Alejandra Kamiya: "One doesn't create a work of art consciously."

It's autumn in Buenos Aires, the time of year when the city celebrates its International Book Fair . These days, warm-hued leaves cover the sidewalks, and the air carries a light melancholy. This is no small matter: for Alejandra Kamiya , an Argentine writer of Japanese descent, the connection between humanity and the natural environment permeates her work .

Kamiya was born in Buenos Aires in 1966, the daughter of a Japanese father and an Argentine mother . One April afternoon, she went out to photograph ash trees: she wanted to capture the moment when the leaves detach themselves, float for a few seconds, and then fall. "It happened to me several times, riding my bike and having all the yellow ash leaves fall on me. Magical happiness," says the author of the trilogy of stories composed of The Patience of Water on Each Stone, Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest , and The Sun Moves the Shadow of Still Things , where nature becomes a metaphor.

The writer says she was never able to fully photograph that moment. "Have you seen how now it seems like everything has to be captured with a camera?" she quips. But she does manage to capture other aspects , like silence or the details that change everything. Kamiya writes with the time of the world—but not this frenetic and uncontrolled one, but with the time of water, forests, and sun.

When asked how he constructs his narrative vision when writing, Kamiya confidently answers: “Writing is, in large part, translating that vision into language, finding a way for language to accompany you in that transcription.”

–In the story “Rice,” you tell a story about the fields and the war in Japan through gestures. What interests you about these everyday gestures that can go unnoticed?

–Gestures and body language are studied a lot these days. I've always been fascinated by them because, on the one hand, they condense, and on the other, you can't lie with gestures. So I find them to be very good material; they can produce an interesting dynamic. There's a kind of contradiction between words and gestures, or a tension between words and gestures: sometimes they accompany each other, sometimes they contradict each other, sometimes they open up in another direction.

–Your work focuses on what isn't often said, but at the same time, silence is very present in your stories.

Yes, but also because writing is made, for me, as Hemingway famously said with the iceberg theory. It's made of what isn't said. Wittgenstein also said this about his Tractatus; he maintained that his book wasn't what was written there, but everything he hadn't been able to write. And I share that feeling.

–Why are you interested in that?

–On a sensitive level, I prefer more indirect, more suggestive forms. I'll give you an example: my father always tells me that my grandfather raised (as we say) orchids, so much so that he even made an orchid that bears his name. Oh, but look how different this is from the Western perspective, which raised Chinese orchids valued for their fragrance. The beauty of the flower is then disregarded. So, so that the fragrance wouldn't be direct, it was placed in the next room, precisely so that it would be something one perceives more subtly. I like this approach, on the one hand, and on the other, now more deeply involved in the craft, it also seems to me a form of communication that resonates more deeply. Because if you say everything, the other person remains passive. If you suggest, the other person has to participate, and by participating, they become more involved. If not, it's something I already give you, and you don't have to do anything. Reading is something we put together.

–You think of the work not so much as individual stories, but more as a whole. And you said—correct me if I'm wrong—that you think they have a common origin, that they could be thought of that way.

Yes, I began to see it more clearly over time because one doesn't construct a work consciously. At least, that's not the work that interests me. I saw it in Annie Ernaux, for example. The work isn't something flat, it's like a ball. Yesterday I had to teach a workshop, and it occurred to me to say it like this: as if it were a ball. People asked me: "Where do we start?" And I told them it's not a line...

Exactly, it's a planet, a world. It's not a line you start on one side and move forward. It's something enveloping, as you say. So you can start on one side and get an idea of ​​that part of the planet. Then you read something from another place, and that gives you a wonderful sense of completeness. That allows you to tell the same thing many times, but from different perspectives. Once you see it from here, another time from there, and you understand something else. And that's how the idea is complete. Then you see it from another point of view, and something deeper, more interesting begins to form. Something that doesn't have so much to do with the plot, because more or less the same thing is always told, but with something deeper, which is what it aims for.

– Have you identified the topics that obsess you?

I recognize my themes, and often when talking to people I discover others. I have great readers who point things out to me. For example, they've told me: "You always talk about houses," or "you talk about boats," "about water," "about trees"… And yes, these are themes that are very important to me. But clearly: death, loneliness, connections… these are three universal themes for me. So one writes about that, and along the way one discovers what one thinks about those topics. As Borges said: the interesting thing is that I don't know what I'm going to say.

–How did your “writer self” change?

One has a connection with literature. As Angélica Gorodischer said, one frequents literature whether reading or writing. And like any connection, it's renewed, it changes, it has its moments, its moods. For example, when I was very young, writing had to do with exploring the world. At one point, it had something more cathartic about it. And then it shifted toward a center... toward an essential center. Lately, I've been fleshing out that idea. Last Friday, I was at a table at the fair, and while I was talking, I realized what the role of the writer is for me now. When you're reading and you feel that the idea that appears there is yours, but it was the writer who wrote it; that's what the writer must be: a kind of spokesperson. A scribe of ideas that are in the air but don't belong to them.

– Do you stop to think about the tensions between the West and the East?

Rather than stopping me, it constantly hits me head-on. My father taught me, and curiously, my mother, who is from Necochea, a rural area of ​​French Basque origin, has very Japanese mannerisms. It must be what Basques and Japanese people have in common. For example, I'm struck by the difference in how they occupy space. I feel like people in the West tend to walk in the middle of the sidewalk and take up the whole space. Or people start chatting in the entrance hall of a building. That would never happen in Japan.

– Do you feel that these tensions are expressed in your literature?

I like to dive in and see what happens. I try not to be cautious at all. I dive in headfirst. And then, there's always the correction. If I say something outrageous while diving in, I can correct it. It's not like I'm going to publish it.

– In other interviews, you mentioned that you understand the body as a remnant, and haikus came to mind. Did you read haikus?

Yes, yes. I read everything I could about haiku. But I have a problem: there are no good translations. I don't read Japanese, and when this whole haiku craze started, I bought everything I could. I read many different authors, from different eras, and they were so poorly translated that everything seemed written by the same author. So what we did was translate with my dad, trying to get as little out of the way as possible. We did the translation with three people: a poet, my dad—who was the leg in Japanese—and me, like the leg in Spanish. And the poet, the leg in poetry. And it was very difficult, very, very difficult. We did some very annotated translations to save what's lost, and it was a titanic task. Afterwards, I said: "How easy it is to write alongside the translation." In Japan, there are different forms of writing. There's a phonetic system, there's a syllabary, and there are ideograms. For example, "cause" or "rain." And they're composed of kanji. So, my dad explained each kanji to us when we did this translation: the etymology of each part, how it's used, everything. And we spent maybe hours on a three-line poem, because each ideogram was a concept, a story, a way of using it. We wrote five pages of everything we'd talked about. Then we'd sit down and try to fit it into three lines. And we'd spend, I don't know, five days, a week working. We'd come back with the result, show it to my dad, and many times he'd say, "Yes, the translation is fine, it means this. But this isn't a poem." And of course, what we'd lost along the way was the poetry.

It's an impossible job. Crazy. But it was fun to do.

– Your stories are very poetic.

The closest I came to poetry was making that translation. And then it seems to me that poetry is also in that gaze we mentioned earlier: suspended, slow, a little melancholic, timeless.

– Alicia Genovese says something similar, that to write poetry you have to let the world traverse you.

Absolutely. How lovely. I have that. And I can say I have it because it's not entirely good. Because every tree on this sidewalk runs through me.

Alejandra Kamiya's books are located at booth 1920 (Yellow Pavilion) Los Siete Logos, published by Eterna Cadencia Editora.