A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  Richie climbed the old Subway Tower building in Asakusa together with Kawabata, who was dressed in a simple winter kimono. Neither could speak a word of the other’s language. All they could do was point at the shabby knocked-together landscape of early postwar Tokyo. Richie would mention the name of a character in one of Kawabata’s early stories and the writer would smile wanly and point to a place where he imagined them to have lived. The destruction of his city did not seem to have fazed Kawabata; it was still there in his imagination.

  In the 1960s, one of Terayama Shuji’s favorite experiments was to perform his theatrical spectacles in the streets. Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets was the title of one of his most famous plays. He wanted to break down the barriers between artistic performance and the performance of daily life. His actors, kitted out in costumes from different periods—1920s vamps, nineteenth-century dandies, 1960s futenzoku—mingled with the crowds, shocking people out of their normal routines. The Tenjo Sajiki was not the only theater troupe in those days to try to infuse real life with fantasy. The difference with similar experiments in Paris, or New York, or Amsterdam, was that in Tokyo there was less of a barrier between fantasy and reality to break down.

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE WAS NOTHING EXOTIC about Nihon University College of Art, or Nichidai for short, where I was supposed to be studying cinema. The buildings, probably erected in the late 1950s or early 1960s, were so nondescript that I cannot remember exactly what they looked like. Ekoda, where the campus was located, was a sprawling suburb of wood and stucco houses, with a narrow shopping street festooned with plastic flowers winding its way to the station on the Seibu Ikebukuro line.

  In fact, I never studied cinema at Nichidai very seriously. The professors were mostly cordial men who had never made a film in their lives, but had stayed on to teach after they graduated from the school themselves. The dean was a fussy bureaucrat who spoke and dressed like the branch manager of a middling bank. His connection to the movies, if any, was tenuous.

  But one professor did leave a lasting impression. His name was Ushihara Kiyohiko, a tiny gentleman with a wet toothy grin who must have been in his early eighties. He spoke a great deal about Charlie Chaplin, his idol, whom he had assisted in Hollywood for a time in the 1920s. He called him “Chapurin-sensei.” More than once the old man acted out the Tramp in front of the class, taking mincing little steps and twirling an imaginary cane, while explaining camera angles. After he returned to Japan from Hollywood in 1927, Ushihara went on to specialize in tearjerkers (known in Japan as “three-handkerchief films”), soaked in nostalgia for bygone eras when life was more traditional, simpler, warmer. Love of Life was one of his successes, which earned him the nickname Sentimental Ushihara. He later made a few films in another genre called supotsu mono, or sports films, about baseball heroes and the like—Japanese movie genres used to be like Tokyo coffee shops that catered to jazz lovers, classical music buffs, or rock fans, carefully categorized in terms of taste.

  Most of my knowledge of Sentimental Ushihara comes from Donald Richie’s books. His movies are hard to track down. I did manage to see a fascinating early work heavily influenced by French impressionism, which he had not actually directed but had written the script for, called Souls on the Road (1921). This silent movie about a failed violinist, inspired by Gorky’s The Lower Depths, was remarkable for being the first Japanese film to use female actors instead of men impersonating women in the Kabuki style.

  I failed to get the full benefit of Ushihara’s classes, alas. Even the Chaplin anecdotes, told and retold with unflagging enthusiasm, were only partly intelligible to me, not just because he slushed his words with a great deal of froth, but because my Japanese was not yet good enough to understand what the old man was saying.

  The student films I saw were equally hard to follow, but mostly because of the use of slang. One of the stars on campus, whose name I can’t recall, was often seen slouching about, always with an entourage of young men, all dressed in black leather jackets and sunglasses, worn day and night. Most of his short films revolved around slouching young men in black leather jackets and sunglasses, who died in scenes of spectacular violence. Women in these student films spent most of the time being abused in one way or another. This invariably involved taking their clothes off. Intrigued, I asked fellow students about these amateur actresses. They assured me that Japanese girls would do this at the drop of a hat for me, because they were like putty in the hands of a foreigner, or gaijin. This was an entrenched and pretty much universal belief in Japan in those days, perhaps going back to the time when Japan was occupied by American troops.

