A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  As a regular at the Film Center I soon came to recognize my fellow dwellers in the dark. They were an odd bunch who turned up at every screening: a thin, older man, always dressed in a white cowboy hat and a bolo tie; a dandyish baby-faced figure who wore a pearl tiepin with his dove-gray suits, like a 1920s movie star; a short dumpy man in his forties who looked a bit like a tramp, with long greasy hair and a grubby denim jacket with the words “I am Japanese hippy” stenciled on the back. They invariably sat in the same seats in the second row, unless some hapless film fan had inadvertently taken one of their places, which would result in muttered complaints in the hallway.

  I don’t think they were close friends. After the screenings, each would go his way. But inside the cinema they were inseparable. Between films, they would huddle in the corridor, recalling different scenes from favorite movies. Bits of dialogue were rehearsed, and opinions exchanged about this actor or that one. The last scene in Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), in which Ryu Chishu plays the father left alone after his only daughter’s wedding, was dissected frame by frame. Sometimes there would be soft bickering about the merits of one performance over another.

  I didn’t join this select company, but as usual I hovered around the edges, listening in. I never knew their names, and they certainly didn’t know mine. But somehow the rumor had reached them that I was related to John Schlesinger. This had the disconcerting consequence that every time I entered the screening room, I saw heads in the second row turn in my direction with whisperings of “Shulesinjaa.”

  I think that Ryu Chishu, or Tanaka Kinuyo, or to be more precise, the imaginary characters they portrayed, were more real to the film buffs than any existing human being. This is why cinephiles are spookier, on the whole, than music lovers or balletomanes. For they are creatures of the dark, getting off on the lives of others.

  But of course I was one of them. I, too, was absorbed in Japanese lives imagined by writers and directors in the golden age of Japanese cinema. I loved the three greats, of course: Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa. Some say that one cannot love all three equally, since they are so different in style and temperament: Ozu’s Zen-like minimalism, Mizoguchi’s lush and painterly Japanese aesthetics, and Kurosawa’s technical genius, owing something to fast Hollywood-style cutting as well as to the drama of classical Japanese theater.

  Ozu is often regarded as the most “Japanese” of the three, so much so that his studio refused to distribute his films abroad at first, assuming that gaijin would never understand them, and perhaps even laugh at Japanese in Western suits sipping tea on tatami floors. Kurosawa was sometimes criticized for “reeking of butter,” a Japanese expression for people or things that have a phony Western air. Even as a raw film student, I realized that this was nonsense. Kurosawa, the only one of the three still alive in the 1970s, was resented for his success outside Japan. He was the proverbial nail that stuck out, so critics did their best to hammer it back in.

  Some Western movie lovers treated Japanese cinema as a kind of cult. One of these enthusiasts was a Frenchman named Max Tessier. Japanese films were almost like a fetish for him. His knowledge rivaled that of the cinematic vampires at the Film Center. But when asked why he had become so engrossed in Japanese films, to the exclusion of almost all else, without even speaking Japanese or ever having lived in Japan for any length of time, he would get irritated, as though one had asked a homosexual why he liked sleeping with men. He spoke of his passion as if it were a biological necessity.

  I think I can explain my own infatuation with films from the Japanese golden age, running from the 1930s to the 1960s, after which television ruined the studio system and great Japanese films became ever more rare. What the movies made by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse, and many other lesser-known directors had in common was an emotional realism. They approached the darker human impulses, sexual, social, spiritual, with a rare honesty less often seen in European or American films. This was not just the result of a lucky confluence of cinematic geniuses. Japanese audiences played an important role too. They were receptive to emotional realism. This seems to be less true today. I am not sure why. Perhaps because even the memories of shared hardships and deprivations are fading.

