Xie Wang (who, for those unfamiliar with my writings, is the owner of a small Buddhist bookstore here in Shanghai) has a friend named Zhou Haiming, whom they often refer to as “Master Zhou” (using the English word “Master”). Xie Wang had first introduced me to Master Zhou as “a poet who never writes down his poems,” which of course made me very curious about him. Whenever I’d run into him, Xie Wang’s other friend Fish would also there, arguing with Master Zhou. Fish seems to think Master Zhou is a complete buffoon — he made a documentary about Master Zhou once which I didn’t understand since it was completely in Shanghainese, but when he screened it at an independent film festival a young woman got up from her seat and slapped Fish’s face because she found the whole thing a massive insult to Master Zhou. I like Fish, but I find Zhou Haiming much more sympathetic. “I admit that I have poor grammar,” he said once in one of his arguments with Fish, “I admit that I’m a talentless failure, but at least I still try to make art.” To which Fish responded “You’re just saying that to sound humble. When you lie in bed with your wife at night, you think you’re the most talented artist who’s ever lived.” At one point during this conversation, Master Zhou suddenly stood up to recite on of his poems to me from memory like a Roman orator, gesticulating madly — and I of course didn’t understand a word he said.
I bring up Fish and Zhou Haiming because I feel like they’re precisely the kinds of writers that you and I aren’t. Our conversation of influence thus far has almost been entirely in diachronic terms — that is how we (or others) have been influenced by those that preceded us. Even more specifically, we've tended to think of influence as something derived from individuals — we've talked a lot about how this particular person, Tim Rogers, influenced us. We haven’t considered the kind of mutual influence contemporaries and friends have on each other. I think a lot of this is simply because we’re both quite solitary individuals. Speaking for myself, I've never been a part of any real-life artistic movement or scene. At this point, I don't think I ever will.
One time Master Zhou asked me who my favorite of the Beats authors was. Xie Wang explained to me that what Zhou Haiming really hoped for in asking this question was that, being an American, I’d know something about Kerouac, Boroughs or one of those other guys that he didn’t — that in living in the same country that these authors had, somehow I’d been privy to rumors about their sex lives that weren’t written down anywhere (this was the specific example Xie Wang gave). I replied that I’d never really read the Beats much — just a little bit of Gary Snyder’s poems and Kerouac’s haiku. Master Zhou was disappointed by my answer. Xie Wang tried to defend me by saying that, having grown up removed from them by half a century, the Beats are as foreign to me as they were to Xie Wang’s generation, back in 80s Shanghai, when they first started reading them. Yet as time goes on, I feel like this isn’t a good excuse. I recently started reading On The Road in hopes of understanding these middle-aged men more.
The book revolves around the character of Dean Moriarty, based on the real-life Neal Cassady, who, like Master Zhou (or Socrates and Confucius), was “a poet who doesn’t write.” The dichotomy between Kerouac and Cassady feels quite revealing in terms of understanding why Tim Rogers’ writing had such an effect on me (and maybe on you too).
Tim Rogers was a guy who lives in Tokyo from approximately 2001 to 2010 who hung out with a bunch of other expats in Tokyo while also engaging extensively online with Americans and Brits not in Tokyo who were obsessed with Japanese things, especially the obscure. I realize now that a lot of the things I associate with him were actually quite common to this vague group that he was both a part of and frequently trolled against. Yet most of those other people didn't write, weren’t very good at writing or were Japanese and therefore any online presence they might have had is inaccessible to me. All of these different people, many of whom are probably just as interesting as Tim Rogers if not more so, are mediated entirely through him. Not just did he turn himself into a literary creation, he did the same to everyone he met in Japan, and somehow in doing so he absorbed their magic and made it a part of this body of work that somehow “belonged to him”. You could say that it’s not Tim Rogers writing I liked so much as the world he was in. Yet I can’t make that statement too confidently because I only know that world through him — a world that certainly feels different from the mid-2000s Tokyo I’ve read about in Japanese authors’ work, even if they are many points of intersection. It’s hard to say what is a result of the structure of Tim Rogers’ mind, representing Tokyo inside of it, and what actually came from the people he met and groups he belonged to.
