Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost: A Novel

By David Hoon Kim

In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved

When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students.

Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself.

David Hoon Kim’s debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each successive, echoic chapter, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost plunges us more deeply beneath the surface of things, to the displacement, exile, grief, and desire that hide in plain sight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374722494

Book preview

I

FUMIKO

Sweetheart Sorrow

Fumiko had locked herself in her room. No amount of pleading or bargaining seemed to sway her resolve not to come out. We hadn’t argued. One minute she was sitting on my bed; the next minute she wasn’t. She lived three doors away, coming and going as she pleased, and it took a whole day for me to notice that anything was amiss. On the third day, I went to see the concierge; I had gotten as far as his door when it occurred to me that I could be making a terrible mistake. I was living illegally in my residence hall, a crumbling twelve-story building named for a dead postwar French writer I had never read. My student identification card having expired a long time ago, I could not afford to get expelled from my room. Fumiko had locked herself up before, though she always emerged from her self-confinement after a night or two. There was a word my father sometimes used, back in Denmark, kærestesorg—sweetheart sorrow—to describe the sadness one feels at the thought of a love affair nearing its end. A sadness one is not yet ready to face. As I walked away without knocking, I could almost hear my father’s voice in my head.

Back at Fumiko’s door, I called out her name, as loudly as I dared, not wanting to attract the attention of the other residents.

Her voice, when it came to me from the other side, sounded impossibly far away: I’m sorry.

I know, I said, pressing my ear against the wood. Just open the door, OK?

I can’t.

Why not?

I can’t.

Another long silence. Then I heard her say, "J’ai froid—I’m cold. Or it could have been Ta voix—Your voice." The fact that so many French words rhymed with each other, coupled with Fumiko’s difficulties in pronouncing them, resulted in frequent misunderstandings between us.

What did you say?

Your voice.

My voice? What about my voice?

But she had gone silent again.

I decided to take the air, visit the Latin Quarter. It wasn’t yet evening, and the métro was abnormally quiet—a lull between rush hours. After getting off at Saint-Michel, I lingered a few moments at the station entrance. Thanks to the heat from the subway tunnels, the nearby trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves and the air smelled of mimosa and chestnut, even though winter was well underway. The guard at the entrance of the Sorbonne let me through, barely glancing at my expired identification card. Students loitered in groups in the main courtyard, bulky scarves wound elegantly around their necks. The marble-floored corridors were unheated. In the snack bar, empty white plastic cups stained with coffee littered the countertop. It was as if I had never been away. I walked past Philosophie, Histoire, Littérature française, stopping at Littérature générale et comparée, my former department. The benches were empty, no one waiting to see his thesis director. I scanned the walls. Among ads for au pair girls and cheap health insurance was a handwritten note covered with uneven, badly formed letters: Theoretical physicist seeks Anglophone to translate treatise. 200 pages. 10 euros / page. Since abandoning my dissertation, I’d earned what money I could by giving English lessons to French high-school students, teaching unruly adolescents how to pronounce their hs and haggling with their stingy parents over my hourly rate. I knew nothing about physics, theoretical or not; yet the prospect of translating something—of not having to churn out anything in the way of original thought—appealed to me. I checked to see if anyone was watching, then tore off the piece of paper.

On my way home, I pictured my employer-to-be presenting me to other colleagues—i.e., hypothetical physicists of theoretical physics—in need of a translator. A beggar making the rounds growled because I didn’t drop anything into his grubby outstretched hand. Closing my eyes, I imagined myself earning two thousand euros a month, sitting in the back seat of a taxi with Fumiko next to me, as we cruised down the avenue de la Grande Armée. The Grande Armée was the B side of the Champs-Élysées, radiating from the opposite edge of the place de l’Étoile. I was, if nothing else, a modest dreamer.

At a telephone booth, I dialed the number. I could see my hall of residence from the booth, and I tried to find Fumiko’s room among the tiny mirrored squares, her last words to me—your voice, your voice, your voice—echoing in my head. Near the top, I noticed a solitary blind eye, one of the windows failing to reflect back the sun’s dying rays. An open window in the middle of winter? I was counting off squares when, on the ninth ring, a man finally answered, introducing himself as Raoul de Gadbois. Clarisse has seen fit to move the telephone yet again, he went on, thence my difficulty in answering it. His French, ponderous and antiquated, was straight out of the Littré. Turning away from the building, I told him I was calling about the ad; I was convinced it had been there for months. We talked. He inquired if Blatand, my name, was English, and, resisting the urge to say yes, I admitted that I was from Copenhagen. Where, I added, trying to give my French rs a British lilt, everyone speaks the King’s English. Gadbois suggested an hour and a date (one-thirty, tomorrow), then gave me an address: quai Louis-Blériot, in the sixteenth arrondissement.

