Turning I saw that my three-piece neighbor had reappeared. Now he was standing up, pulling off his three pieces and then, only in his own creamy skin, jumped into the chocolate river.
I wanted to save him—a new friend already imperiled—but the permed pal had already pulled off his own clothes and joined him in the muddy stream where they snorted and sported like muscled porpoises, while Tani laughed and the bride, face to his shoulder, hid her gaze from the naughty nudity.
All eyes, I stared down at the naked boys. One floated on his back, chest and loins surfacing, and the other, all buttocks, dove into the depths. Then they gamboled around the boat as the old women shrieked, the men sang, and the boatman beamed.
Back on shore with the afternoon sun low, the two swimmers, though now more modest in long cotton kimono, did not seem much more sober. They and their friends rolled about and told the bride what awaited her, as the sun declined and the shadows lengthened, long and cool, across the mats. The distant rush of the waters, more sake, more beer, more whiskey—and, quite suddenly, sleep.
Tani Hiroaki’s wedding party. Nagatoro, 1958. donald richie
I awoke in a different room, my pants off but still in my tie and shirt, lying on a mat, a coverlet over me. The ceiling swam in the upper gloom and the river murmured as though asleep itself and it was dark night.
In the dim light from the corridor I saw that several bodies were in the room with me—bundles of sleep, an arm or a leg sticking out here and there. The smell of spring mud lay rich and fleshy across us.
And an arm fell heavily on me while someone asked in a husky whisper if it was really true that I taught English. It was the creamy swimmer, now piece-less and under the same coverlet. I said I had never taught English in my life. Then what had I taught Tani he wanted to know in his low, urgent, drunken whisper. “I’d like to learn,” he said, “I’m a good learner.”
And I thought about my friend Tani, under this very roof with his pretty bride, his necktie now off. The odor of mud, of flesh, lay heavy in the dark and I thought about weddings and daggers at the waist, took a deep breath of the soil-scented night and turned to face the Kyushu friend.
In the morning I was wakened by the sound of water, a vision of a vast cool blue lake, and a terrible thirst. Pushing off my sprawled and sleeping partner I staggered to the bathroom, enveloped now by the country smell of urine, and drank heavily from the faucet.
The door opened. There was Tani, fresh from the bath. He wanted to know if I had a hangover. Well, he wasn’t surprised, not after all I had drunk. Not him though—bad thing about getting married was you couldn’t drink, had to sit there watch everyone else make fools of themselves. Liked my dance, incidentally.
“How was yours?” I wanted to know.
“Come on. I was tired. Besides, I’ve done it enough with Machiko already.” Then, “Hope you behaved yourself.”
“Certainly did.”
The sound of running water, the river—like the sound of someone taking a leak.” Oh, shit,” I said. “Forgot my toothbrush.”
“Here,” he said, and as he often had before, lent me his.
I was bent over the basin brushing when Machiko appeared, a summer kimono gathered about her. She smiled, said good morning, and I rinsed off her husband’s toothbrush and gave it back to him.
She kept on smiling—he was hers now, shared toothbrushes mattered little. And I thought of the picture and the two of them preserved in the flesh on the photographic plate and their never changing.
But now in the bright morning light reflected off the surface of the uncoiling river, amid the smell of mud and piss and the gentle odor of miso soup warming in the kitchen, we three stood there, our flesh firm, filled with future promise.
From 1960 on, Richie began to keep a fuller record of his life. From now on, the journals have an existence in their own right. Consequently they take the shape of Richie’s life.
