Stupeur et tremblements
Amelie Nothomb Albin Michel (Paris) 1999

There is no such thing as national character. The notion that being, say, French automatically imparts to an individual a set of irresistible characteristics - the French character - is an affront to empirical logic. And yet, the most tired and flimsy assumptions about national character still find their destructive way into both intellectual discourse and commercial consultancy. In the field of human resources, for example, one can buy a library of learned titles covering the cultural differences between Swedes and Canadians, the possibilities for confusion and conflict whenever Latin and Germanic temperaments meet, different concepts of a "meeting" in Italy v. Japan….. You know the sort of thing. This type of work is given a status at spectacular variance with its content. National character "experts" hire themselves to companies to explain how - in, say, again France - the legacy of Cartesian dualism influences the shape of contemporary French capitalism. This whole approach to people and to life and to markets denies all the dynamism that truly characterises how we all behave. No field of consultancy endeavour supplies - from year to endless year - quite as much claptrap as this one.

This leads us to Amelie Nothomb’s soaraway French bestseller. Ms. Nothomb is a Belgian writer who often graces those late-night debate programmes that make French TV worth watching. Her "novel" relates to her early life as a young woman in Japan. (Her father was in the diplomatic service). By way of her experiences working (as identifiably a foreigner) for a large Japanese corporation, she constructs a vision - really a kind of X-Ray - of Japanese society. Much of the drama of the story turns on the play of rank within the company : who has superiority over whom; who can criticise another; how the currencies of subservience and control are distributed; what happens when a rule of behaviour is broken…. The heroine herself, as she progresses through this cultural education, breaches so much protocol that she finally receives a terrible humiliation : she is taken from her job in the accounts department and is given the daily task of cleaning the office toilets.

Now, on one level, this is just a story. But on another very blatant level, this is a philosophical and moral critique of Japanese society - and, yes, character - that seems strangely determined to confirm all manner of tired assumptions and dangerous prejudices. Stupeur et tremblements, let us repeat, has been one of the most successful books written in French in the last few years. (As we write, the author is enjoying similar success with a new title). It must be the case that opinion-formers, schoolteachers, people who run businesses all across France…have ingested these newly packaged myths about a particular foreign reality. This troubles us.

The author seems to have no other purpose but to characterise Japan. And it is a very unpleasant picture. She, the sensitive European flower, suffers in a corporate regime that seems little more than a cultural continuation of Japanese militarism. All she sees are people mangled under repressive hierarchies and terrorised by the fear (and the reality) of public humiliation, stalked by seriously unpleasant bully-bosses who exult in torturing them…... The various references to the war and to prisoner-of-war camps confirm the impression that this is an entire social order that is being accused of not progressing, not humanising itself nearly enough.

Contempt is not hidden. Reflecting on the poverty of life-chances facing Japanese women, the heroine/narrator proclaims "my profound admiration for every Japanese woman who has not committed suicide". In the same theme, she later declares :

"Japan is the country with the highest suicide rate, as everybody knows (sic). For my part, what astonishes me, is that suicide is not more common there".

And what about this throwaway jibe? When one of her bosses mumbles some regrets about the events that lead to her decision to leave the company, she says to herself : "A Japanese person who says sorry and means it - that happens about once every century".

The idea that is most emphatically at work here is that through anecdotes and experiences you can equip yourself to distil an entire social order. In reality, nothing could be more guaranteed to distort and to warp. It is fair enough, if you are so inclined, not to like Japan, whether you have lived there or not. But it is mephitic to good moral order to claim to be able to locate a national character - in this case, a highly repellent national character - the only basis of which is personal impression.

Stupeur et tremblements is yet one more attempt to make respectable a school of cultural analysis that cannot but corrupt the brain. Some 125m people live in Japan, subject no doubt to the daily interaction of old and new influences in their lives. It just cannot be true that their behaviours can be captured and categorised by something so shallow and so glib as this.

Amelie Nothomb is, incidentally, a very elegant writer. Which makes this whole thing so, so sad.

(Translations by Model Reasoning)