  Donald once wrote about Kurosawa that heroes in his films were never just being, but always in the state of becoming. The remark stuck in my mind, because it said as much about Donald as it did about Kurosawa’s movies. It reminded me of what he told me about foreign romantics in Japan, the idea of the self as a work in progress, open-ended, embracing uncertainty. The subject of all great art, Donald also once said, is the nature of reality. This may be why Kurosawa was fanatical about getting details just right. Everything had to look real. The props for a film set in the sixteenth century had to be genuine, not fakes. For one of his films, Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa had a medieval castle built at huge expense, only to have it pulled down again when he noticed that nails had been used in the construction, an anachronism that the camera just might have detected. But all this belongs to the golden age, when the studios were making enough money to indulge their star directors. By the 1970s, those times were over. Kurosawa was finding it impossible to get money in Japan to make the films he wanted. In 1971 he tried to kill himself with a razor.

  I witnessed Kurosawa’s perfectionism at first hand eight years later, when Donald and I were asked to appear as Portuguese missionaries in his film Kagemusha, despite the fact that neither of us looked remotely Iberian. The movie was partly financed by a Hollywood studio. Ours were not speaking roles. We would barely even be glimpsed in a crowd scene. And yet, as we were being made up and costumed for our roles, facing the mirror in a cramped dressing room at the Toho studio, Kurosawa spent a whole afternoon fussing about the way we looked, the right amount of white powder in Donald’s hair, the precise cut of our Jesuit gowns. In the end, it was all for nothing. The minor roles were offered to two other foreigners.

  Kurosawa Akira with actors on the set of Kagemusha

  But I did see Kurosawa shoot a battle scene for Kagemusha, the sixteenth-century story of a criminal ordered to impersonate a dying warlord to keep up the morale of his followers. In his blue cap and dark glasses, Kurosawa towered over his crew, arms folded and tight-lipped, his chin raised, like a general surveying his troops. He waved his arm imperiously, and shouted: “Prepare! Start!” Whereupon hundreds of samurai on horseback came charging down the hill, with the golden rays of the afternoon sun filtered through the dust from the horses’ hooves. Kurosawa stamped his feet in disgust, and ordered his soldiers to go back and do it all over again. Someone had ruined the shot by waving a green battle flag a split second too soon.

  I had met Kurosawa before, in 1976, at a private screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. When the lights went up, the tall man in dark tinted glasses smiled politely when Madame Kawakita introduced me as John Schlesinger’s nephew, my only rather dubious mark of distinction. He then spoke at some length about the new 55mm lenses that Kubrick had used to shoot his eighteenth-century interiors by candlelight. This was what he liked to talk about: technique, not theory. He hated being asked about the meaning of his films, for the work should speak for itself. He could explain technical details, about his multiple camera setups, or the particular film stock he used. But he had already talked about such things for so long. I watched him at press conferences, puffing smoke from his cigarette, barely able to conceal his impatience with questions he had heard too many times before. Japanese called him “the Emperor.” Many people were frightened of him.

  Apart from his films, Kurosawa once said, he didn’t exist. He had to have a current project. Otherwise he might as well die. He was going through a fallow period in the late 1970s, waiting to get enough money to make Kagemusha. This made him especially irritable. To tide him over financially, he appeared in a number of commercials for Suntory whiskey. His most trusted assistant, a splendid lady named Nogami Teruyo, affectionately known as No
n-chan, was the producer. She was perhaps the only person, other than himself, whose artistic judgment he trusted. He never shouted at her. She was like his talisman. Before every shot, Kurosawa would turn to Non-chan, standing beside the main camera, to ask her whether she thought it looked OK. One day, Non-chan called me to ask whether I would like to be in one of the whiskey commercials, together with Max Tessier, the French movie historian. We were to have a conversation with Kurosawa at his country house on the outer slopes of Mount Fuji.

  Kurosawa was not enjoying himself, sitting up in his chair, smoking cigarettes, and giving orders to the cameraman about the right angle and proper lighting. The man who was formally in charge of directing the commercial broke into a nervous sweat every time Kurosawa gave directions to his crew. I turned to look out the window at the black volcanic landscape sloping toward the famous mountain in the distance. Max said something about the fine weather. Kurosawa grunted. I then asked him about a scene in Seven Samurai (1954). Kurosawa said: “Mmmm . . .”