He had come to live in a land as far from Ohio as he could get, and it was becoming his home. Indications of the freedom he found in Japan have already been noted in these pages, but now he began to be aware of an irony. He was free not because he was no longer compelled to “join,” but because he was not allowed to. This was because he was foreign. If he had been Japanese he would have been forced to join. It would have been worse than Ohio. With a growing appreciation of this came an attitude toward self that was quite different from that in, say, the journal entries of 1948. It took the form of an awareness of his singular position in Japanese society, and with it a growing interest in communicating, dramatizing it. An early expression is found in The Inland Sea, but before that, in these journal pages, there are indications. Richie once said that he had thought he was a window, but he turned out to be a bridge.In the meantime he continued to live the life he was just beginning to record in the journals. Since he made little money from any of his books, he continued to support himself doing things—teaching, reviewing, editing—that were not central to the way he saw himself. Though he had a number of avocations—painting, composing, stage and film directing—he really saw himself as a writer, a “creative” writer rather than a critic. He once said that if the house were on fire he would neglect Kurosawa and Ozu in order to save The Inland Sea and Public People, Private People.He was also moving about the city, trying out different neighborhoods. In 1957 Richie had lived in a house in Shimo-ochiai, near Mejiro Station, and in 1959 he lived in a small house on the hill above Otsuka in the north of Tokyo. Here he met Zushiden Tsukasa, a Kyushu student going to Chuo University, and they lived together for a time. In 1961 Richie married Mary Evans and they lived in a small house near Roppongi. In 1971 Richie would buy an apartment in Tsukiji, then sell it and move to Yanaka (1980), eventually settling in Ueno (1996).
5 january 1960. I dream of an experience I had thought forgotten: I am again on the beach at Chiba, and it is the day of the dead, before dawn. I cannot sleep, and wander out onto the beach, looking upward at the summer stars. At my feet is a boy curled up in a hole in the sand and sound asleep. I look further and find the beach is full of sleeping boys, all children. Like animals in their burrows, two and three to a hole, they are curled sleeping. Then I remember that today is the day the dead return. The children are waiting for the dawn, when their dead come from the sea.
I awake and it is dawn: the whole experience, precisely as it was, I see with hallucinatory brilliance. It does not fade, but stays with me all day long. It asks me to use it, to do something with it, not to lose it, now that it has made the immense distance back to me.
In the evening Erik [Klestadt] comes over. He is feeling depressed; feels so wretched that there is something gallant about his consenting to remain the person I know, and to reassure me through various ways of speaking, ways of holding himself, that it is indeed he.
Not sympathetic, I say that such depression is the price he has to pay, that he has made a choice and this is one of the consequences. For Eric is a brilliant linguist who does not use his talents; he is a first-rate critic who never criticizes; possessing extraordinary sensitivity, he allows it to prey on him and never once himself preys on it. He, who can sit down and read a Japanese paper or magazine as though it were English or German, who possesses the ability further to fully comprehend what is left out as well as put in, makes no uses of this gift. He works daily in an office selling scrap metal.
“Oh, you make it sound so easy,” he says. “And perhaps it is easy for you, but something is lacking in me.” He is going to explain, but then that is too difficult. He merely says, “I am terribly lazy.”
I look at him and realize how very much I like him, how much I want to save him. I see him as a swimmer in the unruly surf, sinking, sinking, yet refusing to call for help; smiling with exhausted reassurance, as yet another wave topples. I want to gallop into the raging sea and pull him out; and I would try, but that he would probably pull back and refuse. I tell him this, and he smiles and says, “Well, at least I don’t think I would be
strong enough to pull you under as well.”
6 january 1960. Zushiden [Tsukasa] makes supper and afterward we sit in the electric kotatsu and eat mikan, and he talks about Kagoshima from where he has just returned: tells me that even in winter he used to go barefoot when he was a schoolboy; that they had no gas and still used charcoal; that even now in the single motion-picture theater the crowd applauds when the film begins, and applauds all the credits as well; and that they also clap when the plot takes a turn to their liking.
Zushiden Tsukasa. Mejiro, 1960. donald richie
He also tells me about various early amorous adventures. The first little girl with whom he played doctor (she was patient; he, doctor; she had to have an operation) he saw again just this month at home. “And did you play doctor?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was all very proper,” and he did a parody of the way in which he greeted her: important in his Tokyo student uniform, the slight nod, the slight smile, and dignity about all. Then he broke down laughing at himself.
