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Born in a mental institution on January 1st, 2001, William found himself in the body of a eighteen-year-old boy recovering from trying to sever the “naughty” part of his mind from the “nice” part, and destroy it. “Which part am I?” William wondered, innocently(?) Silence and reams of empty paper answered him. So he began to fill them with little black marks, until the notebooks were piled, ragged and wrapped with chains.

In the intervening years, he picked up the pieces of the boy’s life, and he completed bachelor’s degrees in English and Philosophy. He was headed for a happily-ever-after future--marriage, 2.5 kids, and white picket fences loomed. Luckily, the beloved, whom we shall call “Morella” (cf. Edgar A. Poe, “Morella”), shattered William, and with it the future. Betrayal sent him spiraling down into a void of self-loathing and despair.

Enter the novel. As the bottles ran dry and flirtation with Russian roulette began to bore him, he decided to give in to fate. Like Job, he cried, “What do you want from me?” He sold his soul to tuche and signed it in blood. Tuche--greek, loosely meaning “luck,” it is the external, the wild and unpredictable that whips and howls outside the walls men build, that which man has always tried to master but never will.

He is haunted by dreams: of Morella, of course, but the novel takes care of that--it is the obsession with Japan (Nihon, the land where I am Other) which he cannot shake. The coin toss. An interview for a position at his school, UCI: if he succeeds, he will be set back on the Path to Professorship, and led to the Crystal Edifice (home of everything lofty and beautiful; cf. Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”); if he fails, he will go to Nihon, to start a new life as a writer. It is a sure thing, he is ridiculously qualified, he is a brilliant and rising star on campus, he is beloved by professors.

Surprise ending: he does not get the job. In William’s words, “There’s no such thing as a safe bet.” Can he renege on tuche? Is it too late? His most insane friends are ecstatic. One, the Wizened Hunter, already pursuing his own writing career in Mexico, tells William: “Failure sustains us when we cannot sustain ourselves.” Lucky for me, William muses, failure is something I excel at.

In early 2007, William will go to Nihon. He embraces the horror of it. He learns to pay homage to fear. William becomes The Gaijin, and joins the writers underground: their name is Legion. Inevitably, he meets another Writer from Underground, Josué, in the seedy alleys of Southern California, his soon-to-be distant homeland. They determine to create a nexus, “Writers from the Underground,” where all lost and ink-drenched souls can unite with one voice, disparate yet harmonious. However, the first challenge has yet to met: the novel must be completed: the past must be bound to a merciless melody to create space for the future.

“One’s work is one’s practice,” the Wizened Hunter says. One’s practice is one’s life, William adds. Here goes nothing, Gaijin-san says. A record is created: the narrative and musings of Gaijin-san, as he sets sail (figuratively speaking) towards the blank page of his future. There are no road marks here, no signs. He is the foreigner and the Other. He is lost in every way. He calls the record The Itsubun, the Unknown or Lost Writings.

“Itsu”—it means being lost; peace; hide; mistake; beautiful; in turn...it seems appropriate.

“To be pastless,” Gaijin-san tells me, “is to anticipate death.”
“To anticipate death,” Gaijin-san tells me, “is to make a clearing. To free oneself to become anything.”

This is the Itsubun.

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