  To be sure, the gaijin status had its perks. One reminder of the turbulent 1960s on the Ekoda campus was the library of English-language books, which, curiously for an educational institution, was off limits to the students. The reason, I was told, was that students had occupied the library during one of the big protest demonstrations in 1968, or perhaps 1970. Japanese students were fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War and their own government’s complicity in it. Since then, only foreign students were allowed to go into the stacks. As there were only, so far as I could tell, two other foreign students at the art school, the library was effectively vacant.

  A large gangly administrator unlocked the library door for me. He had just returned from a vacation in America, and was dressed in full Western gear: boots, a garishly checked Western shirt with silver buttons, and a bolo tie. The library had the musty smell of a place that needed a proper airing. There was one other person there, picking up various books from the shelves. He was clearly one of the two other foreign students. I had met one already, an American named Rich, who insisted on addressing me in Japanese, even when I answered him pointedly in English. I tended to dodge him on campus. The one perusing the stacks, wearing a blue cotton Japanese kimono jacket, was still a stranger to me. His name was Graham, an Englishman. Graham was studying the Noh theater—when he wasn’t staging “performances” in Harajuku, dancing along the main thoroughfare in a long white dress with a poet called Shiraishi Kazuko, who enjoyed a scandalous reputation (she was rumored to have slept with Muhammad Ali). She, too, had made her reputation in the 1960s.

  It soon became evident that almost every book in the English-language section of the library had been the property of one man. His name was scribbled on the title pages of most of the books: Cecil Postlethwaite (or something like that). Next to his name was the date and place of residence: Berlin 1929, Berlin 1930, all the way to Berlin 1936, when perhaps things were becoming a little too hot even for Postlethwaite, and the dateline changed to Tokyo 1937, Tokyo 1938, and so on. I don’t know what happened to him during the war. Presumably he was interned as an enemy alien. Or he might have died before Pearl Harbor.

  Postlethwaite’s literary taste was as specialized in its way as Ushihara’s tearjerkers: several rare first editions of Oscar Wilde’s plays, as well as signed memoirs by long-forgotten society ladies who had known the great playwright; the complete works of Ronald Firbank; books on Greek sculpture; a slim volume, published in Dresden, about nudists in Germany, richly illustrated with photographs of athletic young men bathing. Quite how this collection ended up at the Nichidai library in Ekoda is a mystery. I cannot imagine there would have been much call for these books, even if students had been allowed in. But the slightly stale whiff of prewar pederasty lingering in this dreary suburb of Tokyo appealed to the imagination of Graham and myself. We later rather regretted that we had not pocketed some of the rarer items, before repairing to the classical music coffee shop opposite Ekoda station called Zigeunerweisen.

  Postlethwaite was one of those readers who liked to express his feelings in the margins: exclamation marks of agreement, question marks denoting skepticism, and comments, like “rubbish!” or “quite so!” I randomly picked up a book of short stories by Somerset Maugham. One of them was about a British planter in a remote
area of Malaya. An old friend from home has come to pay him a visit. They are having gin and tonics on the veranda at sundown. The friend asks him how he can bear to live in such an isolated spot, where one would almost never meet a fellow white man. The planter replies that this is precisely why he chose to live there. This sentence was underlined in the book with almost ferocious stress by its owner.

  It was not hard to imagine a man like Postlethwaite, an escapee from middle-class England, a sexual exile first in Germany, and later in Japan. There were others like him. Christopher Isherwood had moved to Berlin for similar reasons. Tropical and subtropical places, from Capri to Ceylon, especially in days of empire, were dotted with private Arcadias built by such men who refused to live in puritanical Anglo-Saxon countries where their sexual desires could land them in prison. They often resided in lovely traditional houses in secluded spots, filled with fine furniture and art, with handsome and willing young men to lend a hand when needed.

