A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  This was in the late summer of 1978, about three months after the ashtray-throwing incident in Kyoto. It had not been an easy time. Kara was still smarting from my insulting behavior. My enthusiasm for performing Iwan the Gaijin was waning. But we were still roped together, as the Tokyo leg of the tour had to be completed. The tent was set up near the railway siding in Ikebukuro. We played to full houses on most nights.

  Relations did not improve when my article about our adventures with the Situation Theater appeared in the Asahi magazine. They had given it a good spread. I thought my color photographs looked fine. I had written what I thought was a friendly piece about the effect of a traveling theater troupe on its surroundings, how the red tent created an atmosphere of drama wherever it was pitched. I described the female prison wardens in Kumamoto and the swordsman in Osaka. I mentioned Kara’s tense encounters with Nezu’s screaming fans. I had reached for a tone that was sympathetic and, I thought, funny. But I’m afraid it was not received in that spirit. On the contrary it further fanned the flames of Kara’s rage.

  Perhaps this was partly a matter of language. Irony does not translate well into Japanese. It can easily come across as sarcasm. But I think something else was the matter too. I had failed to write as an insider. Having been offered the chance to take my place in the gang as an honorary member, I had described the troupe with an air of detachment. This distancing was perhaps regarded as hostile. I had learned an important lesson about writing. When you turn friends into characters or figures in a landscape, you run the danger of causing offense, because the way you see them, however well intentioned, may not be the way they see themselves. And who wants to be a figure in a landscape anyway? I think that was at least part of the problem. Kara never gave me a detailed critique. All he said, after a long and angry sulk, was: “Iwan, you are”—and here he used the English phrase—“a cynical guy.”

  Still, all seemed to be forgotten near the end of the season, when the famous Romanian-American theater director Andrei Serban turned up in the tent one night. Serban, a tall, blond, somewhat Christ-like figure, had left his native Bucharest in 1969 for New York. He had directed a controversial Medea at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Later he did a number of Chekhov plays starring Meryl Streep and F. Murray Abraham, upsetting some conventional critics with his idiosyncratic interpretations. He once said that Broadway producers wouldn’t go near him, since he was known as “the director who destroys the classics.”

  Serban was thrilled by Tale of the Unicorn. “It is like Commedia dell’arte!” he exclaimed after the performance, back in Kara’s studio. “It is like Kabuki! It is the essence of theater!” I translated. Kara was all smiles, making sure our glasses of whiskey were kept full. Serban told Kara he had to come to New York. People there had never seen anything like the Situation Theater. They would love it. Kara’s eyes took on a dreamy expression. “To put up the tent in Central Park, now that would really be something.” Yes, cried Serban, “Central Park, the red tent will arise in Central Park!”

  And that is how we ended up at Narita International Airport bound for New York. I don’t know how much Andrei Serban had to do with the organization. Various foundations and cultural councils had been involved. I was to accompany Kara and Ri as their translator and guide. Mine was not a paid job, but more something done in the spirit of friendship; this is the way many things worked in Japan; mutual obligations are built up over time and not always expressed in cash. I had been to New York only once before in my life, but I was happy to “guide” my Japanese friends in the keto labyrinth.

  Kara peered into the night from the airplane window as New York City twinkled below us like a vast blanket of fairy lights, turned his head away in a gesture of disdain, and said: “Seoul is really much more impressive, isn’t it.”

  I had booked us into the Chelsea Hotel because I had read in some magazine that it was a hip place to be. Andy Warhol had shot a movie there. Jane Fonda and Jimi Hendrix had been residents. When we checked in, a painfully thin man in a tattered black top hat and a white woman’s petticoat was nodding off in the lobby. The rooms were so seedy that fat slugs left slimy traces on the stained carpets full of cigarette burns. A reek of marijuana and bad plumbing hung in the halls. I thought this would be the perfect place to start Kara’s journey to the West. In a memoir, written some years later, Kara described the hotel as ikagawashii, meaning dubious, suspicious, or unseemly.

