Erika Kobayashi

Writing means you can transcend death and go on living

Encountering books was very significant in my upbringing. My discovery of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank when I was ten years old was how I started thinking about the central theme in my works, “things that are invisible to the eye.” Anne Frank’s quote “I want to go on living even after my death!” was eye-opening for me even as a child because I thought, “Writing means you can transcend death and go on living.” Ever since, I dreamed of one day growing up to be an author or a journalist.

Even now that I am grown, I occasionally think about the fact that we can read Anne Frank’s writing even though she herself is gone, and I find that deeply moving. On the other hand, the reality that we will never get to read what Anne Frank would have written as an old woman has had a big impact on me as well. One turning point was the discovery of my own father’s diary when I was around thirty years old. He had written the diary at the age of sixteen or seventeen during World War II, and it was strange to think that the eighty-year-old father I knew had written what was in there. Additionally, it made me realize that my father was born in the same year as Ann Frank (1929), which I found doubly incredible. It meant that if Anne were alive, she would have been an eighty-year-old grandma.

From that point on, I found myself thinking about traces left behind by people’s lives—the little moments that weren’t recorded in diaries. In particular, my thoughts turned to those with no diaries, who nevertheless must had had moments that were just as important in their lives. How could I, as a person living and breathing today, use pen and paper to identify and salvage those lost moments and traces of people’s lives? Ever since I started wondering about that kind of thing, my central theme has been “things that are invisible to the eye.”

The topic of radioactivity crops up often in my works. Like everyone else, it definitely became a more immediate topic for me following the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. However, I had actually been interested in what we call “radioactivity” and its related history even before the disaster. That interest led me to discover the existence of laboratory notebooks by Marie Curie, who discovered radioactive radium and received the Nobel Prize twice, in Physics and in Chemistry. A search revealed that one of her notebooks is actually kept in the library at Meisei University in Japan. At first glance, it looks nothing more than a charming cloth-bound notebook, but holding a Geiger counter up to it gives a faint indication that something is there. I was told that because Marie Curie handled highly radioactive materials with her bare hands, any fingerprints left in the notebook still give off measurable radioactivity.

Marie Curie held radium in her hands for the first time in 1902, nearly 120 years ago. Considering that the half-life of radioactive radium is thought to be 1601 years, her fingerprints on the notebook will still be radioactive in the year 3503 A.D. Although somewhat ironic, I suddenly felt that it connected in some way to Anne Frank’s wish to “go on living even after [her] death.” The people in that distant future may not remember Marie Curie’s name, but the traces of her life will remain. Given that, I thought it might be important to write about the issue of radioactivity and nuclear power in a way that transcends the questions of right or wrong and for or against. That is what I do in my LUMINOUS books, as well as in other past series and installations.

Starting with the assumption that I don’t know

My father’s diary also got me thinking about another thing. To me, he had always been a father and an adult, but the person in the dairy is much younger than I am now, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy concerned about adolescence. Even though I spent decades with him, I realized that there was a vast expanse of things beyond our time together that I have no means of knowing or talking about. Not being able to know about one another seems like cause for despair, doesn’t it? But actually, the realization that I had assumed I knew him was what really made me sad.

Assuming you know something is liable to happen at any time. The first time I got to step inside the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, I suddenly had a reality check. Even though I had written that “radioactivity is invisible” so many times up to that point, I still somehow had it in my head that there would be visible indications such as scattered debris and overgrown forest. But the actual premises were not overrun by vegetation—just silvery mortar on all sides like in a science fiction movie. The building even had a Lawson convenience store inside, no different from the one in my local neighborhood. When I saw that, I realized that I had unconsciously thought of places polluted by radioactivity as existing in some other world that had nothing to do with me.

From then on, I tried to stop assuming I knew and imagine things knowing that I didn’t know. Instead of trying to visualize things that couldn’t be seen, I tried to convey those invisible things the way they were. My first creative attempts with this new attitude resulting in my latest book Trinity, Trinity, Trinity and the exhibit at The National Art Center, Tokyo (Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art). If I started with the assumption that I didn’t know and couldn’t see, I thought that there might be room for hope beyond it.

