“Jerusalem Prize” Remarks
Good evening. I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to
say as a professional spinner of lies.
Of course, novelists are not the only ones
who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and generals
tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and
builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one
criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and
better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely
to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that
be?
My answer would be this: namely, that by telling skilful
lies--which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true--the
novelist can bring a truth out to a new place and shine a new light on it. In
most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and
depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth
from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it
with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to
clarify where the truth-lies within us, within ourselves. This is an important
qualification for making up good lies.
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to
be as honest as I can. There are only a few days in the year when I do not
engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised
me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me
they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this,
of course, was the fierce fighting that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported
that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded
city of Gaza, many of them unarmed citizens--children and old people.
Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I
asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a
literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the
impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the
policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power.
Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a
boycott. Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to
come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me
not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact
opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me-- and especially if they
are warning me-- “Don’t go there,” “Don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there”
and “do that”. It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a
special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with
their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I
chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than
not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say
nothing.
Please do allow me to deliver a message, one very personal
message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction.
I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the
wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like
this:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against
it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the
egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right
and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a
novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what
value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some
cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white
phosphorus shells are that high wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are
crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the
metaphor.
But this is not all. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of
it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique,
irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is
true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is
confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is “The System.” The
System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own,
and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others--coldly, efficiently,
systematically.
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to
bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon
it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the
System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning
them. I truly believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the
uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories--stories of life and
death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and
shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions
with utter seriousness.
My father passed away last year at the age of ninety. He was a retired
teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school
in Kyoto, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a
child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast
offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the small Buddhist altar in our
house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying
for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all
the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his
back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering
around him.
My father died, and with him he took his
memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked
about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from
him, and one of the most important.
I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race
and religion, and we are all fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called
The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is
too high, too strong--and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all,
it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability
of our own and others’ souls and from our believing in the warmth we gain by
joining souls together. Take a moment to think about this. Each of us
possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not
allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life
of its own. The System did not make us: we made the System.
That is all I
have to say to you.
I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that
my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I would
like to express my gratitude to the readers in Israel. You are the biggest
reason why I am here. And I hope we are sharing something, something very
meaningful. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here
today. Thank you very much.
この文章は、共同通信エルサレム支局の長谷川健司特派員(支局長)がエルサレム賞主催者から提供を受けたテキストが基になっています。しかし、実際の講演はこれに少し修正が加えられていました。当日、長谷川特派員が授賞式会場の取材で録音したレコーダーを聞きなおし、実際に村上さんが話した通りに再現したものです。
出典:47NEWS
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