You need only to tell Clarisse that you are having lunch with me, Monsieur Blatand.

Clarisse?

The maid.

After hanging up, I cast a sidelong glance at my profile in the glass booth. I could feel it. This was a turning point. The reflection in the glass nodded with me. If I hadn’t yet gotten the job, I had already gotten a free meal. My luck was changing, and I was almost convinced I would find Fumiko waiting for me at my door. Stepping out of the elevator on the seventh floor, I ignored the peeling wallpaper, the occasional graffiti. The hallway was empty. No Fumiko. I felt a wave of sadness at the thought of returning to my room, to my single bed, my drawerless desk, my requisite antediluvian sink with two faucets: scalding hot and bone-numbing cold.

I stopped at Fumiko’s door and knocked. Two quick raps.

Fumiko, can you hear me? I know you’re in there.

Gradually, I became aware of a muffled flapping noise. As though she were at her window, airing out the bedsheets.

You can’t keep this up forever, I said, more to myself than to her.

---

I had met Fumiko a year ago, in the métro. She was not the first to mistake me for one of her countrymen. To anyone seeing me walking around in Paris, I probably looked about as Scandinavian as the Emperor Hirohito, even if the only thing I was able to say in Japanese was I don’t speak Japanese.

But you look so Japanese! an exasperated Fumiko told me that day, her French much more foreign-sounding than mine. Words, in her mouth, always seemed to have one syllable too many. We stood facing each other, surrounded by commuters, in the stale air of the subway car.

When I told her where I was from, she screamed. Several people looked at us.

"De-eh-enmark? Wouah! A pause. So you speak—another pause—Danish? She even managed to give Danish" an extra syllable.

Yes.

Fumiko was from a small town in northern Japan; she was auditing courses at the École des beaux-arts. She smoked Marlboro Lights, or Maru-boro Rai-to, as she pronounced it. She owned an Aiwa mini-disc player, which, she told me, used a special lithium-ion battery. The friendlier she became, the more I found her friendliness irritating, presumptuous. I had met people like her before, Asians who thought I had something in common with them. In Denmark, I had grown so used to looking different from everyone around me that I was able to forget what I looked like. In France, I was made aware, all over again, of my appearance: from French students frowning over my un-French, un-Japanese name to panhandlers in the street who shouted "Konnichiwa!" when I walked past, no doubt the only Japanese word they knew.

I didn’t think I would see Fumiko again, but I ran into her a few days later, at the student cafeteria. She insisted on sitting with me. On the way out, we discovered not only that we were both headed for the same building, but that we both lived on the seventh floor—like something out of an Ionesco play. After that, we kept bumping into each other: at the cafeteria, in the hallway, by the elevator. (Only later did it occur to me to wonder if she had planned these accidental meetings.) I learned that Fumiko had left for Europe after recovering from a nervous breakdown, the way wealthy Scandinavians went to the Mediterranean to convalesce from respiratory ailments. A drastic change in environment, a doctor had said, could only do her good. Her parents wired money to an account at the BNP every month. She had chosen Paris because she had studied French in secondary school.

I in turn told her about my thesis—I hadn’t yet abandoned it—on the influence of Sir James Frazer in the works of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. I was (as I used to tell my thesis supervisor) interested in the manifestations of magic; I said this to Fumiko with none of the self-consciousness that I displayed in front of my professor. She asked me how long I’d been in France, and I gave her my usual line: Long enough to feel like an exile, not long enough to feel French. I told her about being adopted as an infant, about growing up in Copenhagen, my childhood fishing trips with my father to the Faroe Islands, my grammar-school years spent in Sweden. Fumiko asked me why Scandinavians always sounded like they were mumbling, and I told her it was mostly the Danish. Even Swedes and Norwegians had trouble understanding us. There was a saying that Danes spoke with potatoes in their mouths—"Danskerne taler med kartofler i munden." When she heard me speak the language, she couldn’t stop laughing, yet I understood that she wasn’t mocking me. Her reaction, I told myself, would have been the same with a blond-haired and blue-eyed Dane. Who would have thought that the laughter of a Japanese girl would make me feel Danish again?