  One of the first people I met in Japan was a figure rather like this, another acquaintance of my gay uncle. John Roderick was a veteran American reporter who had spent part of the war with Mao Zedong’s Communist guerrillas in the caves of Yan’an. After the war, when Western journalists were no longer welcome in China, he based himself in Japan. Roderick was not a handsome man. He looked like a retired sergeant major, burly, with a large jaw, a clipped moustache, and small watery blue eyes peering amiably from a large florid face. His Japanese was rudimentary, but he was not shy, and never short of company.

  Roderick lived on a hill overlooking Kamakura, the graceful old capital of medieval Japan, one of the few towns to have escaped the wartime bombings, filled with Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. On top of that hill, he had built his Arcadia: a gorgeous old farmhouse with a thatched roof, dark brown timber floors, ocher mud walls, rice paper sliding doors, eighteenth-century lacquered screens, gilded wooden sculptures of Buddhist deities, precious Edo Period tea bowls, and finely crafted antique chests. The farmhouse had been dismantled in a village in central Japan and rebuilt, timber for timber, by traditional Japanese carpenters. This entire enterprise had been arranged by a young man of extraordinary beauty whom Roderick had spotted some years before at a public swimming pool. They had lived together ever since. Yoshihiro, or Yo-chan, as he was affectionately called, was officially adopted as Roderick’s son.

  It was through John Roderick that I met Donald Richie, a few months after I arrived. We were both invited for dinner, specifically for this purpose, at the Tokyo apartment of another middle-aged expatriate, an English writer and traveler named John Haylock. He, too, was a sexual refugee, who had lived in a succession of congenial tropical homes, in Baghdad, Cyprus, Thailand, and now Japan, where he taught English literature at a girls’ college. Haylock wrote in his memoir, entitled Eastern Exchange: “I felt it was wiser to live in a tolerant land . . . It was better to be in self-exile than a potential criminal.”

  John was not very old, in his early sixties at most. I asked him, perhaps a little gauchely, how long he intended to live in Japan. Well, he replied, “I believe I shall die here, which I rather think might be very soon.” Talking to John was like shaking hands, metaphorically at least, with the Bloomsbury group; he had been on intimate terms with Duncan Grant and had known Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf’s lover, in Paris. He also knew Mishima, as did most of Donald’s friends. To be able to say “I knew Mishima” was a badge of honor, cherished by literary-minded veterans of the Tokyo gay scene.

  So this then was “Donald Richie’s crowd,” about which the man in Amsterdam had warned me. I felt instantly at ease with them, even though I was hardly a sexual exile myself. My own yearnings were more for the Kyoko I had seen in Truffaut’s film than for a Yo-chan, although I could very well see the attractions of both. Like many young men, I was in a hurry to make up for lost adolescent opportunities, and hungry for experience. But I was hedging my bets, for I still had a safe haven, a home that minimized my risk.

  This temporary home was a six-tatami-mat room and a four-and-a-half-mat bedroom in a rickety apartment building on the Seibu Shinjuku railway line, which I shared with my girlfriend, Sumie, who had returned to Japan just before I arrived. I was glad to leave the luxurious seclusion of my relative’s house, where I had spent the first weeks in Japan. We found the apartment after doing the rounds of real estate agents, most of whom were too polite to turn a foreigner down outright. But we had to understand that landlords might be worried that the gaijin-san didn’t know the proper way of using a Japanese bathroom, or might give the neighbors a fright, or would abscond without paying. Why, only the other day, there was such a case with an American. . . .

  Sumie did not really fit in either. Having escaped from the strictures of her childhood home in a provincial Japanese town, she had been in no hurry to come back. Like many young Japanese women who sought a degree of independence that was not generally on offer at home, she preferred to live abroad. Having decided that she wanted to be in a small country, she had picked Holland more or less at random on the map, gathered up all her savings, and traveled alone by boat and train via the Siberian plains to Europe. She was a tougher person than I was. We had met in a Chinese restaurant in Leyden, where we were both studying and she was working part time to pay the rent.