  Here we were in the presence of greatness, two European lovers of Japanese film, too tongue-tied to have a conversation with Kurosawa in a whiskey commercial. The movie lights were making me uncomfortably hot. Soon I, too, like the anxious director, was pouring with sweat. “Please talk,” the director of the commercial whispered, casting a nervous glance at Kurosawa.

  Kurosawa lit another cigarette, and waited, clutching a glass of amber barley tea in his right hand. Max asked him about Throne of Blood. Wasn’t it shot on location near here? Kurosawa’s eyes finally lit up behind his tinted glasses. Indeed it was, he said, and pointed at the black sand outside. That is where the castle had been, and where Mifune Toshiro was pierced on the ramparts by arrows shot into his armor at close range. As Kurosawa pointed out the camera positions for that famous last scene, and gestured with his hands to show how Mifune, in his role as a medieval Japanese Macbeth, slowly stumbled to his death, the movie landscape in the midst of which we were shooting the commercial came strangely alive. I could replay parts of the film in my mind, the grainy black-and-white landscape, the fog, the sound of the wind, and the look of horror in Mifune’s eyes. It was almost as if the old castle loomed once again through the window. As for the commercial, I don’t believe it was ever shown.

  * * *

  • • •

  ODDLY ENOUGH, I can’t remember going to many film screenings with Donald. We spoke about the movies often but rarely saw them together. He certainly never came to the Film Center while I was there. But one particular movie house that we did visit together is still etched in my mind.

  Donald lived in a tiny apartment on the top floor of an apartment building overlooking the Shinobazu no Ike, the pond with the lotus flowers where I first saw Kara Juro’s Situation Theater perform in their red tent. The district, Ueno, is part of the plebeian shitamachi, or low city, where Donald felt more at home than in the wealthier hilly areas of Tokyo. Asakusa was not far off. A few minutes’ walk from Donald’s apartment building was a warren of alleys lined with neon-lit cabarets and louche massage parlors. Young pimps with frizzy haircuts and tattooed necks would hang about, trying to lure customers inside. Of a hot summer night, Donald liked to cruise in the small park bordering the lotus pond. Years later, Edward Seidensticker fell down the concrete steps leading to that same park and died of a skull fracture.

  Near the park is a graceful old shrine, rebuilt many times since its inception in the fourteenth century, named Yushima Tenjin, after the spirit of a tenth-century poet, reincarnated as the god of thunder, lightning, and other natural disasters. But curiously enough, Tenjin was also the guardian deity of male love. There used to be male brothels clustered around the temple, and unlicensed Kabuki performances and gambling dens, all long gone.

  The cinema Donald frequented regularly was located between this temple and his apartment building. It was one of the many movie houses specializing in roman porno. Posters of schoolgirls being ravaged by masked men, or of yakuza having their wicked ways with young housewives, flanked the ticket booth. You had to go down some steps to get inside. “Come,” said Donald, like a gleeful cicerone, “you must see this.”

  I was slightly puzzled, since I would never have thought that Donald had any interest in films of this kind. The smell of rank sweat, urine, and harsh detergents was overpowering as we entered the dark corridor leading into the movie theater. The concrete floor felt slippery. Men went in and out of the public toilet, adjusting their trouser belts, trying to look casual, even as their eyes darted around as though in search of something.

  It was hard to see anything inside the cinema at first. There was the loud noise of a woman panting in ecstasy. I turned toward the screen, where a man in dark glasses was pleasuring a respectable-looking lady with a dildo. Donald had disappeared. As my eyes got used to the gloom, I noticed that I was the only one paying any attention to the movie screen. For once, no one in the dream palace was living vicariously. There were men of all ages in every row of seats, in various states of undress, heaving and bobbing and clutching. The orgasmic noises coming from the movie screen failed to drown out the concert of sighs and grunts in the audience. I spotted Donald on the other side, a smile of deep contentment on his face.

