Could you tell us a little about your career?

My first book was published by Verticales in 1999, and we have worked together ever since. I also write texts for the stage, and I perform on stage myself. I am very interested in the ways in which literature can go beyond the written word, through sound pieces, displays in public spaces, etc. In particular, I consider the role of the voice to be very important in literature, and I like the idea of continuing to use it as a mouthpiece, while associating it with other arts to propose hybrid forms. For example, in my work with the electro-acoustic composer Eryck Abecassis. At the same time, I am a lecturer-researcher at the University of Paris 8, where I deal with everything to do with contemporary literary creation, directing the work of students who want to become writers.

How did you get the idea to work on the 1995 Tokyo attacks? How did you approach your research?

I began the project in 2017, two years after the Bataclan attacks. I wanted to reflect on how these collective events affect our lives, even when we have not been directly involved. But I was aware that I needed some distance and that I was not in a position to work on such recent events. From this point of view, the Tokyo attacks offered the dual advantage of geographical and temporal distance (they happened in 1995). Reading Underground, Haruki Murakami's book of interviews with victims, then convinced me that I did not want to produce a strictly documentary work, but a work of fiction. That is to say, not to interview victims but contemporaries who had not been directly affected by the attacks but who, perhaps, had memories of what they had stirred in them.

Residencies are often presented in an idyllic way by those who take part in them. On the contrary, in Un singe à ma fenêtre you insist on a form of unease that you felt on your arrival in Japan. How did your residency unfold and how did it inform your writing?

When I arrived in Japan, I was not expecting such a surprising and different country, I was not at all prepared for it. I very quickly realised that I wasn't going to be able to carry out the project as I thought, because nothing happened as planned. This became a sort of comic leitmotif in the book, the gap between what we expected and what happened, the place of the unforeseeable in this highly structured residency. I could see that I was in a magnificent place, in very favourable conditions, and yet I was deeply anxious, angry; in short I was in the doldrums. So the atmosphere of Villa Kujoyama and how I felt about it played a very important role in writing the book.

Un singe à ma fenêtre deliberately revolves around its subject without ever addressing it directly. How did this choice fit in with your working protocol?

I avoid my subject in Un singe à ma fenêtre, it's true, which is also linked to the fact that my witnesses also tended to avoid it, or had nothing to say about it. Faced with this obstacle, I ended up accepting the drift of their words, and the fact that they spoke to me about everything but the sarin gas attacks. My writing protocol is always the same: starting with an intuitively defined subject, I try to meet people who know the subject or who want to talk about it. In this way, I form a kind of focus group, I listen to what they tell me: this material fires my imagination and produces the text. As I get older, I realise that most of my books are drifting, that they never move in a straight line. The side steps and digressions are almost more important than the initial subject. It's not so much a drift as a kind of spiral that turns around a blind spot that you can never reach. Can we get to this thing and really say it? Each time I think I'm going to get there, and each time the centre slips away, leading to books that can sometimes be confusing. Drifting is also a way of discovering other, more important things, hidden behind the initial subject. The principle of the book is then to find the other subject, that hides and reveals itself behind the apparent subject.

So what is the real subject of Un singe à ma fenêtre?

I think that through my encounters with people who culturally have a very different use of speech than I do, I understood the place it plays in the construction of our lives and the central role that silence plays in it. The people I interviewed were surprisingly similar to me, in the sense that they kept answering evasively, not really saying anything. Finally, I recognised practices in them, concerning the relationship to silence for example, that were close to those that had long been mine. The witnesses also told me, in roundabout ways, some very striking things about the relationship they had with the dead. So I learned a lot almost without knowing it, and it took me months to understand it. That's what the book is about.

You are at the origin of the master's degree in creative writing at Paris 8, one of the first of its kind. As a teacher, you support many aspiring writers. How do you interpret the central place that residencies have taken in the creative writing scene in recent years?

Young writers nowadays spend a lot of time applying for every residency going. It allows them to make a living from their writing. Many of these residencies are associated with cultural activities, for example with workshops for a wide range of audiences. So it's not just about writing, but also about giving a place to writers and literature in our societies. I think this is great, in the sense that it shows that the social role of literature is being taken into account. But it also demonstrates that it is no longer possible, except for a tiny minority of authors, to make a living from the sale of their books alone.