I don’t know when I fell in love with Fumiko, with her boyishly cut black hair, her sputtering French, her habit of washing her underwear in the communal kitchen sink, even with the way she had of entering a room, so quietly and unobtrusively that I often glanced up to find her reading one of my books or staring at a picture on the wall. An unforeseeable side effect of communicating in a language foreign to both of us was that it allowed me to forget, sometimes, that she was Japanese. A foreign language allows one to rename the world and everything in it. Perhaps I was able to do so with Fumiko as well—that is, I was able to see Fumiko herself with new eyes. Watching her inspect the carcass of an insect on my windowsill one afternoon, I found myself thinking, I have fallen in love with your strangeness. That same day, I told her she was beautiful: "Vous êtes belle"—the formal vous, in contrast with the tu we normally used with each other, underlining the solemnity of the occasion. Fumiko, from across the room, smiled, as though suddenly understanding something.

What’s so funny? I asked.

"In Japanese, the vous is used by the wife to address her husband. The wife says vous and the husband says tu. I never thought about it until I came to France."

I went to where she was sitting, a book open in her hands. "Is that why you said vous to me for such a long time?" I asked.

She slapped me lightly on the arm with her book. "I said vous because we didn’t know each other very well."

And now?

She didn’t answer. That night, as we lay in bed together, I told her I loved her. (In French, it was easier to say such things.) But the words, even buffered by a foreign language, nearly caught in my throat.

"Moi aussi, Fumiko answered, after a while. Je vous aime."

I believe she was in love with me from the very beginning. Not long after we first met, I found on my doorstep two Fuji apples and an old Grundig transistor radio. All because I had mentioned, in passing, the persistent silence of my room. The accompanying note said, A ghost in your room can make the silence disappear. I puzzled over the words for several minutes, until I realized that she had probably meant en revenant (coming back) instead of un revenant (a ghost). Later that evening, there was no answer when I knocked on her door, and, assuming she was out, I left a note of my own, signing it, A fellow ghost. We’d been going out for a few weeks when she told me she had been home the day I came by but had been unable to leave her chair.

Why?

All of a sudden, I felt afraid. I couldn’t move. I sat there, listening, for a long time. She gave an embarrassed laugh. When I opened the door, you were already gone.

---

Had it only been three days? I was unlocking my door when I heard someone step out into the corridor. With a quickness in my chest, I looked up. It was Pascal, a psychology student who lived a few doors down. After hesitating, he waved. I had first met Pascal in the cafeteria. He had wanted me to take part in his research on pathological disorders affecting East Asian natives. Some routine questions, nothing elaborate, so I can get an idea of your psychological makeup, he had told me that day, even after I had informed him of my background. Caught off guard, I had suggested Fumiko, hoping she would refuse. But Fumiko was only too happy for an occasion to practice her French with a native speaker. A week later, Pascal came to my door.

I don’t know if I should be telling you this, he said.

Telling me what?

It’s about Fumiko.

What about Fumiko?

Normally, I never reveal information given to me during an interview, but—he glanced up and down the corridor— I thought you might want to know.

Know what?

In Japan, the majority of nervous breakdowns occur in the late teens. That’s when you have your university entrance exams, your pre-entrance exams to qualify for the entrance exams, your preparatory classes for the pre-entrance exams… Watching him talk, I recalled the morbid enthusiasm he had displayed in the cafeteria while telling me about hwa-byung, a stress syndrome that affected middle-aged Korean women, and the dreamy look in his eyes as he went on about a Japanese malady in which the sufferer grew obsessed with his own body odor. There’s even an exam to get into the preparatory classes, if you can believe that. It’s no wonder so many of them kill—

What’s your point? I said. I knew that Fumiko had found life in Japan exhausting.

He cleared his throat. "Your girlfriend came to France as a cure. But one of the conditions of her recovery was that she avoid things, elements, that might remind her of Japan. At least, for the time being…" His voice trailed off.

So? I don’t see what the problem is. I stared down at the floor, where a corner of one of the tiles had been chipped away. Pascal didn’t say anything. I looked up at him. You mean me?

I’ve been trying to decide whether it was worth telling you.