Zushiden is only twenty but knows himself better than do many grown men, including this one. He is proud of his body, but only for what it will do for him; says he thinks he is not too smart but knows that he’s not dumb. Won’t study, though—is interested in the team and the school; stays home here most of the time and reads sports newspapers; willing and obliging, and one of the least selfish people I know, perhaps because one of the least ambitious.
Yet this will change; I have seen it change, and in only five years people just as open and as at peace as Zushiden transformed into insecure, scheming, harassed Japanese adults. Perhaps it is the curse of the city; perhaps the mark of society; perhaps merely another form of the adaptation that I am admiring.
7 january 1960. A cold day. Hurrying home after the public bath, steam rising from my hair, I notice girls sitting in the open shops, boys lounging by open upstairs windows. It is quite true that heating is not needed in this country. Even people who have it do not use it. The hands, the face, become red and chapped. When someone is really cold he doesn’t dance around, his whole body chilled; rather, he pats his cheeks, wrings his fingers. Then (and what a graceful gesture that is) one hand is extended over the charcoal in the hibachi. In the bath, however, with what abandon do the washers douse themselves with scalding water before they plunge into the boiling.
9 january 1960. At the PEN meeting, the sun reflecting off the Sukiyabashi Canal just outside the big French windows, I am introduced to a bird-like, white-haired man.
“Oh, but we know each other,” he said to the man who was introducing us. “We spent a very cold afternoon together some ten years or so ago. I caught a cold. Was in bed for a week.”
Kawabata Yasunari looked at me, kindly, inquisitively, and released my hand, “I imagine he doesn’t even remember me.”
“But I do,” I said.
“He speaks,” said the writer, surprised. Then, to the other man, “There we were, stuck up there, the old subway tower in Asakusa, and I was wondering what to do about him. He was so terribly enthusiastic and kept pointing things out. And we couldn’t talk.”
“Tell me,” I said, a decade-old curiosity returning, “What were you thinking of that day on the roof when we were looking out over Asakusa?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But how did you feel about Asakusa all burned? You were seeing it for the first time since the war was over.”
“Oh, that. I don’t know. Surprise maybe. Sadness probably.”
He had gotten over Asakusa. Had he gotten over it when we stood there in that cold glare? I wasn’t over it, even yet, doubted I ever would be. For me Asakusa had spread to cover the city, the country, maybe even the world.
“And you, did you ever translate Asakusa Kurenaidan?” he asked.
“I never learned to read.”
“Well, at least you learned to speak. We can talk, finally.”
And he smiled, his white head birdlike against the flowing glare of the slow canal and the distant clamor of the Tokyo traffic.
But we never did. And now people were pushing, wanting to speak with the famous novelist. We had already had our talk. And whenever we thereafter met Kawabata would cock his head on one side and look at me quizzically, humorously, as though we had had something in common.
13 january 1960. My last day of teaching. Making out the final term marks, I half-heartedly attempt to feel something, anything, about my leaving Waseda [University] for good. Nothing comes. I try again; this time something does:Suddenly I realize how tired I am of it all, with what lack of interest I face my classes. All of which makes me realize what a poor teacher I probably am, that—for my students’ sake if not my own—I should have stopped before.
Yet, this is not true. I am liked, liked for the wrong reasons perhaps, liked because of the show, but the show was there because I wanted to entertain them into learning. And this has been good. I have proof—the letter that came last June after I had stopped two weeks early because I did not feel I could go on, and which I will in part copy here because I want to keep it:
We will all miss you, Mr. Richie! You really brighten our school life. As you may know most of our classes are boring, dry and some even meaningless. We are fed up with old-typed schooling, such as studying the English language in Japanese, which is really meaningless and even harmful, I think. For that, perhaps the bad tradition in English education in this country is responsible. But your class is different; it is interesting, enjoyable, and lively. In fact, your class is one of the few classes we enjoy and like to attend. But we don’t want to ruin your health, and hope you will have a good time this summer and look forward to seeing you in September, and may I ask you to please put up with us once again.
