The Story Behind the Story
I got the idea for The Book of Wind while looking out at my Japanese garden. It was in the fall of 1991. I was still in Japan and still living in the old, thatched-roof house in Nagahama that was my home when I finished The Champion of Reason.
A few months earlier, I had returned from another long traveling adventure, this one to Mexico and Central America. This trip, however, was different from all the others because, on this trip, I wasn’t doing any writing at all. I was just trying to recover from seven years of hard work on The Champion of Reason. It had taken so much out of me that I thought I was finished as a writer. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The main thing, I kept telling myself, was not to lose my sense of humor.
So, anyway, there I was, looking out at my Japanese garden, and I got struck with the idea of a sentence with a blank, into which fill-ins could be inserted. This was the sentence with the blank:
A very disagreeable odor lingered in the immediate area for a relatively long time after _________ left.
I wasn’t a big fan of bathroom humor. Sure, back when I was a kid, I liked it, but that was a long time ago. However, this idea seemed to open a door (the bathroom door) for some pretty funny stuff. That excited me. Here is a consideration for the blank:
Tobias Gaspasser, special guest at the home of the LaFleurs, a Montreal cheesemaking family, of which the woman of the house, Gladiola, had just brought out a block of sharp cheddar and said, "And now Mr. Gaspasser will do us the honor and cut the cheese,"
And here’s another one:
American ‘Boom Boom’ Baker, whose boomage into a sound meter at the North American Farting Contest at the Montreal Forum measured a record-breaking 63.7 decibels and assured his enshrinement in the Farting Hall of Fame in Pooperstown.
The possibilities seemed endless, especially since the person who leaves could be either the person who commits the anal atrocity or the person who is on the receiving end of it. Here’s an example of the ‘victim’ leaving.
Felicity Freesia, who was on a British Airways flight seated next to Seymour ‘Sewage’ Slaughter, to whom she said, "Excuse me, but I’m curious to know why you just put a nose plug on.… Oh my God!"
And here’s another one:
The Roses, who were so fed up with the windbreaking of their hosts, the Windbergs, that they got up from the dinner table without finishing their meal of chile relleños and sweet potatoes and said with sarcasm, "So long, and thanks for all the farts,"
I realized that I could go even further into the fart of the matter and have fill-ins with footnotes (fartnotes?), like this one:
Norbert Fartwangler, whose awful anal emission at a Christmas party in Seattle was in violation of a specified request by the meticulous hostess, Iris Sniffet, who had sent invitations with a P.S. stating, "Kindly leave your flatulence at home,"*
*When confronted by an annoyed Ms. Sniffet, Fartwangler sincerely apologized with the explanation that he had not known the meaning of the word ‘flatulence’ and had erroneously thought that the request was for ladies with very small breasts to wear padded brassieres.
Or this one:
Portrait-painting of Sawako (by Morimoto
Katsuhiko) as the ballerina that she was.
Top-ranked golfer Bogey Neufart, whose gas emission, while lining up a putt under ominous clouds during the U.S. Open, was struck and ignited by lightning,*
*The Meteorological Agency, which had long been publishing a free booklet containing the Dos-and-Don’ts pertaining to lightning, decided, because of all of the publicity surrounding Neufart’s career-ending, badly burned buttocks, to revise the booklet with the inclusion of one more Don’t.
I figured that Europe would be an inspiring place to work on this ‘smellbinding’ book. So, in the spring of 1992, I took yet another six-month leave of absence from teaching conversational English and headed there, but not before falling in love with a Japanese lady named Sawako. More about her, and us, later.
I bought a used car in Holland. I loaded the trunk with a tent, a sleeping bag, and other camping necessities, and headed off with great intestinal fartitude to work on The Book of Wind, subtitled Considerations for a Blank.
Working on The Book of Wind was a lot less laborious than the grind I went through with The Champion of Reason. Without the constraints imposed by the progression of narrative, I could let my imagination run wild, and I really let it rip on this camping adventure that took me through Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.
Chenonceaux Castle in the Loire Valley of France
After all of the traveling I had done in Asia, Europe was a refreshing change. Unlike so many places in Asia, where greedy, get-rich-quick developers were having their way, Europe, for the most part, especially in small towns, still had its old charm and beauty. It was really nice to have the car and get out to where the trains didn’t go.
I started each morning with a cup of coffee made with a stove-top espresso maker on a propane burner. Then I moved on to bread, cheese, and fruit left over from the night before. Sometimes there was also a little wine left over.
The wine was good, and it was cheap. Everything was cheap, except the gas for the car. This was in 1992, when the U.S. dollar was still strong against the individual European currencies. I was packing U.S traveler’s cheques and getting by just fine on fifteen dollars a day, which included a nice mid-day meal at a restaurant. Several entries in The Book of Wind happen to be set in restaurants.