Interview with Michael Hoffman, author of Fuji, Sinai, Olympos

Inside the Book:

Title: Fuji, Sinai, Olympos

Author: Michael Hoffman

Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com

Genre: Essays

Format: Ecopy /Paperback

Travel companions on my journeys are four in number: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Basho.” (Travel) “He walked in priestly garb. Arriving towards evening at a town or village, he’d chant sutras until passersby gave him, or flung him, enough money for a flophouse bed, a little food, a bath and enough saké  to induce a measure of forgetfulness. ‘A beggar,’ he admonished himself, ‘has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar.’” (Walking) ‘“The pleasantest of all diversions,’ said the fourteenth-century Japanese priest Kenko,“ is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.’ Reading is inseparable from reverie. ‘Sitting alone under the lamp,’ I was soon not alone at all, but hosting, I venture to say, as vivid and varied a company as ever gathered under one roof. (Genji, Myshkin and Jones) “Everest is nothing, mere seismology.” (Fuji, Sinai, Olympos) 

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THE INTERVIEW:

How did you come up with the title of the book?

I actually had the title almost before I had anything else. I was thinking of the three sacred mountains in my life: Fuji because I live in Japan, Sinai and Olympos because they are the twin peaks of Western culture. The title shaped the book, rather than  the other way around.

What is your writing environment like?

Pretty austere. Kind of spartan. An upstairs room in my house. A bit of a mess, books all over the place. As I write I may read a sentence of this, a paragraph of that, not  knowing, making a point of not knowing, what book I’m reading from. I live in a small village on the sea, so I have a fine view. I like to think of the waves pulsing and surging through my writing.

What are the best tools for writers today?

Sorry, no idea.

What inspires you to write?

Thoughts. Sights. Talk. A paragraph read, a word overheard, a leaf quivering in a breeze, morning… I write first thing every morning and have for years now, so  it’s pretty much second nature. Something else: a feeling that something is very wrong with the world and with the way civilized humankind is living. Fear and loathing, in other words. Fear and dread. They are very animating, very inspiring emotions.

Did you learn anything while writing this book?

Everything that’s in the book is what I learned while writing it. And this: that I can write essays. My customary medium is fiction, so it as good to sing in a different key, so to speak.

What is your favorite quality about yourself?

A capacity for solitude, I think. I value it the more because I fear it’s being lost in an ocean of networking. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “If you are alone you are completely yourself but if you are accompanied by a single companion you are only half yourself.”

MEET THE AUTHOR

Michael Hoffman has lived in Japan since 1982. His columns appear regularly in the Japan Times, irregularly elsewhere. His previous books include "In the Land of the Kami: A Journey into the Hearts of Japan;" "Other Worlds; Little Pieces: This Side of Japan;" and "The Coat that Covers Him and Other Stories."