The first time I met someone in real life who liked Number Girl and knew nothing at all about Tim Rogers was quite strange to me. It wasn't a case of me finally connecting with someone who liked this thing I thought only I liked — I didn't actually like Number Girl (though I do like Zazen Boys). Something much stranger was going on. I had let Tim Rogers, an at-the-time obscure internet personality, define in my mind this band much more well-known than he was, to the point that I couldn't imagine the band existing without being mediated through him. This shock has repeated itself far more frequently since I've come to Shanghai, where there are a lot more people familiar with "lesser-known" (i.e. unrelated to games or anime) Japanese culture than in the US. Anytime an acquaintance talking about their vacation to Tokyo back in 2018 mentions some toponym I'd previously only known from Tim Roger's writing, I think to myself "that place actually exists after all."
When I started writing myself, this phenomenon inverted on itself: suddenly I had a perverted desire to accrue the kind of power I imagined someone like Tim Rogers (or Murakami) had, being the guy who introduces people to their favorite band, becoming inextricably linked with these things in the consciousness of all my unsuspecting readers whose brains aren't brimming with the encyclopedic knowledge mine is. Once I recognized Tim Rogers as a mediator, I had a subconscious desire to throw him out of my life and become other people’s mediator. Once I realized that this is what I was doing, I became ashamed of it, and developed an irrational need to resist all forms of mediation.
This has two components. On one hand, I’ve started being a lot more interested in other people’s personal history with the things they like. A good example of this is Long Vacation, a 90s Japanese TV show that I’d first heard about through Tim Rogers. My girlfriend, however, watched it as a kid and has a deep nostalgia towards it that neither I nor Tim Rogers could ever possibly have, having both only encountered it as adults. Just because he’s loudly and boisterously talked about the show in many places and just because I happened to be introduced to it by him doesn't mean that I need to accept his framing of it. My girlfriend's personal experience with the show is more valuable than his, simply because she is a real person, and he is, for all intents and purposes, the literary creation of some shadowy entity on the other side of the internet that is associated with a human body which I've technically met once, but exists entirely outside of my life.
On the other hand, I try to resist letting my writing compound into some fixed "me," turning myself into a predictable character that my readers can keep coming back to and feeling comfortable with. As soon as that "me" exists in writing, I'll be stuck in a literary karmic cycle, playing a role enforced upon me by some past version of myself that I no longer feel any connection to. This is extremely hard to resist, as I've found that, in my attempts at comprehensibility, I often reference my older writing, which immediately suggests a kind of coherence between present me and past me that often exceeds what's actually there. This is a kind of inherent dishonesty in being a human being, especially one that regularly engages in a medium like writing that has the potential to last for months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, etc.
Yet, my resistance towards Tim Rogers is what places us in the same tradition, perhaps even more so than if I’d continued embracing him unquestioningly. I was surprised when you brought him up in your first letter in this series. We’ve both written about him quite a bit in our private emails, trying to psychoanalyze his effect on us – yet it feels strange and perhaps even embarrassing to write in public about someone who’s influenced me so much, and yet towards whom I have such conflicted feelings. After further examination though, it’s probably for the best to be honest and explicit about one’s influences, rather than trying to hide them.
This is one of the many dishonesties Tim Rogers enjoyed engaging in. If Rogers ever becomes worthy of people with PhDs writing academic studies of his work, they’ll have a field day contemplating why he chose to emphasize certain influences like Hemingway, but hide others, like David Foster Wallace. Having written this out though, I suppose the answer’s pretty obvious: he came of age at a time when everyone was influenced by David Foster Wallace, and therefore it seemed cooler to boast about not having read him. I, on the other hand, grew up a generation behind Tim Rogers. David Foster Wallace, Kerouac and Hemingway all feel the same to me: they’re the literary idols of people who aren’t me.
My girlfriend took me yesterday on a long journey to a café in the middle of a forest on Chongming Island, north of Shanghai. The owner used to live on the same street the we live on in Changning district, before he left the city to become the Chinese equivalent of a Tiktoker while running his café. He’d listen to the conversations of his guests, and no matter what the topic was, he always seemed to have some anecdote to chime in with, or some idiosyncratic opinion. I found this quite endearing, whereas my girlfriend found it annoying. It made me contemplate a thought that I’ve had many times in the past: I’m irresistibly drawn to “cool” uncles, not because they’re actually cool, but simply because I envy their ability to make the most mundane topics seem mysterious and deep, without even trying. I envy good conversationalists, perhaps because I wasn’t exposed to any growing up. If I’d had a cool adult to talk to in real life when I was 17, I might have still enjoyed Tim Rogers writing, but I doubt I would have spent so much time digging into the depths of the Wayback Machine searching for everything he’d ever written. Literature would have a very different role in my life – rather than being a form of individual communication, where I focus on the idiosyncrasies of the author, maybe I’d care more about artistry and universal human emotions. Maybe Romance of the Three Kingdoms would be my favorite of the famous vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, rather than Dream of the Red Chamber. Yet I didn’t have a master conversationalist for an uncle, and so I read Tim Rogers instead.
