Shimada : I think there is a common material in our novels, that is, the suburbs .

Erickson : I grew up in the suburbs at the time when the whole concept of the suburbs has really been defined terms of American society. At least in the 50’s, the suburbs were a place the people escaped to. Then in the 70's, the generation grew out of the suburbs came of the ages, the suburbs became the place the people escaped from. But in both cases, I think the suburbs has some kinds of an appeal at least in America the people who wanted to redefine their roots, and in that sense we define who they are.

One thing I noticed in your novel Dream Messenger , that I think some of my works share, is that the people are all psychically rootless, not attached to a place, and particularly in the case of this particular novel, they are not even attached to own birth, and you have concept of rental children . I think the characters in the numbers of my own novels are framed by that same psychic rootlessness, which is why time and space don’t account a lot. I think at the outset that was the suburban mentality. I would guess that at least in America that mentality has changed and it has become more conventional.

S : I read an article where you compared L.A. and Hollywood, and I felt, put it on Rubicon Beach's way, this is the L.A.1 and L.A.2. Although I never lived in L.A. , I have seen L.A. through the representation of the movies of Hollywood, and this image of the suburbs has been spread all around the world as the image of American suburbs. Seeing the Hollywood movies which depicted American way of life, Japanese people tried to build their own suburbs by imitating American suburbs.

E : Were the Tokyo suburbs a phenomenon of World War�U ?

S : As the exception there were some suburban place which was the idealization of country gentlemen before the Second World War, but most of the suburbs were the result of the high growth of the Japanese economy after the second world war.

E : I’m trying to place the time of the mentality of the country. Because in America the American way of life was exactly what people went to the suburbs to invent. America had just won the war and the economy was exploding. And the suburbs became an expression of the American triumphant of naivete. People went there not as the country gentlemen but as a new liberated middle-class no longer held to choose between cities and farms. But now the suburbs are rotting and falling apart. So the American identity that was invented out of the naivete and out of the dreams is in peril.

S : In Japan the suburbs are like a show-window of economic growth, and now partly they are in ruins. The image of American suburbs came into Japan through the Hollywood movies, which was invented on the movie set. And Japanese people seriously took it and tried to build the suburbs along that fictional image. Of course, the real life of the L.A. suburbs and the Hollywood suburbs are different, but the point is that in Japan the fictional suburbs appeared as the real town.

I’d like to go on to talk about the original specific topology which comes from the suburbs. At first I hated to live in such a Japanese suburbs, and come to think of it, it seems that the reason why I didn’t like living there was that I still wanted to stick to the old Japanese concept of nature and the feeling of reality. For those who living in the suburbs, in order to grasp the sense of reality they have to combine the images that are given from the mass media, for example, Hollywood movies, television, American pop music, Japanese comics and so on. And they has used these images as communicating material. I think I was looking at the ruins in the newly built suburbs where the houses and buildings were always shiny.

E : Was there a period when you rejected the suburbs and left ?

S : It was only one year when I lived in New York. When I left for the suburbs, I came to realize the grotesque aspect of the suburbs. One day when I was traveling, I realized the suburbs where I was living was sort of like a objet of surrealism. Walter Benjamin defines surrealism as a collection of monstrous dreams. And these dreams can be connected with their images even though they have nothing to do with each other. And I came to realize that only in such images the reality of the suburbs can be found. So in order to write the novel based on the suburbs, using the style of 19 century’s realism is not good for it, and I thought the style of surrealism would be much better to build the reality. And it came to my mind that to write about the town where I live, I have to actively rebuild that town or remake it as a collage of all other cities. I realized that what was needed was sort of an imagination of a mad architect who try to construct the suburbs as kind of a theme-park like Dissenney Land. After I read your novels I felt you had already done it. And I was encouraged to find across the Pacific Ocean there was a writer living in the same topos.

E : I was grown up in the suburbs in 50’s. The place where I lived was very rural, and there were ranches, farms, and also orchards. The place of my first fifteen years, the rural identity changed to a suburban identity and to a mega- suburban identity. The transformation was very fast. I think that, as I was growing up at the time, people were not quite sure what the suburbs were. It was in the process of being invented. And that kind of surreal transformation seemed very natural to a child, I didn’t know enough to realize it was surreal, it was real. It informed of my way of thinking, my way of seeing, and my way of creating. But at some point I felt constricted by it and I left it. And I still have a mental block against going back.

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