  The reason for coming to New York was of course to meet people and see plays. My memory of the meetings is now a blur. I do recall Ellen Stewart at La MaMa. Her splendid cornrows had not yet gone silver. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in the East Village. A block party had turned the street over to a mass of people dancing to the sounds of Bob Marley. She told us how the whole world was coming together right there in the Village. They had staged a Korean Hamlet at La MaMa a year before. “Child,” Stewart said, “if a play beeps to me, I’ll put it on.” The array of armbands and bracelets that ringed her thin brown arms made a pleasant clinking sound as she sashayed her way down the block, greeting neighbors like the queen of East Fourth Street.

  We saw Joe Papp at the Public Theater, who, after being introduced to Kara Juro and Ri Reisen of the Red Tent Theater, greeted them as Mr. and Mrs. Red Tent. Even though Kara had criticized me the night before for not translating every word that a man from the Rockefeller Foundation had spoken, I decided that Papp’s condescension could do without a translation. Papp looked preoccupied, sitting behind his desk, with frequent glances at his watch. Well, he said, yes, a theater tent in Central Park, yes that sure could be interesting.

  We saw the incomparable Charles Ludlam perform in an impossibly camp version of The Lady of the Camellias (he acted as the Lady, of course) in a tiny former gay nightclub on Sheridan Square.

  We went to Central Park to see Meryl Streep and Raúl Juliá perform in The Taming of the Shrew. Andrei Serban was with us, bubbling with enthusiasm. Keep an eye on that young Streep, he said, she’s going to be a big star.

  We even went up to a disused parking lot in Harlem one night, where a group of “socially engaged” black actors were entertaining the neighborhood people for free. We were told by whoever it was that sent us up there which streets to avoid. Harlem was still an edgy place back then.

  I can’t remember what else we saw. But Kara and Ri were remarkably blasé about the theater in New York. Even Ludlam’s wild antics left them rather cold. I think they found American acting too cerebral, not physical enough. Ri observed that Americans didn’t “act with their lower bodies.” An aspiring young performer belting out a show tune to the crowd queuing up in front of a Broadway theater left a greater impression on them than Streep, Ludlam, or Juliá.

  Kara in particular appeared not to be excited by anything much. He was oddly incurious about a city he had never visited before. When Ri suggested going to one of the great museums, Kara said rather curtly that he would stay in the hotel. “Do you really think,” he said, “Andrei Serban would be going to museums in Tokyo?”

  One thing Kara did observe was something that would not have surprised any New Yorkers. The streets were full of panhandlers at the time; ragged people sprawled on park benches; or emaciated junkies in subway tunnels or in the lobbies of crumbling apartment buildings. What struck Kara, however, was not the number of down-and-outs, but the fact that so many of them were white. The sight of a poor, begging keto was an anomaly to him, something almost against nature. He expressed no satisfaction in this, just a sense of wonderment.

  A year before, in the Summer of Sam, a serial killer, claiming to have heard the voice of a demon dog in his head, had gunned down strangers at random in the outer boroughs of New York. I can’t remember who suggested going on a tour of the murder sites, but there we were in a taxi, prowling obscure bits of Queens and the Bronx, with the knowledgeable cab driver filling us in on the precise details of the killings.

 
Mostly, however, Kara stayed in the hotel, writing his next play, while Ri and I went for walks or to the movies. We saw Faye Dunaway in a mediocre picture called Eyes of Laura Mars playing a fashion photographer being stalked in New York by a serial killer. Kara’s decision to shut himself off in his hotel room might have been a form of posturing; an effort to do as he thought Andrei Serban would have done in Japan. Or perhaps it was a form of shyness.

  I had read accounts of other famous Japanese artists and writers who reacted defensively to being in a strange Western city unrecognized among strangers. Sudden obscurity could be painful to grand men who were used to deference, even adulation, at home. Mishima, I had been told, found this particularly irksome. He spent his first time in New York in an almost constant huff. Indifference was sometimes rather too quickly interpreted as racial prejudice.

