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Marudhan: Mr. Hoffman,
you are in Japan for nearly two decades now, from where
you are contributing essays, book reviews and translations
to various Japanese and Western magazines. In Japan, a land
of curious contradictions and oriental beauty, you must
have witnessed differences in lifestyle, culture and values,
when compared to the western way of living. How do
you think has this "shift" influenced you and
your works? Do you believe that a writer's environment
influences his thoughts and hence his works?
Hoffman: Being in Japan
kept me from taking my environment for granted. Relocating
to a whole new environment was like learning to see all
over again, just as I had to learn to speak all over again.
It was a bit like a return to infancy at 27. Few of my stories
have Japanese settings, but learning how to see in a new
way definitely influenced the settings they do have. And
most of those settings are not quite real—at least
not in the sense that a photograph is real. There is an
element of fantasy in them—may be something like what
Dostoyevsky called “fantastic realism”.
Marudhan: How do you select your materials?
Are they real-life portraits or purely imaginary?
Hoffman: Neither and
both. Actually I sometimes think that all my characters
are me in some form or other, narcissist that I am. In The
Empty Café the only character I can think of
offhand who is a fairly straight portrait of a real-life
model is Grace in “Solitude.”
Marudhan: Will you concur
with the generally held view that a writer has a responsibility
to educate and enlighten people and not merely entertain
them? Should a work carry a message, always?
Hoffman: I don’t
think a writer has a responsibility to do anything except
write according to his or her lights. The best writers are
enlightening—not because of any self-consciously assumed
responsibility, but naturally so. Lesser writers don’t
have that in them, and it’s no use telling them it’s
their responsibility to be enlightening—they can’t
give what they don’t have. On the other hand, I do
hate to see literature stooping to the level of television
entertainment. A message? I don’t want a writer’s
message, I want a writer’s life. I want a writer I
read to put his / her life into their work. I don’t
want them to tell me how to live—I want them to show
me how they live.
Marudhan: Mr. Hoffman,
since you are also a book reviewer, can you identify some
factors that good books have in common?
Hoffman: I don’t
review much fiction. Mostly I review academic books on Japan,
rather dry tomes, most of them filled with interesting knowledge
tediously presented because few scholars these days seems
to have mastered the art and craft of writing. I love good
writing, and I abhor bad. A book can contain all kinds of
interesting information—if it’s poorly written,
I won’t read it (or at least I’ll give it a bad
review). On the other hand, I’ll read anything with
pleasure whose writing lives and breathes, whether I’m
interested in the subject to begin with or not. I’ve
always thought that good writing is linked to good understanding.
To write poorly is not merely to lack a skill but to be
deficient in understanding.
Marudhan: In this age
of globalisation, it is at times, difficult to ascertain
whether a work has been produced to appeal a particular
region-specific audience or a global readership? How
do you handle this? Do you have a particular audience
in your mind when you work on a book?
Hoffman: No audience
in mind. The only audience I have in mind as I write is
me. If other people like it, of course that’s very
gratifying.
Marudhan: What would be your advice
/ recommendations to evolving writers?
Hoffman: Number one
: Read. That can’t be stressed too much. Keep a notebook
and pen handy and scribble your stray thoughts down as they
occur, because the most fruitful thoughts soon vanish. Spend
at least a small part of every day alone. And then, of course—write.
You have to maintain simultaneously two contradictory attitudes:
1) that you’re amazingly good, because otherwise you
won’t persist, and 2) that you’re nowhere near
good enough, because otherwise you won’t improve. Ignore
the rejection slips. Learn what you can from well-meant
advice, but write YOUR way, not the way the agents and editors
and creative writing proofs tell you to write. You may not
be the greatest writer on earth—you’re probably
not—but no one on earth can write YOUR stories better
than you can.
Marudhan: Whose works do you like the
most in fiction and nonfiction?
Hoffman: There are
four writers I discovered very young and who I keep going
back to : Dostoyevsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flannery O’Connor
and Kafka. These are writers who took our common reality
and made of it something profoundly individual. I read a
lot, but I’m not really very well-read; there are lots
of gaps in my literary education. I’m not too fond
of much contemporary writing. Too many tricks, too much
phony individualism and false passion, as if written to
gain the attention of indifferent people in a busy world.
Hard to blame them, I suppose. The word is busy and indifferent.
Nonfiction? Mostly philosophy and history. I’m totally
illiterate in technology and economics. Sometimes I think
I should read up on them, but I never get very far.
Marudhan: How do you
foresee the growth of literature in the times to come?
How much deeper would its impact be in our lives?
Hoffman: I think literature
as we know it is dying. In 200 years the book will be an
artifact. Even now, with more literate people in the world
than ever before, both percentage-wise and in absolute terms,
we’re not really readers any more. We’re scanners.
There are just too many competing interests and amusements
for serious reading to flourish. Sitting alone quietly with
a book—I’m afraid that delightful image is fast
on the way to becoming an anachronism.
Marudhan: Information
is now the key-word. We have numberless sources
today from where information keeps pouring in, tremendously.
Take the Internet, for instance. We are also witnessing
numerous e-zines sprouting on the web, taking up new roles
in publishing. How will you rate this development?
Hoffman: It’s
information glut—far more than we can absorb. More
than I can absorb, anyway. I’m sure many other people
have higher absorptive capacities than I have. But I think
too much is as big a problem as too little, with information
as with food. We’re not THINKING about the information
we’re exposed to. Info-glut is robbing us of our depths.
As for the e-zines and the internet’s new role in publishing—this
may be a contradiction, but I’m all for them. After
all, they’ve made my own publishing career possible.
Marudhan: How effectively
can a writer help society by way of writing?
Hoffman: Anything good
helps society. Good writing may be the only thing that can
keep the book alive, and that alone would be an enormous
service. Writing is one of the few communication media conducive
to genuine depth, as opposed to in-one-ear-out-the-other
television and most movies, for example. A writer can most
effectively help society by writing on a serious level,
keeping the standards high and making it think. 
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