Day 1: Get your Morning Fix

Chris Flynn is to be forgiven for his opening gambit. “It’s early for me. Is it early for you?” It is early (10 am), and it’s cold outside – hail was still treacherously lurking in my front yard, waiting to wrongfoot me on my way in to the first day of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

A good crowd is seated in and around the restaurant fixtures of Feddish, which has a view of the the Eiffel-like skirts of the Arts Centre. Some of us are perched on bar stools, and others sit in threes or fours around starched white tablecloths, like we’re in on some secret after-hours event run by the restauranteurs. But we’re not doing anything on the sly – we’re at The Morning Fix, the free event held every morning at Federation Square’s Feddish.  The titular ‘fixes’ are short readings from festival guests. It’s a good way to go if you haven’t yet cracked the voluminous festival program. Just turn up, and you’re guaranteed a mix of authors – international and local, non-fiction and fiction.

Other fixes are available too: “Are we open for coffees?” Chris, the session’s chair, asks Naomi, who works here, ponytailed and ensconced in the horseshoe-shaped bar. She confirms that coffee is on. I’m sitting opposite where the house spirits are lined up – Gordon’s Gin, Johnny Walker Red, Jack Daniel’s. If they’re not open for coffees, I could go a Moscow Mule.

Or perhaps a fifth of Jack’s would be a good companion for the first reader: Joe Bageant, an ‘expert on rednecks’, with a reading from his latest, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. He not only reads his piece, but also sings: ‘Where were you when they nailed him to the boards,’ in a deep rumble that would have no shame in shaking hands with Johnny Cash’s. Bageant’s reading is about ‘being saved’ across the heartland of America. He thinks everything his country does is ‘immoral or downright wicked’ – which you can hear more about at tomorrow’s USA Today session.

From the United States to Australia’s adopted British son, Jon Bauer, with an excerpt from his debut novel Rocks in the Belly. ‘I used to tell people I was a foster child, even though I was the only one who wasn’t fostered.’ He reads from a section where his unnamed narrator is remembering his childhood – particularly a fostered child named Robert, who died. It’s such a harrowing and meditative excerpt that previous listeners have told him they thought the character was in Guantanamo Bay.

Benjamin Law, native of Brisbane, has brought along an entourage – his publicist and his mother, who is a significant presence in his collection of personal essays, The Family Law. ‘I thought I’d bring some brutal warmth into the room,’ he says. I still have my gloves on, so I’m not complaining. He describes weather conditions up north in which you could ‘make pudding in sinks’. His mother is unimpressed with their lack of forbearance. ‘You think this is hot?’ she asks. She grew up in Malaysia, and went to a convent school, where the nuns would wear full habit, ‘their boobs poached in their own sweat like pork fillets’.

I’m not feeling so cold anymore.

Naomi comes out of the kitchen with a wagon wheel-sized plate of cookies. I think Law’s reading has influenced what I see, because at first I think they’re chicken schnitzels. No such luck. I suppose it’s too early for crumbed meat.

The last segment of this literary breakfast is Kim Cheng Boey, who is a Singaporean transplant. Kim travelled from Calcutta to Morocco, and intended to write a travel book. What emerged instead was a collection of essays, Between Stations. Entangled with this writing project were Boey’s attempts to salvage memories of his father, who had passed away. Boey tells movingly of taking his son on walks he used to do with his father: ‘I’ve become my father, and my son is me.’

The Morning Fix is on every day of the festival’s main program. See who will be giving you your your fix here.

Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice

When it comes to genre, I’m usually more True Blood than true crime. But it’s a wrench to resist Jake Adelstein’s story, as told in his book Tokyo Vice: Jewish-American kid applies for a job at a Japanese newspaper (and not just any newspaper; it’s the Yomiuri Shimbun, which has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world) and despite his Japanese language score being in the bottom ten, he’s called in for an interview and he gets the job, only to end up sitting opposite a member of the biggest organised crime group in Japan, who is relaying a death threat from his boss. Just another day in the life, really.

Adelstein’s first posting is in half-rural, half-suburban Urawa, a ‘place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable”’. But, as unfashionable as it is, Urawa is where he cuts his teeth as a police reporter. Navigating the complex spatial politics of the Yomiuri’s office (“Who the hell told you could sit down here!”) and getting up to speed with the house style (“I’ll expect you to know it within a week.”) are small tasks compared to learning how to update the office scrapbooks.

Starting out in any profession is a big ask in any case, but being an American who works for a Japanese newspaper has its own challenges. Adelstein’s first kikikomi (interviews related to a crime) are comedic adventures, with potential interviewees mistaking him for a salesman. The cultural differences serve him well, too, sometimes; “dumb gaijins” can get quite handily behind police tape.

Adelstein is a chummy and deft translator of Japanese culture: from the Japanese reverence for language, as exemplified by the concept of kotodama – the spirit of language that resides in every word; to the underbelly of Japanese culture, which makes our Underbelly look like Play School. Eventually, Adelstein scores a post at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where he begins to cover the extraordinary crime syndicates of Japan – the legendary yakuza.

As Adelstein explained in an interview on WNYC, the yakuza are more Wal-Mart than West Side Story. On one end of the spectrum, there are the members who ‘own’ the illegal immigrants peddling counterfeit wares on the street. On the other end, you have the supremos who launder money through their innumerable – and legitimate – loan businesses and hostess bars.

It would be hard not to admire the seemingly unassailable extent of the various yakuza enterprises, except that, unavoidably, regular people get hurt or disappear. Adelstein’s career path takes a turn when he becomes involved in the story of Lucie Blackman, a British girl who went missing while working as a hostess in Tokyo’s infamous Roppongi district. In this quest, Adelstein straddles the line between impartial observer and passionate truth seeker. And it wasn’t to be the only time he came face to face with the ugly side of Tokyo.

Jake Adelstein will be a guest of the 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival. He will appear in conversation on September 4 (free event), The Real Life of Crime with Robert Richter QC and Mark Dapin, and Worldwide Crime with Malla Nunn and Louise Welsh, both on September 5.