  In 1965, Oe Kenzaburo, who would later win the Nobel Prize for literature, sent a postcard to his translator from New York: “A few days ago I was introduced to Norman Mailer at a bar late at night. He ignored me as if I were a small dog, or maybe a visiting dentist from an undeveloped country. Alas!”*

  The pride of local fame, however, is not the only possible explanation. The great Natsume Soseki almost went mad with solitude during his two years of studying in London. He wrote about that unhappy time, much of it spent in the seclusion of his lodgings in South London: “Everyone I see on the street is tall and good-looking. That, first of all intimidates me, embarrasses me. Sometimes I see an unusually short man, but he is still two inches taller than I am . . . Then I see a dwarf coming, a man with an unpleasant complexion—and he happens to be my own reflection in the shop window.”* But this was in 1903, some years before Soseki became the most famous novelist in Japan.

  Then there is the so-called Paris syndrome, a phrase coined by the press at the end of the twentieth century to describe Japanese tourists whose first encounter with Paris (or any other Western city idealized from afar) made them go slightly mad, so they would have to be repatriated. Something like that happened to a pale, bookish Japanese student called Sagawa Issei, who spent almost four years studying French without much success. In the early summer of 1981, he lured a beautiful Dutch student called Renée Hartevelt, who spoke fluent French, to his apartment with an excuse about wanting her to read a German poem.

  Sagawa, then thirty-two years old, had a peculiar history with white women. He had assaulted a German woman in Tokyo ten years before. Something he wrote about his life in Paris echoed Soseki’s sentiments in a strange way. Sitting in a café one day: “Suddenly I looked at the glass front door of the café and reflected there were the five of us. A small Oriental in a charcoal blazer was submerged amid large white-skinned men and women. Instinctively I looked away.”*

  On that ill-fated day in June, in Sagawa’s apartment, Renée Hartevelt turned around to read the German poem, and Sagawa shot her in the back with a rifle. He raped her corpse, sliced her up in pieces, ate some parts, and kept some in his refrigerator, before packing up the remains in a suitcase, which he tried to dump in the Bois de Boulogne, alas for him, in full sight of some French cops. While locked up in a French mental institution, Sagawa became a kind of cult antihero in Japan, where writers and intellectuals wrote about him with an appalled (and often appalling) fascination for the ultimate taboo-breaking sex crime.

  Unwilling to keep him any longer, the French authorities sent Sagawa back to Japan a few years later, where he was examined in a mental hospital and declared sane. Since he had never been officially convicted, he was now free to appear on television talk shows, and even play a small part as a sex murderer in a porno movie.

  Oshima Nagisa was interested in making a film about the case. And so was Kara. Nothing came of these plans. But Kara wrote a novel in 1982, entitled Letters from Sagawa, about his semifictional attempt to meet the killer in Paris. It was a morbidly playful book, full of references to keto, to the impossibility of translation, and to the neurotic attitudes of Japanese toward white foreigners: “That ‘yearning’ for the skin of ‘white’ people which for long years tormented and drove you on is not something I, who have myself been looked-down upon by women of foreign parts, cannot understand.”* In 1983, Kara won the most prestigious Japanese literary prize for his book.

  To interpret Kara’s behavior in New York in hindsight through the lens of his strange novel would be unfair. I saw no evidence that Kara’s amour propre was bruised by New York. But he did write some years later that the American trip had made him reflect more deeply on his own background. He felt the need to “maintain the balance” of his Japaneseness by writing a play, called Kappa, full of references to the muddiest aspects of Japanese culture. The kappa is a sprite in Japanese myths, a demonic trickster lurking in rivers and lakes. But the kappa in Kara’s play is the reincarnation of a drowned boy living in a tatami room that turns into a bog. And so it goes on, deep into Kara’s fantasy world, taking him away from unfamiliar New York back to the swampy soil of Tokyo.

  Our return flight to Japan was canceled for a reason I have forgotten, something to do with the weather perhaps. So we had to make a stop in San Francisco, where we spent the day wandering around rather listlessly. After Ri returned to the hotel for a rest, Kara and I ended up in a run-down old theater in Chinatown. We arrived in the middle of a crude and very noisy Cantonese opera. Next to us, an old man was snoring through the crashing, banging, and wailing sounds onstage. Others cleared their throats and spat on the floor just as a young nobleman was declaring his love to a courtesan. We were the only non-Chinese, so far as I could make out. And I was the only keto. I followed Kara’s gaze, as I had been doing metaphorically all through our trip; I wanted to see what he saw. Kara was less interested in the stage action than in the ambience, the colored lights beaming in from the back of the theater, the comings and goings of the musicians. It was the first time that week that I had seen him looking entirely relaxed.

