Mrs Tsk *

Metaphysics of absence: Here’s a first look at the cover of The Book of Japans, published by Sternberg next month.

Getting a glimpse of the cover for your new book or record is perhaps the single most exciting moment for a writer or musician. It’s the moment at which you realise that an ephemeral sequence of words or notes is about to become an object in the world; a product, a fact, a thing.

This thing happens to be making a statement about things. Whereas my scratch cover had merely sketched the plot, designer Zak Kyes has — with typical brilliance — plucked out the book’s key phrase: “Things are conspicuous in their absence.”

“Conspicuous by its absence” is an ancient phrase: the Roman writer Tacitus described the absence of Junia’s brother and husband from her funeral procession as “conspicuous”. In my book, the conspicuousness of absence is a Zen idea about paying attention to emptiness or nothingness. It’s more specifically related to the idea of ma, which is about learning to see the spaces between things, the missing bits. Japan is absent from my book, which is set entirely on the Shetland Isles, and concerns a series of speculations and projections about the far-flung, far-fetched nation.



One thing I like about Zak’s jacket is how his reversal of the colours of the Japanese flag (the same thing he did for the Scotlands book) has created a white hole on a green ground. It looks like a raking torchbeam, as if someone is frantically searching for the absent Japan. But it also evokes the covers of old Penguin Crime paperbacks, and of course a murder mystery is one in which a dead or missing person dominates the action, and an absence is continually present.



On the back cover there’s a single phrase: “We have no great and clear idea of another world.” It’s something Alain Badiou said in his BBC Hard Talk interview as a justification of the utility of communism.

In fact, if you think about it, every big idea claims to make visible an important absence, an elephant in the room. Marxism has the proletariat, Freudianism the unconscious. In identity politics, it’s the absence from power or visibility of the particular minority concerned: women, gays, blacks.

I’ve always been particularly attuned to missing or absent things. Glamour and desire, for instance, are all about what’s not here. Daydreaming is being “somewhere else”. Fame is a lot to do with making yourself otherworldly, abnormal and inaccessible. Then there’s the idea that making art is trying to make sure people will miss you when you’re gone: Morrissey once wore a badge saying “FAMOUS WHEN DEAD”.

The cover of the Scotlands book proposes lying (a slightly-more-interesting word for “art”, in this case) as a way to generate parallel worlds. The Japans book makes the same claim for absence. Japan’s absence from Shetland is what permits the twelve idiots in the book to create their own fantastical versions of it. Like glamour or fame, lies and absences require distance as a necessary precondition for the generative processes of imagination. So my book attempts to reinstate the wonder of early travel books (pre-Marco Polo) in which far-flung lands really were far-fetched, containing wondrous beasts and outlandish people.



These days, of course, the world is no longer as big as it once seemed. It all joins up. Here, for instance, is how the BBC reported the presence in Lerwick, Shetland of radiation from the Fukushima disaster. Jets and atoms and bits shrink distance, but they may just make a tantalising absence more conspicuous.