But I have nothing to do with Japan!

Pascal lifted his hands, palms out. I only told you because I thought you should know. You can take it or leave it.

But I couldn’t. I could neither take it nor leave it. Although I looked Japanese on the outside, I didn’t feel it, had never felt it. At the same time, the doubt always remained that I was not who I thought I was, that, unbeknownst to myself, I was an impostor, a fake. I feared I was no one, in the end.

Now I called out to Pascal, who had reached the other end of the corridor, How’s the research going? When he turned around, I noted, not without a certain satisfaction, the dark circles under his eyes.

Could be better.

Oh? What’s wrong?

My theories aren’t holding up. Pascal walked slowly towards me. A recent study on cultural imprinting weakens what I’ve been proposing in my… He stopped walking, then smiled thinly. In other words, I’m in a bind.

A beat passed in silence.

Can I ask you something? I said.

Sure.

Is there a disorder where, uh, the patient locks himself in his room?

"Hikikomori. Modern-day hermit syndrome. Pascal’s face lit up. Most live with their parents, who leave food by the door. In some rare cases, it can get ugly, but they usually live quietly in their rooms and only come out after dark. He winked. That is, if they come out at all."

My body felt hot all over, the way it did at the onset of a fever.

Pascal was looking at me strangely. Why do you ask?

Just testing your knowledge.

---

Raoul de Gadbois lived on the last floor of an apartment building overlooking the Seine. Despite the excessive heat of the radiators, I sensed something cold, a chill in the air. The furniture, the fixtures all seemed old but barely used. Everything was brightly lit. My head ached. After a mostly sleepless night, I had woken up in a sorry state, my throat full of phlegm and my tongue covered with little bumps: the fever had blossomed. Clarisse—a squat, middle-aged woman—led me past the study on the way to the dining room. I noticed an ornate glassed-in cabinet where small octavo volumes of Greek and Latin intermingled with yellowing physics tomes. On the hallway wall hung a black-and-white photograph of a young woman with penetrating eyes and a mouth too large for her face.

Gadbois stood up from the table, and we shook hands. He looked to be at least seventy, a reasonably ugly man with a fleshy face and a perfectly bald head. His ugliness was subtle: it took a moment to realize, and fully appreciate, its scope. He didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised that I was not European, as though it were a given, to him, that all Danes looked like me, and vice versa.

He said, gravely, Bonjour, monsieur.

Bonjour, I said. Monsieur.

After we sat down, Gadbois asked about my life in France, the weather in Denmark—but the usual inquiries about my background did not come. I knew that a sneeze could strike at any moment, but I nevertheless forbade myself from asking for even a tissue, convinced that the smallest show of ill health would jeopardize my prospects. Feverish and delirious, I was about to tell him, just to have it done with, that I had been adopted, when Clarisse came in with a bottle of wine on a tray. It was only as I watched her fill Gadbois’s glass that I understood, with a start, that the old man was blind.

The main dish was brought in. With slow, practiced movements, Gadbois’s hand swept across the tabletop and closed over the fork and knife. Clarisse, as though waiting for something, stood in the background. At that moment, a strange and ridiculous thought entered my head: that Gadbois had intentionally kept his blindness from me on the phone, and in the laconic phrasing of his ad. He took a bite and said, This isn’t mackerel. Are you trying to trick me?

I could tell, simply from looking, that the fish was mackerel; I had helped my father inventory the catch on our summer fishing trips.

It’s a mackerel, monsieur, Clarisse said, unfazed by Gadbois’s reprimand.

He took another bite. Herring. You went out and bought a herring.

Herring is more expensive, monsieur. You gave me only enough money for mackerel.

Gadbois turned away from his plate with calm disdain. Is this mackerel, Monsieur Blatand?

I sensed Clarisse, in the corner, fixing me with her imperturbable gaze.

You’re right, I finally said. It’s not mackerel.

Gadbois, dignified and triumphant, turned to Clarisse and nodded once, gravely, his honor restored.

In addition to the mackerel, other items on the menu—the roast potatoes, the buttered artichokes with shallots—were systematically contested by Gadbois. Clarisse responded to each accusation with equanimity and patience. At last Gadbois acquiesced, resigning himself to the impostor food. It was the best meal I’d had in months, and yet I couldn’t taste a thing. Each time Clarisse came around to fill my glass, I kept my eyes on my plate, unable to look at