Within my autistic brain, a dream is now expanding like a balloon... This morning, at AEON I started reading Paul Auster's early work "City of Glass" again. When was the first time I had read this novel? It could be in my high school period when I had been desperate for this life completely (literally, I had to feel the nihilism that made me blind toward any future). Remembering that period, as I always write, everything at this moment still seems like a dream because there must be trustworthy friends certainly now.
"City of Glass" has a certain style/plot of so-called detective novels, in which a private eye tries to solve its mystery. However, in Auster's novel, the more the main character tries to quest/solve the enigma, the more the world around him starts showing how it can be a complicated chaos to him. As some Japanese critics point out, this elegant novel has the same structure as a Japanese legendary author, Kobo Abe (I agree with them. Abe and Auster must have the same father, Franz Kafka).
Although each author has their uniqueness/character in their work, by gazing at their world I find that they have kept on trying to write how this world can be mysterious and sometimes very "unfriendly". Auster's novels were once introduced as "elegant avant-garde novels". Indeed, due to the translation, I can enjoy Auster's gentle and elegant world (in a way, Auster's world might be too "clean" to you), but at least for me, their novels are very actual or real ones which certainly suit for my skin, and almost invade my body into bones.
After reading "City of Glass", I started thinking about the "memoir" I wished to write. What can I write about within it? Thinking about this, I got its title all of a sudden. "Shiso-Ga [宍粟画]" can be a good title for it I think. This comes from a favorite director Wim Wenders' movie "Tokyo-Ga", and Shiso means the city I live. At the break time at my work, I started thinking about this. If I could quote another movie's memory, I would like to do it from Jim Jarmusch's epoch-making one... For me, this city (and my life here) must have been "stranger than paradise"!
