And so this good friend shuttled me north so that we might meet with this éminence grise she’d decided was my only chance that day. In the waiting room the receptionist took down relevant data about me and asked my native friend how she’d come to speak such fluid English while I knocked over a table and said something uncharitable to the bandaged guy who muttered something disparaging under his breath about gaijin.[x] The specialist demonstrated the extent of his expertise by requiring only ten minutes of consultation—mostly with my bilingual friend, though I sporadically slurred in with ill-formed sentence-portions in my idiosyncratic Japanese—to render his prognosis and prescribed course of treatment:
「帰国 し なさい。」
This wasn’t the response we’d been hoping for.
「帰国 し なさい?」 I asked.
And our crew-cut, monastic expert possessed of the professional amour-propre that comes only with decades of dedicated exertion in the trenches of one's chosen field met the confusion in my eyes with a conclusively stern gaze, nodded:
「帰なさい。」[9]
III.
William Gaddis’s posthumously published Agapē Agape is a work that might be unlike anything in the canon were it not for the career of Thomas Bernhard, who spent several decades beating William Gaddis to the despairing punch. Which uppercut consists, essentially (obviously I’m stooping to reducing two of my all-time-favorite authors’ oeuvres to a single-sentence paraphrase) in books about the failure to perfect a work of Art that are themselves ultimately imperfect but in their imperfection works of Art.
[9] —Return to your country.
—Return to my country?
—[Nodding] Go home.