  After a while, I felt I had seen enough. “No, no,” said my mentor, “wait till you see the toilets. There are peepholes in the stalls.” No, I said, I really think I get the picture. With a slight air of disappointment, Donald took me outside into the dark and slippery corridor. And just at that moment a middle-aged man in a woman’s dress appeared from the public restroom. His mouth was smudged with red lipstick. As soon as he recognized Donald, he lowered his head in a decorous bow, and said with enormous deference: “Sensei.” There was not a hint of irony in his voice. He spoke with all the respect due to a great man of learning. Donald very politely bowed back.

  Perhaps there was innocence after all.

  FIVE

  When Donald wasn’t talking about movies, or the Japanese, at one of our regular coffee meetings, he talked about sex. The coffee shop near his place of work was popular with young women in prim office uniforms—knee-length gray skirts and shiny black shoes—picking off the cream from their tall chocolate parfaits with dainty silver spoons. Donald liked to order cheesecake, which he ate rather messily. “Sex in Japan,” he pronounced, his mouth still full of cake, “always seems just around the corner. The invitation is there. One is constantly tempted.” And yet, he continued, licking the last crumbs off his lips, “it so often remains just out of reach.”

  That was not the impression I got from his many seduction stories. A technique he often used, so he once claimed, was to ask a young man on the subway what time the next boat was leaving for Shinagawa. Since Shinagawa was a drab industrial suburb that was once, long ago, the gateway to the city, the question was distinctly odd. But it broke the ice, so to speak, and on occasion might have led to more intimate relations.

  But I could see what Donald meant. I had never lived in a country where the culture of advertising, popular media, and entertainment was as drenched in erotic fantasies as Japan. The pornographic imagination was not furtive and marginal, as in many countries, but entirely upfront. This gave the impression of unlimited sexual possibilities. But a widely shared sense of decorum made sure that this wasn’t necessarily so.

  And yet the idea of Japan as a sexual paradise for Western men has been around for a very long time, at least in the imagination. Portuguese Jesuits in the late sixteenth century, on a mission to convert the Japanese upper classes, were astonished and not a little shocked by the freedom of women in those days to divorce their husbands, abort unwanted babies, or have extramarital affairs. Chronicles of Japanese life by those early missionaries read like descriptions of the West by strictly orthodox Muslims today. Japanese society has changed a great deal since then. The social freedoms of women, which shocked the Iberian missionaries, became far more constricted in later
centuries. But the image of Japan as a licentious place, the country of submissive geisha and Madame Butterflies, persisted.

  When the French writer and naval officer known as Pierre Loti came to Japan in 1885, he decided he wanted to marry “a little yellow-skinned woman with black hair and cat’s eyes” and live with her in “a little paper house.” For a fixed monthly fee of a hundred yen, a temporary match was arranged through an agent who specialized in this kind of thing with a young girl whom Loti immortalized as Madame Chrysanthemum. Incapable of communicating in a common language, or of seeing her as a fully grown human being (she would have been about eighteen), Loti quite literally treated her as if she were a doll, “a mere plaything to laugh at, a little creature of finical forms.” This petite doll woman became the model for Madame Butterfly.*

  In a way, Bed and Board, the movie by François Truffaut that impressed me so much as a student in Leyden, owed something to the same theme. The young Frenchman discarded Kyoko as soon as he got bored playing with her, as Loti had done with Madame Chrysanthemum, and Lieutenant Pinkerton with his Butterfly, as though this were an entirely natural thing to do.

  I have already confessed my attraction to Kyoko. Unlike Donald, I did not come to Japan to escape from a society that oppressed my sexual inclinations. And my girlfriend was anything but doll-like. But I cannot imagine wanting to immerse oneself in another culture without feeling a sensual pull. People who study Chinese all their lives without liking Chinese food baffle me. Japan certainly had an erotic frisson for me. As with Max Tessier’s love of Japanese cinema, this is not easy to explain. It was not just about the way people look, although that was part of it, but about the peculiar mixture of desire and propriety, abandon and decorum, or what the writer Arthur Koestler once described in a book about Japan as stoic hedonism.