De Japanse schrijver en scenarioschrijver. Taichi Yamada (echte naam: Ishikawa Taichi) werd geboren op 6 juni 1934 in Taitō, prefectuur Tokyo. Yamada studeerde Japanse taal- en letterkunde aan de Faculteit Educatie van Waseda University. Na zijn afstuderen in 1958 werd hij assistent van regisseur Keisuke Kinoshita bij de Shōchiku-filmstudio’s. In 1965 verliet hij Shōchiku en vestigde zich als freelance scenarioschrijver. In de jaren die volgden schreef hij scripts voor talloze televisiefilms en series, waarvan er ongeveer dertig prijzen wonnen; ook scripts voor een tiental speelfilms, verschillende romans en tien essaybundels. In 1984 ontving hij de Award van de Minister van Onderwijs voor de film Nagaraeba en de Kikuchi Kan-prijs, en in 1985 de Mukuda Kuniko-prijs voor Nihon no Omokage. In 1987 werd hij genomineerd voor de Japanse Academy Award voor Beste Scenario. Het jaar daarop ontving hij de Yamamoto Shūgorō-prijs. Hij ontving in 1992 de Mainichi Art Prize voor de film Shōnen Jidai (ongeveer “Childhood”).
Uit: Strangers (Vertaald door Wayne Lammers)
“After my divorce, I set up house in the apartment I had been using as an office. Since I made my living writing scripts for television dra-mas, I spent most of my waking hours in solitary confinement at the apartment. Until recently, I had a lady friend who came here to share her company with me, but she drifted away when I became caught up in the divorce proceedings with my wife. I didn’t mind; I had expended so much emotional energy on the divorce that I was perfectly happy to be free of human entan-glements for a while, including those whose pleasures were of a purely physical nature.
One night about three weeks into my life of renewed bach-elorhood, it hit me how quiet the building was. Too quiet, I thought. Not that the place was a secluded mountain retreat. Quite the contrary, the seven-story apartment building faced directly out onto Tokyo’s busy Route 8, which never saw a break in traf-fic no matter what time of day. When I first began living here full time, in fact, the endless noise kept me awake at night. Large, long-haul trucks timing their trips for the midnight hours when traffic wasn’t so heavy sped by one after the other, and the rumbling roar seemed to well forth from deep within the earth. Lying in bed prey to this din, I would feel short of breath. With a stoplight only a hun-dred meters or so down the road, the noise periodically came to a halt, only to rend the silence at an even higher pitch a few moments later as the trucks ground into motion again. The relentless thundering would resume, my heart would beat harder and harder, the walls would close in, and I would bolt upright gasping for breath. It took me about ten days to get used to the round-the-clock barrage. When I’d contemplated spending the night at the apart-ment, back in the days when it was still only my office, I had dismissed the idea out of hand, knowing I would never be able to sleep. But with my bank account drained after the divorce, I could not afford to move anywhere else; having no choice but to take up residence here, I soon discovered that one could indeed adapt even to conditions such as these. The incessant roar of traffic retreated to the far reaches of my consciousness, as did the hum of the air conditioner, and I would sometimes realize in surprise that the tock tock tock of the second hand circling the clock on the wall had become the only sound I was aware of. But now it had reached the point where the building seemed altogether too quiet, and I had to wonder where my own senses were leading me.
This feeling of too much quiet first came over me on a night near the end of July as I sat working at my desk a little after eleven. A chill ran down my spine, and I felt as though I were suspended in the middle of a vast dark void, utterly alone. “It’s awfully quiet,” I murmured. I ignored the feeling for a time as I continued to write. After a while I reached for the dictionary to look up a kanji character I couldn’t quite remember, and as I flipped pages in search of it, I realized that the same uneasy sensation had been gnawing at me for the past several nights.”
