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My father was originally from Hiroshima.


When he was a high school student in Hiroshima, the A-bomb exploded.
He didn't die.
His friends disappeared within moments.

He walked everywhere on the destroyed road to search in vain for their corpses. As a survivor, he never wanted to recount what he saw in those days.

One day in surprise he told me that an old woman had asked him to piss on her because of the pain of the burns.
He did not want to and did not feel like it.


He saw a detached horse head dangling on a telegraph pole.


I belong to the second generation of the atomised.
I forget French from day to day.

I was born in Kobe.
I was very sick.
I was weak.


I was too clever. I was really obedient, -you say sage in French?-, so I had an ample chance of becoming a delinquent.

When I was 14, I read a translation of a book by Rimbaud.
So it's decided!, I said to myself. That book was crucial.

The Japanese '68 phenomenon had begun.
I was in high school. I was seventeen years old.

That age is not good, he says.

"He says" in the sense of Paul Nizan. Have you ever read Paul Nizan?, this is the one who said, 'I was 20 years old, I won't tell anyone it's the most beautiful age in life'.

We did the barricades.
I was on the side of the Japanese Red Army.
I wasn't a terrorist though.

I always refused to kill.

My friend Masao Adachi is a filmmaker.
He is 84 years old today. He was expelled from Lebanon.
He was the spokesman for the Japanese Red Army.

You ask if he was a terrorist? No.

He was called a terrorist. He never killed anyone.
Maybe it was his fate and what he had to live through.


I have always thought a lot about revolutionary violence.

I was unable to give myself an answer.
I refused to study at university.

It was my life, I was happy.

Behind the barricades I read a book by Artaud.

There were only two of his books translated into Japanese, so I learnt French myself to read his books Behind the Barricades.

You see, it was a long journey.


Rimbaud says that 'there can only be an end to the world by advancing'.
Were the barricades the beginning or the end?

Here, look.
These are books by Artaud that I translated into Japanese.
The Theatre and its Double, Heliogabalus or the Crowned Anarchist, Writings of Rodez, Van Gogh the Suicide of Society and then others, are all over here among other books.

Mishima was certainly not a leftist.
But he did enter the barricades of Tokyo University to argue with the revolutionary students. Being there was definitely dangerous. He had the courage to go and speak directly to the extreme left.

Such an action was highly unlikely from other intellectuals of the time.
I openly accept his courage and intelligence, but he did not influence me as a person or as a writer.


I was always on drugs at that time.
I was taking all the drugs I could find.

The barricades were not a grave.
I can see the destroyed table.
The chairs were stacked like this.

Friends and comrades are with me.
It was dark outside. Everything is silent.
We were very worried about the police.

I can remember the smell of the chairs.
I can feel the violence ready to explode at any moment, but everything was calm.

Everything was contradictory.
I haven't come out of that contradiction.
I haven't come out of it yet!

I have a heart disease.

When I was fifteen I took a very strong somnifer. Those kinds of sleeping pills have been banned for a long time. I vomited but the effect was as interesting and beautiful as heroin.

I have never been interested in alcohol.
You piss all the time with alcohol. Always water. Always water.
I always drank water.


But with drugs, those were my interest and my territory.

I remember that we had stolen drugs from the hospital in the pharmacy thanks to a doctor. He had been really kind.
Why had that doctor been so kind? I don't know.


We had a lot of problems with drug dealers, drug pushers.
Anyway, I realised after a while that drugs were not usable for inspiration and creative fulfilment. But it was too late.
If I took amphetamines right now I could have a heart attack.

I fled Japan.

There were problems with the public security police and of course with the drug squad officers.

I was a member of the extreme left. I was reading Marx, Trotsky, Curzio Malaparte. I was reading things that went against my society. I was a problem for the state.


I was a little enemy of the Japanese state and society.
In those days we threw petrol bombs and stones.

I was constantly in danger of being arrested, like my comrades.
In Japan I had to lock myself in my house.

Meanwhile, the situation in France was quite similar.
The writers I translated were all exiles from French society.

I generally don't like France. They are too egocentric there -I am joking-. But they have a beautiful language. I love beautiful languages. Vincent Jelen is my only French friend in Kobe. I still have a friend in France who calls me sometimes.

He is handsome and has a deep culture.
In those days there were beatniks and hippies in Japan too, especially in Shinjuku.

I was a beatnik.
It was cold in Paris.
It's cold in the world.


When they asked me where I was from I decided to say 'Je sui Allemand', I am German. At that point they no longer asked me anything.

Me, an Asian, I didn't exactly look like a German. But if I said that, they would leave me alone.

I wrote essais on Beckett and Artaud.
I wrote novels, especially about the concept of plural identity.
I lived in Spain, in Morocco, in France.

I have written. I have always written.
I wrote to go further afield.

When I was a child, I wanted to study classical piano. Then I got sick and started listening to the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground and the noise music I could access.

When I was in Europe over the years, the first punks appeared.
Music is linked to my body like dancing. It is a symptom of a body without organs.


It is Artaud's idea. To get rid of God's judgement. He found another body, a body without organs. Inorganic. In his own body, I say. As much as in his own sick, drugged, alcoholic, masochistic body. This idea has given inspiration to many philosophers, such as Deleuze. I believe that the body, that body, is deeply connected to our real body.

I was in Tokyo, I said, among beatniks older than me.

But after the earthquake my parents' house was destroyed and I returned to Kobe.

Ma mère

My mother.
My mother was very strange.
How can I explain.

She was beautiful, she was beautiful in the classical sense.

She didn't look it, but of the women I knew, she was the strangest woman.
She accepted all my oddities without ever saying anything.
She was not ordinary.

I saw her die.
I watched my mother die.
I watched my mother die very closely.

But I'm not afraid of death.
What is death.
In itself, I mean. Where is the death of death?


My father had four experiences that disappointed him.

First was the flooding of Kobe.
Second was the Americans dropping bombs, lots of bombs on Kobe.
The third was Hiroshima.
The fourth was the earthquake in Kobe.

And he always survived.
He is still alive.
He lives next door.


As a musician I like Monteverdi.
There's his tomb in Venice.
I would like to embrace it.
Yes, like Nietzsche the horse.


I was very influenced by European writers.
By the theologians and philosophers also.

I wanted to understand why the Europeans, I mean the poets, the artists, the cursed writers or whatever they are called, destroyed their lives.

It is a question of madness.
Is madness an idleness, an absence from work?
I wanted to understand exactly why in depth.


When I read their story through the novels, that was the first thing I asked myself.

Men have not changed since Roman times, not only politically.
They have always done the same things. It is a question I ask myself.
I would like to understand Jews, Catholics and Islamics, but I don't understand them.

I don't even understand the Japanese of today actually.
I have to say that I have things to understand that I question myself about every day.


All the ancient Greek philosophers were clochards.
Even St. Augustine stole from a tomb, you know?
He became a Catholic afterwards.


Before he wasn't.

Manifestation avec molotov

Les Barricades de l’université de Tokyo

EP-4  et mes amis

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