The weight of choices that determine the future 100 years from now

Right now, the entire world is finding ways to deal with the invisible coronavirus. Willingly or not, I think people are turning their eyes more toward things they cannot see. Nobody wants to see or think about things that are terrifying if at all possible. So I understand the want to find relief in assuming one “knows.” Still, I personally want to be aware, however faintly, of the fact that what you can see is not everything. Another thing I have noticed is the way people attempt to ride out invisible issues by making the weakest people bear the brunt of it all. I really feel that this has not changed that much since the accident that showered radioactive material around the area.

But that doesn’t mean I have given up hope for this world. For example, X-rays and radioactive rays were discovered just over 100 years ago. Looking into the history of that time period reveals that a mere 100 years ago, women didn’t even have the right to vote. Thinking about how much things have changed in 100 years gives me hope that society and people have the potential to change even more in the next 100 years. That’s the kind of sentiment I am in as I write.

I believe “choice” is the key element in changing the world 100 years from now. With The Diary of a Young Girl and my father’s diary in hand, I once traced Anne Frank’s footsteps in reverse from death to birth while simultaneously keeping my own diary when creating Your Dear Kitty. At the time, I visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne spent her final days where I thought, “If only they had liberated the camp a week earlier,” and then the Secret Annex in Amsterdam where I thought, “If only the informant hadn’t given away the Frank family hideout for several more days.” As I visited each place, I imagined different scenarios in which Anne might have survived. When I finally reached Frankfurt am Main where she was born I thought, “If only nobody had voted for Nazi Germany back then.”

The acute realization I had in that moment was that every person holds the life of someone else in his or her hand, and that the choices we make now have the power to save or kill someone ten years from now. You can agree or disagree; I don’t think that matters. The thing that does matter is to know that what you choose now can have serious effects on things ten, twenty, or even a hundred years from now. I myself have a strong desire to be the kind of person who doesn’t get caught up in immediate matters and makes choices with the future in mind.

To “happen upon” remnants of a town’s history

War comes up frequently in my works and a lot of people ask me if I like historical stuff. But what I actually value are the immediate things that exist within a one-meter radius or so. For example, if I trace back through those close to me like my mother and my mother’s mother, I inevitably run into the topic of war. I only write about war because I can’t depict the things I want to convey otherwise. The fundamental thing that drives my desire to write is my wish to know why I am living in this age, in this place, under these circumstances.

The one-meter radius pertains not only to those close to me, but also exist within districts. Sometimes I visit various towns before starting to write a book, where there are vestiges of all the different layers of history of each place. I get very excited whenever I discover some kind of fragment of those layers. When I wrote Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, I visited the tiny town of Jáchymov in the Czech Republic (its mines are known as the source of ore from which the Curies discovered radium).

When I walked down the Silver Road that runs through the center of town, I happened to look up and saw the Olympic rings emblem on a wall with the inscription “1936.” Why was that there? Curious, I looked it up and discovered all kinds of things I never knew. 1936 was the year the Berlin Olympics were held under Nazi Germany and also the year of the first ever Olympic Torch Relay, but the next Olympics in 1940 had originally been planned for Tokyo. The only image of the “Tokyo Olympics” I had was the one held in 1964, and this was the first time I discovered the existence of a previous event that never happened.

The accidental discovery of that emblem taught me the history that gave birth to the story of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, and I think it is an interesting coincidence that now a French translation of the book is about to be published in Paris, which is the next host of the Olympic Games. Happening upon fragmented remnants of the past in the places I travel to is a very stimulating experience for me. It may not be the kind of thing you would find in a guidebook, but I believe any town you visit has the potential to provide an encounter with something fascinating.

Exploring history in Roppongi, where diverse people intersect

I have the feeling Roppongi has a lot of these “remnants,” too. For example, a small remnant of an old imperial army regiment remains in a section of the National Art Center, Tokyo. The history I learned from textbooks feels very distant to me, but it actually exists just one degree of separation away from the places in my life today. When I walk around town, I naturally run into buildings that existed when people as close to me as my mother’s mother—my grandmother—lived, and encounter things that these people may have touched. All of these things I come across are a revelation. So if I were to think of a project set in Roppongi, I would want to start by exploring its history. It would be great to venture out on foot to hear about Roppongi’s past and the stories from people who live here now.

