Here I am, writing you a letter. ** Thank you for the flowers. ** The whole room is saturated with their fragrance; ** I hated so to leave them that I didn't go to bed. ** In this absurd room with its columns, its weapons and its stuffed owl, ** I feel at home. ** The warmth, the smell, the peace and quiet belong to me. ** I take them with me like a reflection in the mirror: ** When I leave, they leave. When I return, I look—and there they are. ** I can hardly believe that they live in the mirror only through me. ** Now I wish most of all that it were summer, ** that everything that has happened had not happened. ** That I were young and strong. ** Then, perhaps, of this cross between crocodile and child ** would remain only the child and I might be happy. (ET) **

I am the owl** watching over the forest at night** I keep seeing, hearing, maybe even repeating** at night everyone begins to repeat the past** as if they might forget who they are** I am the owl**

A fast story and a slow story start at the same time. ** The slow story did not delay, but began narrating immediately.** The fast story, however, lay down to take a nap, confident in the speed of its narration. ** By the time the fast story arose and sped through to its final act, it noticed the slow story had already finished.**

"One of the German words I've become more and more attached to in recent years is the word Zelle, or "cell." ** This word lets me imagine a large number of tiny spaces alive within my body. Each space contains a voice that is telling a story. ** For this reason these cells can be compared to cells of other sorts: telephone booths, and the spaces inhabited by prisoners and monks. ** It's beautiful when a phone booth is lit up at night on a dark street. ** In the section of Tokyo where I grew up, there was a park full of ginkgo trees. In one corner of the park Hood a phone booth that was very popular with young girls. ** From dusk to midnight it was continuously occupied. Probably the girls could develop their talent for telling stories better in this cell than at home with their parents.** They gripped the receiver firmly and glanced around with lively, empty eyes, as if they could see the person they were talking to somewhere in the air.** The transparent glass box, lit from within, where the girls spent so much time stood between the dark shapes of the trees in the park:** this image fascinated me even then, when I myself was a girl. ** But the subject matter of the girls' conversations was of little interest. They spoke mostly about the males with whom they had relationships. ** Sometimes the phone booth resembled a transparent tree occupied by a tree spirit. ** The Japanese fairy tale "The Bamboo Princess" begins with an old man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and chopping it down. ** Inside he discovers a newborn baby girl that he raises together with his wife.** The tale ends with the girl, who has become a grown woman, flying back to where she really comes from: the moon.** The nocturnal phone booth might also have been a spaceship that has just landed in the park. ** The moon men have sent a moon girl to Earth to inform them about our life. The girl is just making her first report. ** What would she say about the park? Would she have much to report so soon after her arrival? ** Later, in Austria, I saw a cell that immediately reminded me of the phone booth.** It was made of solid wood and stood in the unlit corner of a Catholic church. ** The walls of the cell radiated warmth and calm; right away I thought I would be just as happy to stand inside telling stories as the girls in the phone booth.** A friend told me the cell was called a "confessional" and that, like the nocturnal phone booth, it was a place to talk about sexual encounters.** But unlike a modern phone booth, the confessional was made of wood and stood there like a tree whose roots have grown deep into the earth.** It couldn't fly away like a spaceship. So there are storytelling cells that stay in one place, and others that appear to be mobile.** And so I understood why a chamber that resembles a prison cell is better suited for composing an erotic text** rather than a large room in which optical sensuality is staged.** I don't think much of asceticism, nor do I believe that sensual pleasure can enter a piece of writing only when it is suppressed in real life. ** The claim that a person who writes is not truly living can be made only by someone who sees a person and his life as subject and object. ** He might say the most important thing is to live one's life.** I would say: I live, and my life lives as well. Even my writing lives.** Thus the question of whether a person is living when he writes is misguided to begin with.** One asks this sort of question only to make everything revolve around man.** It doesn't have anything to do with asceticism when someone sits in a cell and writes.** It has much more to do with the activation of the living cells that comprise their own phone booths, monks' cells and prison cells within the body. ** Countless stories are told in these enclosed spaces. When I write, I try to hear the stories coming from within my body. ** When I listen, I realize how unfamiliar my own cells are to me. They consist of what I have inherited and what I have eaten.** Thus it often happens that a story I hear within my body seems to me chronologically or geographically distant.** But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters.** At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: ** they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist.** The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various ** it's difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text.** And perhaps it isn't really a single, shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once.** The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists.** There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.** In Hamburg-on-the-Elbe there is a small harbor known as Devil's Bridge.** A long time ago, no one was able to build a bridge across the Elbe strong enough to withstand a severe autumn storm.** The devil made the desperate Hamburg merchants an offer: he would build an indestructible bridge.** In payment he demanded a soul. The merchants promised to give him a soul when the bridge was completed.** When the devil had finished work, it became apparent that none of the merchants was prepared to forfeit his soul,** and so they sent a rat across the bridge to the devil, who stamped on the rat in fury and then sank into the earth.** Since then the harbor has been called Devil's Bridge.** When I first heard this legend, I didn't understand it, because I didn't know rats have no souls.** That is, rats have no souls for the devil, who is quite Christian in his orientation.** In other religions that tell of the lives of plant souls and animal souls, a rat most certainly does have a soul- one every bit as precious as that of a Hamburg merchant. ** The devil needn't have been disappointed.** I have two ways of visualizing the human soul. In the first, the soul looks like an elongated roll I once ate in Tübingen.** This sort of bread is called Serle or "soul" in Swabia, and many people have souls in this shape.