I remember getting whole big chunks of novels done in weeks, not months – but I like to think what I do produce is closer to a finished manuscript than it used to be. Having kids is one obvious change-agent. Not just the way children oblige you to see society through parental eyes, but also that slow-motion process of watching human beings form over a decade and a half has been – to use a parasitic word – useful for my understanding of personality and character. I’ve done some screen work, too, which encourages textual frugality. Screenwriters have to get so much done with so few words.
Moving on: I’ve got an eight-year chapter in Japan in my life, but you’re now up to 24 years in Japan. Soon you’ll be at the tipping point. As a long-term resident, do you feel like a stakeholder in Japan, or are you still a free-floating gaijin-san, albeit one with a family and social security? Is it Tokyo for good now?
DP: Home or away, Britain or Japan, stakeholder or eternal gaijin? These are difficult questions, more of the heart than the mind, and made even more complicated by ageing parents, growing children, time and distance. At the risk of talking in quotes, there is a beautiful passage in the last interview with Roberto Bolaño where he says: “My two children are my only homeland. And in second place, maybe a few instants, a few streets, a few faces or scenes or books that live inside me.”
As I found out when I tried to live back in Yorkshire, selfishly, I need my room in Tokyo, the National Diet Library and the secondhand bookshops of Jimbōchō in order to write, in order to live. I try not to see this as a rejection of Britain, rather as just an acceptance of my own situation. But you must have crossed the tipping point, and have now lived abroad longer than in Britain? You have managed to write successfully in many different places – Italy and Holland, Japan twice and Ireland for a while now – do you feel able to write anywhere? Or is Ireland now the place you need to be to write?
DM: Like you, I’m British in terms of formation, background, family, culture and media, but apart from a short stint when our daughter was born, I haven’t lived there since the mid-90s. When England play Ireland at sport these days I even find myself quietly hoping Ireland get the upper hand just for the pleasure of basking in the pure ecstasy my Irish friends will radiate at the final whistle.
Navigating old age in a culture and language not one’s own, however, is an issue that gets less abstract by the year. And of course for as long as Brexit remains a checklist of platitudes rather than a programme of policy, we have no idea how withdrawal from the EU will impact on our kids’ life chances and their freedom of movement in the future.
DP: Going back to your times in Japan, and to ask about the influence of Japanese literature on your writing, is The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki still your favourite Japanese novel? I remember arguing with you in a hotel dining-room in Nottingham in 2004 that Mishima’s Runaway Horses was the better novel, and you accusing me of being humourless. Not that I bear a grudge. And now I’d say Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki, anyway.
I teach part-time a course on writing in the 21st century at the University of Tokyo and at the end of the year, I always ask the students to choose their favourite story and novel of the course. “Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut”, the story you wrote for Granta Japan, has twice topped the poll; Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go always wins favourite novel.
DM: Oh dear, I’m sorry you thought that I was accusing you of humourlessness for your admiration of Mishima! My memory is a little hazy of course, but I’m guessing I was making the point in my clumsy way that Mishima’s work is devoid of humour; however much I might admire it in other respects. I mean humour in its widest, wisest sense, not just gag-count. Tanizaki’s not always a barrel of laughs, but there’s a leavening spirit in his writing that, for me, makes him better company.
It’s over two decades since I read Makioka Sisters and I might have changed as a reader, so I’m not sure which novel to give my “favourite Japanese novel” title to now. I like Sōseki too – he has a generosity of spirit that reminds me of Forster and which, in turn, the more patrician Tanizaki lacks.
As we are here, two middle-aged expat novelists discussing 20th-century Japanese lit like a pair of pigeon fanciers, I’ve got to say, I loved your Sōseki chapter in Patient X, and him running into a possible Jack the Ripper during the former’s miserable year in London was one of those “Back of the net!” moments – and maybe the most perfect synthesis of David Peace crime writer with David Peace the Japanist.
DP: Apologies: I was attempting humour about the “Mishima incident” – not my forte – just to be clear, I wasn’t offended in the slightest. But the conversation came back to me when I was recently rereading Runaway Horses and I smiled when it did.
Thank you, though, for being so kind about the “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom” chapter. The intention had been to juxtapose the miserable year Sōseki spent in London with Angela Carter’s time in Tokyo, inspired by the coincidence that the Sōseki Museum in London (now no more, sadly) was a few doors down from the last house in which Carter lived, in Clapham – but it turned into something else, as these things do
Patient X by David Peace is published by Faber on 5 April. Slade House by David Mitchell is published by Sceptre.
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