In particular, Roppongi is a place where all kinds of people and cultures from around Japan and overseas intermingle, so whenever I pass by people on the street here, I’m always very curious about what kind of background they might have, where they came from, and how they’re living now. Why Japan? Why Tokyo? Why Roppongi? Walking around town with an audio guide would be interesting, too.

There is still plenty to find out about the metropolis that is Tokyo

Talking about this reminds me of Akira Takayama’s project Tokyo Heterotopia. I had the opportunity to be a part of the first Heterotopia Riga, which involved writing stories on buildings with historical connections to both Riga and Japan. These stories, read by local narrators, were available for participants to listen to while visiting the actual buildings in question. The one I wrote was about a ghost telling the story of the building it haunted, based on actual history. More than anything, I thought the remarkable thing about the project was that one could listen to the story in the same place as its narrative setting.

I can’t help but wish that Takayama-san would do a “Roppongi Heterotopia” with all the buried history here (laughs). I actually participated as an audience member in Tokyo Heterotopia back when it was put on at Festival/Tokyo 2013 (F/T13). I would walk to each location, and while I experienced what was going on around me amidst all of the surrounding environmental noise, the radio alone whispered tales of past history into my ear. I thought that was really interesting.

I’ve rediscovered that I really like Tokyo. I’ve always liked large cities that are amalgamations of diverse aspects, and the fact that Tokyo is where I was born and grew up is certainly a factor. But more than that, I think Tokyo still has so much more potential. There are still countless aspects of Tokyo that I have yet to uncover, and the idea of investigating them is very exciting. There are many things about Tokyo and perhaps about Japan as a whole that I find somewhat stifling, like the politics and the expectation to conform, but I believe there is potential for change and for the city to get even more interesting.

Something “invisible to the eye” seen through picture book making

The other interest that I am exploring is picture books. This summer, I am planning to publish the first of a series of picture books with death as the theme, which is what I am working on preparing for at the moment. With death becoming more of an immediate topic with earthquake disasters and the coronavirus pandemic, there are many more things I think about now on a daily basis, like how I should convey the topic of death to children, and whether I will be able to actually talk with children about it. This might be because when I was a child, the thought of dying scared me more than anything else.

Instead of through my own children, more often than not these days I find myself thinking about the topic based on my own childhood. Of course there is a lot I have forgotten but I feel that now that time has passed, I can finally think about past memories without anxiety and put them into words. I once heard Sergii Mirnyi, a journalist who covered the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster, say that local residents did not start talking about the incident until twenty years later. I think it’s very true that some things are difficult to talk about for ten or twenty years afterwards, and that some things are impossible to talk about even after twenty years. Painful experiences such as the death of someone close to you are especially hard to put into words, in my experience. Thinking about that makes me curious about the passage of time within my soul.

But that doesn’t mean my topic of interest has shifted in my writing. I want to continue writing about radioactivity and war, and I believe the theme of “things that are invisible to the eye” will always be a topic of fascination for me.

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Erika Kobayashi was born in 1978 in Tokyo. She currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Kobayashi creates works that are inspired from things that are invisible to the eye, time and history, family and memory, and the traces of place. She was awarded the 7th Tekken Heterotopia Literary Prize in 2020 for her novel, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, published by Sueisha. In 2014 she was nominated for the 27th Mishima Yukio Award and the 151st Akutagawa Award for her novel, Madame Curie to choshoku wo (Breakfast with Madame Curie), published by Sueisha. In parallel, she has presented installation works both in Japan and overseas, which enable viewers to re-experience various scenes in which the elements of fiction and documentary from her writings drift back and forth between personal narrative and social reality.

Her other publications include the collection of short stories She Looks into the Mirror, the nonfictional work Shin’ai naru Kitty tachi e (Your Dear Kitty,), inspired by the diaries of Anne Frank and based on the diary of Kobayashi father, the graphic novel Hikari no kodomo 1.2.3 LUMINOUS (Children of Light: Luminous), which traces the history of the atom and radiation, and a book of her recent writings, drawings, and comics, Wasurerarenai Mono (I Can’t Forget).

Kobayashi’s recent solo exhibitions include His Last Bow, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London (2019); 1F in the Forest of Wild Birds, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2019). Group exhibitions include Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2019); Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016); and The Radiants, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2015).