** But this doesn't mean the soul is inserted into their bodies like a roll.** The soul is an empty space in the body** that must constantly be filled with the roll that has the same shape as this space, or with an embryo, or with the breath of love.** Otherwise the owners of the souls feel as if something is missing.** The second way I picture the soul is as a fish whose name is also "sole": thus the soul is related to water, or to the sea.** I'm thinking of something like the soul of a shaman.** Among the Tungus, for example, it's said the soul of the aspiring shaman draws the tribal river down to the dwelling place of the shaman's ancestral spirits.** There, among the roots of the tribe's shamanic tree, lies the shaman's animal mother,** who devours the soul of the new arrival and then gives birth to it in the form of an animal. ** This animal can be a quadruped, or it can be a bird or a fish; in any case, it functions as the shaman's double and guardian spirit.** It's a nice thought that somewhere in the world the soul is leading its own life in animal form.** The soul is independent from the person in question.** The human being has no way of knowing what the soul is experiencing, but still there is a link between him and his soul.** I would like to share a life with the person I call "my soul" as the shaman does with his:** I never see or speak with this person, but everything I experience and write corresponds to this per son's life.** I appear to be soulless because my soul is constantly in transit. In a book about Indians I once read that the soul cannot fly as fast as an airplane.** Therefore one always loses one's soul on an airplane journey, and arrives at one's destination in a soulless state.** Even the Trans-Siberian Railway travels more quickly than a soul can fly. The first time I came to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost my soul.** When I boarded the train to go back, my soul was still on its way to Europe. I was unable to catch it.** When I traveled to Europe once more, my soul was still making its way back to Japan.** Later I flew back and forth so many times I no longer know where my soul is.** In any case, this is a reason why travelers most often lack souls. And so tales of long journeys are always written without souls.** According to Walter Benjamin, there are two kinds of storytellers:** "When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about, goes the German saying,** and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. ** But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions.** If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embod ied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman."** There are some who travel much farther than sailors and remain in one place even longer than the oldest farmer: the dead. ** And so there are no storytellers more interesting than the dead. ** But it is a problem that their language cannot be understood, it is not even audible. How can one hear the stories of the dead?** This is one of the most difficult tasks of literature and is solved in different ways in various cultures.** A theater, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak.** A simple example is found in Hamlet the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother.** That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past.** They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet's father had been bitten by a poisonous snake.** Through the dead man's story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure.** The theater is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible.** In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. ** They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet's uncle.** The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.** There are other places besides theaters where one can hear the stories of the dead: for example in an anthropological museum.** At the Museum of Anthropology in Hamburg there are a number of transparent coffins lined up one beside the other, each containing a dead figure.** Each figure personifies a tribe. A coffin standing on end resembles a phone booth because the figures inside look as if they are about to tell a story.** That is probably why these coffins have to be standing up rather than lying flat, as coffins usually do.** The figures in the coffins-dolls made of plastic-bear witness to the link between death and these dolls:** all of the tribes represented in the form of dolls were, at some point in history, culturally or economically conquered by others and to some extent destroyed.** As in other museums as well, a power relationship is illustrated here: that which is repre- sented is always something that has been destroyed.** In a zoological museum, for example, a stuffed wolf might be put on display, whereas no wolf can display a human being.** Historical museums, too, are marked by a hierarchical relationship between past and present.** As long as an outsider appears threatening, the others try to destroy him. When he is dead, he can be lovingly represented as a doll in a museum.** One can look at the doll, listen to the explanations of its way of life, view the photos of its homeland, but there is always something that remains unclear.** There is a veil separating the museum visitor from the dead doll, making it impossible to learn much.** One learns much more when one attempts to describe an imaginary tribe.** What should their lives look like? How does their language function? What is this completely unfamiliar social system like?** It is equally interesting to play the role of an observer who comes from a fictional culture.** How would he describe "our" world? This is the endeavor of fictive ethnology, in which not the described but the describer is imaginary.** I remember a day when I felt as though I'd heard the language of the dead.** In 1982, in the spring, I visited a village in Nepal inhabited by Tibetans. Before me stood a temple from which a prayer was emanating.** When I listened more closely, I realized it consisted of several voices.** I looked inside the temple and saw a single monk praying. From his body came several voices. ** After he had taken a breath, he once more spread out a deep voice like a carpet on which several other voices could then appear.** He produced these voices from within his body, offering a sounding board to storytellers who themselves had none.** The dead, for example, who had no bodies of their own in which their voices could resonate, were able to become audible in the voice of the monk.** At the time I tried to produce my own voice carpet.** I failed in my attempt, but for the first time I became conscious of several secondary voices that form part of my speech.** I began to pay attention to these voices as I spoke. Telling stories no longer took the place of listening; rather, listening gave rise to stories.** Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth.** Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet's father rather than his mouth?** To cut off a person from the world, you must first destroy not his mouth but his ear."** (From Storytellers Without Souls, by Yoko Tawada)**