  For a year and a half, Sumie and I shared that apartment in Numabukuro. The elusive Kyokos remained figments of my imagination. We were happy together. But I also felt I was missing out on something. I wasn’t ready to settle down, but I yearned for security too. It was easier to live dangerously in a vicarious way, like peering into the opium-scented brothels in Terayama’s plays, or rubbing shoulders with Donald Richie’s crowd, which had some of the glamour of my uncle’s set in London. Knowingness still came more easily to me than the potential sting of experience. Life still felt more like a performance.

  Perhaps it was because of my childhood in a culturally mixed household, or possibly something else in my makeup, that I always felt drawn to outsiders. But outsiders, including Donald Richie’s friends, form their own exclusive groups. I could pass, but I would not commit. Hovering on the fringes was where I liked to be, neither in nor out, neither one thing nor another, semidetached, a born fellow traveler, a male fag hag, an observer in the midst of sympathetic strangers. It was thrilling, but also a way of playing it safe. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to Japan, a society to which a foreigner could never belong, even if he wanted to.

  Donald was dressed like a conventional middle-class American: light blue jacket, gray shirt, a knitted maroon tie, big black Florsheim shoes. He looked young for his age, which would have been around fifty-three: pink cheeks, brownish hair, large white hands, a boyish midwestern face that slightly resembled that of Alfred Kinsey, the famous sexologist. The range of his conversation was astonishing: Japanese movie world gossip, Arnold Schoenberg’s expressionist songs, Ozu Yasujiro’s films compared to Kurosawa Akira’s, Jane Austen’s late novels. But his main subject, especially when he was addressing me as the newcomer, was the way foreigners lived in Japan.

  He pointed out the pitfalls that many gaijin stumbled into: namely the speed with which infatuation could change into disenchantment, or even peevish resentment, as though Japan were to blame for personal disillusion. He mentioned the “Seidensticker syndrome,” named after his friend, the scholar Edward Seidensticker. Ed habitually spent half the year in Japan. When he arrived in Tokyo, he was ready to kiss the ground. Everything was wonderful. Then, once he had more or less settled down, he began to get more and more irritated by “these people,” until after six months he was quite ready to go home.

  Donald Richie

  The great mistake, Donald told me, was to think that you could ever be treated in the same way as a Japanese. People would be polite, even warm. Profound friendships with Japanese were perfectly possible. But you would never be one of them. You would always be an “outside person,” the literal meani
ng of “gaijin.” Those foreigners who were foolish enough to resent this could easily develop a full-blown case of gaijinitis, in which every sign of special treatment, whether deferential or contemptuous, was seen as a bitter blow to their amour propre.

  He, Donald, felt entirely at ease as an outsider. The great thing about Japan, he said, was that one was left alone. To be Japanese in Japan was to be caught in an almost intolerable web of rules and obligations. But the gaijin was exempt from all that. He could observe life with serene detachment, not being bound to anything or anyone. In Japan, Donald felt utterly, radically free.

  For a man of Donald’s inclinations this would clearly have been impossible in Lima, Ohio, where he grew up dreaming of escape. But even in New York, where he lived in the late 1960s as the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, he still felt constrained. So he came back to Japan just a few years before I met him, not exactly as a sexual exile, but as a man who was convinced that when he first arrived in Japan in the late 1940s he had glimpsed his private Arcadia: a country where he would never be judged for his desires.

  “You know,” he said, before we parted company at the Hongo subway station, “you have to be a romantic to live in Japan. A person who feels complete, who does not question who he is, or his place in the world, will dislike it here. To be constantly exposed to such a radically different culture becomes unbearable. But to a romantic, open to other ways of being, Japan is full of wonders. Not that you will ever belong here. But that will set you free. And freedom is better than belonging. You see, here you can make yourself into anything you want to be.”