And then it is signed by a young man who sits in the front row and about whom I know little else—Yabuki Keiji.
16 january 1960. Zushiden here. He makes supper. We sit in the kotatsu; he drinks whiskey and I drink awamori. We talk. I realize that I have a home and a family. The electric fire warms our feet; the alcohol warms our bodies. After supper, warm, we sit and talk. It gets later. Then it is time for the warm bed and warm bodies.
17 january 1960. A brilliant day, Fuji hanging over the city, Shinjuku small against its base, everything foreshortened and minutely clear as though seen through a telephoto lens. Meredith and I drive out into the country to see Holloway.
With Marian Korn, 1960. donald richie
I have glimpses of two domestic households: Meredith and [Yato] Tamotsu have a joking relationship, bunkies, pals, supported by affection, by regard, by need; jocular rough talk to each other; laughed insults; rather matey—a domestic arrangement.
Holloway and [Kamata] Michio have another kind: no jokes to speak of, constant support. I think of bookends, of pairs (plaid sox, plaid tie), of dress-alikes. The two make such warmth that the bad cold world is kept out. So shielded and sheltered that the one’s opinion is asked before the other makes up his mind.
Wonder what my household looks like. But which one? Well, right now, with Zushiden. It is roommates. People who go their own ways but attend the same classes. We don’t have a social life together. We have a personal life. This family is more like a boarding house.
18 january 1960. In the evening I enjoy another glimpse of domesticity, this sanctioned by marriage. Frank and Marian [Korn]—married long enough to have three almost grown kids. Hence perhaps Marian’s: “Oh, no, you are very stupid. You are utterly wrong. You just don’t know.” On the other hand: “Oh, you are so very clever,” followed at once by “I’m just a stupid woman. Oh, yes. I am, I am,” even when no one contradicts her.
Frank is determined common sense itself when around his wife. Occasionally public caresses to which Marian lends herself like a petted cat. She holds on to a person as though trying to remember the contours, as though attempting to convince herself that it is all real. Marian, charming figure, charming dimple, turning serious: something of Madame Verdurin there; Frank, something
of Basin: a refined, reflective, and self-abnegating cruelty.
Marian on Stravinsky and Craft: “Well, I know who I am putting my money on. The old one, he’s had it; but the young one now he’s coming right up. I imagine that in ten years or so, he will be it—the old one has had it.” Of any composer she doesn’t like (Webern before [Heuwell] Tircuit put her straight): “He doesn’t know what he is doing!” Folk-wisdom—her mother must have said the same thing about some clumsy neighbor farmer.
Frank is, on the other hand, slightly above the arts, patronizes them: in his canon only Bruckner, Mahler, and Beethoven (“Jews every one of them,” a joke) and an I-know-what-I-like attitude.
Both Frank and Marian are now very tired, they are falling apart, they are asleep. I look at my final family, for here I have a place too. Perhaps it was my open unavailability that first interested Marian, perhaps it was Frank’s philandering. At any rate the unlikely happened and I found her doing to me what I do to others. This, I think she thought was the way to my heart. I could never be what Marian wanted me to be—bold, impetuous, headlong. I could not rape. I could only be raped. Thus our small passion petered out and we remained friends.
Now I watch my slumbering hosts, so like a father and mother, and remembered my attempts to confess my philandering to Frank—whom I found just as attractive as I did Marian. And his alacrity at avoiding these confessions. These he did not want to hear. About my boyfriends he was complaisant but not about my girlfriends, at least not this particular one.
20 january 1960. Sick from the dentist and Mary [Evans] tall, wide-eyed, flaxen-hair down to the shoulders, comes over to take care of me. She brings me a bottle of kirsch and curls up on the bed while we talk. Beautiful, strange, something like a tall bird—perhaps a heron. Extraordinary eyes: very wide, large, Egyptian; with those eyes and the El Greco figure I think of Burne-Jones—she is his demoiselle elue. Swann would have thought of Botticelli.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 16