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Rade Jarak: The Japanese Diary (VBZ, 2010)

By Lamija Neimarlija

In The Japanese Diary, Rade Jarak gives various definitions of his notes gathered during the six months of wondering through hamlets and other remote spots of northern Japan, as well as the labyrinths of Tokyo, the biggest modern metropolis. His initial intention was to go to Japan, which for him, as a writer and painter, is the picture perfect to copy from. He does not see his ‘’technique’’ in this book as a travelogue, or as photographic, because he does not use it to describe the surface, but by discovering Japan, he makes it metaphoric. This first statement is true, for these notes present a parody of travelogue and a photographic journal, while the details from the surface of Japanese everyday life create a ‘’twisted’’ world of the Diary.   

The visit to Japan was a part of a Residential Programme for Painters, and it resulted in three portraits: Danil Kiš, Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka. These are not the only artists that left a significant mark on Jarak’s poetry. Deeper reasons can be found in Jarak’s essay from 2006 ‘’The Three Levels of Poetry“ – the works of the listed writers create ‘’a world of their own’’, they can not fit in the culture they were created in, marked by the way they handle the unimportant (he manages to make them unusual and to elevate them to new spheres). This influence can also be seen in Jarak’s portrait technique: one of Kafka’s eyes is a black button he keeps in his pocket since Zagreb and the other is a rusty key from the streets of Copenhagen.

The Eye is Dancing on the Surface 

Although the perspective of a utter foreigner in some way justifies keeping the attention on the surface of Japanese daily life, it is here only as a stimulus for unusual trips into the well-known and everyday. There is also the feeling of a man-traveller, whose home is on the road, on the rails, on the path…, the masochistic ‘’on the edge’’ feeling that ‘’calms’’ him and keeps him in Japan, the same feeling that was described by the frozen Walter Benjamin in his Diary of Moscow, by the hungry and poor Orwell, in his A Complete Nobody in Paris and London. He also creates the parallel with travelling writers through the quotes from Orwell’s, Benjamin’s, Mandelstam’s and Pavese’s diaries.

As much as he tries not to tackle the big topics and events, the not-every-day (foreign, ironic, distant) approach to the surroundings he finds himself in open a new fictional dimension of the most common and most banal ‘’real’’ events, e.g. the metaphorical use of language when describing the surrounding reality. Such approach – storytelling as mechanism of free associations, the attention kept on the moment and on the present – make the ‘’deciphering’’ of the hero’s profile more difficult. Here is what we know: a Croatian writer and painter in his mid-forties, father of two, divorced, lives in Japan on almost no income. His company are his Bulgarian colleague Julija, American Nyassa Shannon; he sometimes has a romantic adventure with a geisha (Sakuna) or with one of his ‘’sweethearts’’ (Machiko-san). Depressed by the Japanese climate, Japanese formality, precision, ‘’closedness’’ (all products have instructions only in Japanese, almost none in English), lack of socialisation (lack of coffee bars and ‘’social interaction’’ in Fukushima), but thrilled by the Japanese women, that are very beautiful and the most melancholy women in the world…  

The Speed of Calvin 

The confused character in the notes is created by pushing and questioning the limits and taboos. When, in accordance with the definition of life as fiction, he tries to implement the five rules of Calvin on Tokyo for the new poetry (the sixth one got lost), each of these attempts end in paradox: the speed becomes slow (with time, the fast train seems as slow as a bar), the multiplicity becomes monotony (the sights of Tokyo: only buildings, buildings and buildings) or the uniformity, the precision becomes ‘’open’’ (example of the Japanese language and grammar) etc. His attitude towards Japanese culture is not free from the old habits and stereotypes of a European, disoriented and lost in a country so far away, literary and metaphorically. But mocking or irony regarding Japanese customs, public places, religion, mentality etc., almost always end up as humouristic or paradoxical, in the case of stocking up various blankets and aids that the Japanese use, for example.

Jarak is bold enough to state that the Japanese lack the dimension of Christianity, the so-called civilisation’s sense of guilt: The Japanese lack the dimension of Christianity, of monotheism. This coming from me, someone who attacked religion all his life, but it seems like I have adopted it as part of my civilisation. As a sense of guilt. He explains such an attitude by saying how Japan kept its pagan passion, which their outer ‘’ceremonialism’’ holds back, which brings up the question of what it is in the civilisation’s acceptance of Christianity that saved us from ceremonialism and what happened to our pagan passion. It is not surprising that when coming home he writes: We are going back to Europe, to ‘’civilisation’’. Is he repeating the stereotype or is he creating irony, in a context of the fantastical world of the Japanese Diary? 

Dali in Tokyo 

The messy logic of the Diary is created by various notes on Tokyo (Tokyo is: a crazy house, tense, perverse and somehow ‘’creatively’’ supporting in a way that it would not be a surprise to find that, alongside two, it has a third human gender, an endless sea of concrete, the most beautiful city in the world, the most sad city in the world, a bee-hive, Kafka’s dream). Sometimes Jarak develops a metaphor through the whole Diary, as in the chapter ‘’The Clocks’’, where he destroys Japanese precision by describing the feeling of disarray when unable to gain orientation in time: all the clocks in the building are late, the main official clock at the entrance, the clock in the ‘’bar’’ is speeding, the correct clocks on the railway station do not show the same time…

Jarak tries to describe a world that lacks meaning, as Kafka in his non-classical fantasy, and finds such a world in Japan. The question that remains is whether he, as a typical European,  found this world of signs clear and simple or was its reality mysterious and opaque, under its transparent layer.