An artifact of the format he chose to communicate in, novelistic essays, is, as you noted, that in every story he told, even when he was just talking about video games he liked, he was the main character. I’ve been thinking a lot about this quality of Tim Rogers’ writing since you’ve mentioned it.
I remember seeing the word "Polyphonic" used to describe Demons and The Brothers Karamazov on Wikipedia, a description which seems to have originated from Bakhtin. The idea is that in these two novels, there are all these different characters with different philosophies that end up in the same rooms at different points, interacting with each other like the voices of a fugue. There isn't a single main character in these books, but it's not really the case that all of them are the main character either. They all exist in a single timeline. When one is the main character of a story, the flow of time is dictated by your perception and no one else. An eventful hour in your life might have 100 pages dedicated to it, while an uneventful year might be passed over in a sentence. In Dostoevsky's "polyphonic" novels the timeline is shared by many characters, which are made to conform to the linear structure of the novel using tools like flashbacks or the characters recounting important details in dialogue that the narration had skipped over when it had previously been at the point of time when said details occurred. Time belongs to no one, and as such these novels don't feel as "personal" to me as, say, Crime and Punishment or Notes from the Underground.
It’s interesting contrast this with one of the great works of Chinese literature, The Records of the Grand Historian (or Shiji for short). Shiji, ostensibly an attempt to write a history of the entirety of Chinese society, is structured as a series of interconnected biographies. This has the peculiar effect of allowing everyone to be "The Main Character". When Sima Qian writes about Li Si conspiring with Zhao Gao to place Qin Shi Huang's youngest son Huhai on the throne rather than his appointed heir Fusu, this is characterized in completely different ways in different figures' biographies. In Li Si's biography, he is compelled by Zhao Gao and hardly has a choice in the matter, in the end complying because he hopes that he can better serve the empire this way, whereas in the biography of Meng Tian, one of the generals Li Si and Zhao Gao have killed in seizing power, the Li Si and Zhao Gao are placed on more or less equal footing. There is no real attempt to present a single objective history – instead you have all these contradictory accounts of different lives, written from what I assume was Sima Qian's imagination of their perspectives. It's even more interesting when you have people like Qin Shi Huang, Liu Bang, or Xiang Yu that show up in an enormous number of other people's biographies as "side-characters." E.g. there's a passage in the annals of Xiang Yu where, as a kid, his uncle took him to watch Qin Shi Huang march through their city, and Xiang Yu dismissively declares that he could do what Qin Shi Huang does, like the narrator of Money for Nothing watching rock stars on television. Another aspect of this is that at the end of each biography, Sima Qian's own perspective suddenly is revealed when he writes his conclusions. In modern day academic/historical writing, I'm used to conclusions of papers or book chapters being more or less skippable summaries of what I've already read, but Sima Qian's conclusions almost always contain new elements that weren't in the main text of the biographies themselves, because Sima Qian is no longer living inside the characters, but is instead writing as the "real person" he was, someone several hundred years later looking back on the historical figures' lives.
You write about that when you wrote personal essays like Tim Rogers, you found yourself lying, just as he must have done. Sima Qian is constantly lying as well, both in a "factual" sense as well as the "stylistic" sense that you were referring to – all without apologizing for it. This was in part because he sees each biography of his work as a kind of monument to the figures in question, immortalizing them. I think these "historical distortions" were also a necessary result of the way he gathered information, a combination of going through written records and travelling around the empire, gathering information passed down by different oral traditions. In some sense, the different perspectives of different characters are a kind of fossilization of the differing memories of the great grandchildren of the people affected by these historical figures.