  After a meal of Chinese noodles, we walked into a random dimly lit bar. A rather hideous bunch of dusty plastic flowers was arranged on the bar top. Next to it was a large golden cat, also made of plastic, lazily waving one paw up and down when you nudged it. An old airline poster of Mount Fuji hung on the wall. Behind the bar was an Asian woman, probably in her midsixties, heavily made up, with frizzy reddish-dyed hair tied into a knot with a pink chiffon scarf.

  Kara whispered in my ear: “What does she remind you of?” I had read enough about modern Japanese history to know the answer: “A pan pan girl.” Yes, giggled Kara, in high excitement. Pan pan girls were Japanese prostitutes who plied the bombed-out ruins of Tokyo for customers just after the war. Some specialized in Japanese men, some accepted Koreans and Chinese, too; some went only for the keto in uniform, and some only for black GIs.

  Hearing us speak in Japanese, the bar lady stretched her crimson lips in a broad smile, exposing a row of cigarette-stained teeth. Her story followed quickly. She had come to the United States in the late 1940s with her American husband, a navy man. They soon got divorced. Ever since, she had been working in one bar or another. But business was no longer what it once was. Her looks, her manner of speaking, her rural Japanese accent, all spoke of a different time, when Kara grew up in the low city and GIs swaggered around Tokyo in their jeeps. She could have been one of the women living among the drag queens in a public lavatory on Kara’s street in 1946. Time had stood still for her, as it often does for lifelong expatriates, who become almost like caricatures of their younger selves. I had seen examples of this among the gaijin expatriates in Tokyo; they become professional Englishmen or Americans, hold more and more reactionary political opinions, and drink too much.

  “So what are you going to do with your life?” Kara asked me after our third mizuwari. It was not a question I could answer with any conviction, so I mumbled something about being a photographer. “Yes, yes, photography,” he said rather dismissively, “but we believed in your talent. How old are
you now? You’d better get a move on, you know. I set up our first red tent in Shinjuku when I was still in my twenties.”

  The bar lady had been playing a succession of songs by Charles Aznavour. She liked French chansons, she told us, especially Aznavour-san. Americans don’t understand French songs, she said, unlike us Japanese. She patted her heart, and said: “Feeling. The same feeling.” Kara nodded: “Exactly so.” Edith Piaf sang “Milord.” The bar lady emerged from her perch behind the bar and began to dance, fluttering her thin hands in the air like a twenties flapper. She asked me to dance with her. Kara got all excited, turned around on his bar stool, clapping his hands, his high-pitched voice rising above Piaf’s: “Yes, Iwan, dance with her! Dance! Dance!”

  And I danced.

  ELEVEN

  I did not see much of Kara after we returned to Tokyo. My honorary position in the Situation Theater had come to an end.

  Kara was right, of course: I was just an ordinary gaijin after all. It was as though I had flunked an important test; my immersion in a Japanese gang had run into an insurmountable barrier. That last night in Kyoto had been the moment of truth that all foreigners face in Japan at one point or another. No matter how much you might behave as a Japanese, you never will be Japanese. Some foreigners find this painful. But you cannot blame the Japanese for failing to comply with the illusions of foreigners. Just as Kara faced his Japaneseness in the Chelsea Hotel, every gaijin in Japan must realize that a gaijin he or she will always remain, no matter how well a person speaks Japanese or has mastered the etiquette of Japanese social life.

  One of the finest descriptions of a Westerner’s disillusion in Asia comes at the end of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. Mr. Fielding, the free-spirited English professor, wants to revive his friendship with Dr. Aziz, the Indian Muslim who was deeply wronged by the false accusation of molesting an Englishwoman. Fielding had supported his friend all through his ordeal. He respected the Indians, Muslims as well as Hindus, and tried hard to understand their cultures. He came close to “going native,” that great colonial taboo. But the resumption of his friendship with Dr. Aziz is not to be, not yet, not there, in British India. Fielding asks: “Why can’t we be friends . . . It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But, Forster writes in the last paragraph, “the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file.”