Hiding In Plain Sight

To The Casual Eye, Japan Has Luminous Natural Landscapes And High Culture, But To Author Akhil Sharma It Is The Japanese People’s Famed Inscrutability That Bears Examination

- Akhil Sharma

“Where is it?”

“There.”

“Where?”

The fog was all around us. My driver raised an arm and pointed a white gloved finger into the mist.

It was a cool afternoon and we were standing by the side of the road, two hours outside Tokyo by car and my driver was pointing towards Mount Fuji: except I couldn’t see this iconic symbol of Japan. All I saw was tall green pines wrapped in mist, not yellow Delhi mist, but mist like milk, mist like what you would see if a country had no cars, no smokestacks, nothing beyond pine trees and maybe people drinking tea and discussing philosophy. This, of course, is the Japanese aesthetic, to make everything disappear and to exist almost in essences. Go to gardens in Japan and what you see are not grassy lawns but stretches of moss; grass therefore has been replaced by colour and the slightest bit of softening.

How can people live in such abstraction, I wondered, on a recent trip to Japan?

And the answer I found was: they cannot.

I tried to discover the Japanese people on this recent trip and what I found was that their humanity was hidden behind a mist of Japaneseness in the same way that Mount Fuji was hidden by fog.

I was in Japan for a book tour. My novel Family Life had been translated into Japanese and I was supposed to give interviews and do readings.

My book is a novel, but it is based on my own story and the story of my family. When I was ten and my brother fourteen, my brother dived into a swimming pool and struck his head on the bottom. The blow stunned him and he lay underwater for three minutes. When he was pulled out, oxygen deprivation had caused massive brain damage. He couldn’t walk or talk. He couldn’t roll over in his sleep. He was fed through a gastrointestinal tube.