One of the consequences of my exposure to Tim Rogers was that I became obsessed with honesty. "Honesty" is one of those words that Plato could write a dialogue about, where Socrates ultimately ends up at some bizarre definition that makes zero sense and instead throws me into doubt for the rest of my life over whether or not there could ever actually be something resembling what I used to imagine "honesty" meant. I don't want to belabor the point that writing is inherently dishonest – I've already repeated this sentiment over and over about my own writing in my emails to you. I can’t help but feel that if honesty is impossible, then perhaps the next best thing is to allow everyone’s lies to coexist happily – though perhaps that’s just a form of nihilism. At the very least though, I think it’s best to avoid ways of viewing literature that lead to “hegemonic lying,” where one person’s subjective view of reality (or even a small handful who don’t have anything to do with each other) are put in a privileged position. This precisely what happens when I view literature as a kind of family tree of influences where I read the great masters and learn from them – that is, the diachronic view of influence that I began this letter discussing.
And so I return to the idea of a “scene” or literary movement. Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweetheart gets its name from an incident occurring early on in the plot:
Let me get back to how Sumire and Miu met.
Miu had heard of Jack Kerouac and had a vague sense that he was a novelist of some kind. What kind of novelist, though, she couldn’t recall.
“Kerouac… Hmm… Wasn’t he a Sputnik?”
“Sumire couldn’t figure out what she meant. Knife and fork poised in midair, she gave it some thought. “Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation.. . .”
“Isn’t that what they called the writers back then?” Miu asked. She traced a circle on the table with her fingertip, as if rummaging through some special jar full of memories.
“Sputnik . . .?”
“The name of a literary movement. You know — how they classify writers in various schools of writing. Like Shiga Naoya was in the White Birch School.”
Finally it dawned on Sumire. “Beatnik!”
What struck me about this passage when I reread the book last year was the equation of Beatniks with the White Birch School. At the time, I chalked this up to Murakami’s playfulness. What I knew of the White Birch School made me imagine something very serious and “literary” in a more classical sense, whereas the Beats were somehow “anti-literary.” However, now that I’ve actually started reading Kerouac, I can’t help but feel the comparison isn’t that odd: Many of Shiga Naoya’s most famous stories are essentially just semi-fictionalized descriptions of him hanging out with his writer friends (e.g., At Kinosaki), just like On The Road. When I first read At Kinosaki, what I was reminded of was Su Shi’s Ode to the Red Cliffs, which is also a poetic non-fictional narrative about an outing with some friends and the conversations they had. Literary groups hanging out, talking about their predecessors, gazing upon the world, and responding to each other’s works have existed since the beginning of literature.
And now I’m reminded of Wang Xizhi’s Orchid Pavilion Preface, one of those canonical prose pieces one has to read sooner or later when studying Classical Chinese, wherein he describes the titular Orchid Pavilion Gathering, a kind of poetry writing competition involving copious alcohol. One of the themes of the short piece is a kind of equation between the present, past, and future generations of poets — what we’re writing might be different, but future generations will feel something reading what we wrote here today at this gathering, just as we feel something reading the works of ancient poets composed during similar gatherings. This is a very different conception of continuity than the ideas of “influence” that we talked about up until now. Zhou Haiming and Fish are heirs of the Beats, not necessarily because they’ve learned anything about how to write from them (though that may be so), but because they’ve formed their own little group in which they struggle with art and language the same way the Beats did, despite the circumstances being very different.
It's been many months since I wrote my last letter to you (I got caught up doing other things…) What I’m struck by, rereading both my letter and yours, is how many ideas I thought were my own reveal themselves in your writing. Our correspondence has gone on in the background while I’ve written all sorts of other things, and while it might not make for the content of a novel like On the Road, I’d wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s had as much influence on my thinking as any great novelist I’ve read.
And so, we reach something resembling an end. In this first round of epistolary essays, I was given the task of wrapping up our conversation to some sort of conclusion. You know very well that I can’t do that. Concluding things is much more of a Balckwellian skill — your two letters have revealed that conclusions have always been critical to you. I, on the other hand, never really conclude my essays. I’d like them to go on and on, and always imagine that the final product that I present to the reader is nothing more than a fragment of some greater never-ending work.
For that reason, I’m going to end this letter here. I’m quite confident that this won’t be the last time we talk about any of the themes we’ve discussed, even if the topic I’ve picked for the next round may seem quite different (to be revealed shortly).