26 august 1990. To Kawakita Kazuko’s, a party for Jim Jarmusch. Takemitsu Toru there as well. I ask him for a school to which to give the Donald Richie Commemorative Collection of Stringed Chamber Music. He shakes his head. Tells me that he had wanted to give his score collection to the Toho Music School. And they refused. “Just no more space in Japan,” says Toru.
2 september 1990. Learned a very interesting idiomatic difference. It came about this way: I was getting a cold drink at the machine, and a young tobishoku in tabi and cummerbund flashed a broad, white smile and said, in Japanese, “I’m not Japanese, either.” Well, the big, dazzling smile directed at a complete unknown had already indicated that.
He was Korean, from Pusan, and was working high on one of the scaffoldings of the buildings going up around here. Now he was off for the day and thought he would go sit in the park, enjoying what cool the twilight would offer. While this was not issued as an invitation, I took it as such and joined him.
Strong, young (twenty-five, he told me), and with that courtly politeness of the Koreans among strangers. Handsome, blunt, very Korean features; big, hard Korean body, sitting there in the dusk with his legs open. Much taken, I held up my end of the conversation until it was practically perpendicular. But this was also necessary, because his Japanese was not all that good. Mine is much better, and so I kept trying different words until I hit upon one he knew.
He was, I learned, bumming around Asia. He would go to a country broke, work, get some money, and go on. He did not know where he would go next or for how long he would be in Japan. Had been in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Always somehow made out. Smiled at this. Big, wide, smile. I could see why he always made out.
Then, seeing my interest in him, he interpreted it in the simplest possible way and decided I wanted to hear about the girls in all these foreign places. He certainly knew a lot about them, including the two, yes, two, whom he had simultaneously enjoyed (friends of friends, no, no money, never), or the one who had enjoyed him just the evening before. Oh, just to think of them made his chinchin okoru.
Here came the interesting idiomatic difference: When we have erections, we sometimes say we “are ready.” The Japanese usually say they “are hard.” But the Koreans say something different. Dae-Yung speaks of his chinchin standing up by saying in English, “It is angry, very angry.” And here was the Korean tobi saying the same thing in Japanese, since okoru means to become angry. How interesting. I wonder if this linguistic fact has ever before been noted by scholars. I tried to tell the tobi about this, but he could not understand. The spoken language not sufficing, I resorted to Braille.
Open, free, in that Korean way, he did not know if the chinchin could okoru at such short notice, but sure, why not, and besides he was tired after work, would like to rest a little. Well, to make a long story short (another idiom) chinchin okoru-ed, and then we went and had a big Korean meal with lots of kimchee.
Name was Lim Chun Sung and he was to leave the next day for Nagoya to work, but would be back on Thursday. We made a tentative date in the middle of the month, the 15th, but he didn’t know where he would be here. At parting, with a big smile, as though it were a joke-gift, he taught me the Korean for chinchin—it is chote.
A most interesting linguistic finding. I had thought that Dae-Yung had made up the angry prick as a part of the pidgin through which we are sometimes forced to communicate. Not at all. It is a part of the Korean language itself. And how interesting that the Koreans have to get angry to make love.
15 september 1990. Surprisingly (since I had not really expected it), Lim Chun Sung kept his promise and appeared, now in a summer sweater with the New York skyline on it, but the same tobi pants.
Over lunch (mainly beer), he told me something more about himself. He is a nomad all right, but this was because he had some trouble in Korea. Just what this consisted of I do not know—his Japanese is really bad. But, it had to do with clutching and slapping and shooting and stabbing and hanging, I guess. I guess, because these are the motions he went through, smiling that big, white, wide accepting Korean smile the while. Also, he was more curious about me. Where did I live, did I live alone, had I any friends? I wish it were possible to trust people, to take them home, to share things, but it is not. At least not people from the park in Ueno.
Later, coming home alone, I cut through the park and saw the young man I often see: crew cut, mid-twenties, nice looking, and somehow sad, also watchful as though waiting for something good to happen in his life. And over the months, I have talked with him. It was not girls he was waiting for, but it did not seem to be boys, either. And though he had some interest in talking about the hentai fufu, it was not voyeurism (which is all they offer), and the resident whore, even, did not know what he wanted though she had her own opinion: “Homo da wa.” So this evening I stopped to talk. Said his stomach was bothering him, gave a quick, apologetic smile, and looked vaguely about him. Just then a large man in a loose coat passed, and his eyes focused and he gave a short salute. And instantly the scales fell from my own eyes.
Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself? “You’re fuzz!” (Deka da!) I spontaneously cried. He instantly assumed that held-in poker face, which means that I am right, and made no attempt to deny anything. “That explains it all,” I said. And so it does. He has no interest in these things other people in the park do, and the only thing he is waiting for is this criminal to walk into his life and get nabbed. “Awful for you,” I said, “to have to perch here every night amid all the perverts and wait and spy and watch.” But he said, smiling as though in apology, “It’s not too bad.”
What kind of criminal is he after? I wanted to know. Obviously no small fry. He is surrounded by these. Is it the Most Wanted Man or something like that? But, he merely showed his polite, closed face and did not answer. “But, I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “No you won’t,” he said, smiling. And I had gotten to know him so well, I’d thought, in the past months. You never know, do you? Things just never what they seem. Wow, isn’t life surprising? etc. So I went my way and left him there, lonely looking, a cop on duty, all night long. Officer of the law, protector of the peace, no matter what the respectable prostitutes and pimps and perverts think.
1 october 1990. In the evening to the opening concert of the week-long series commemorating Takemitsu’s sixtieth birthday. He is in the lobby wearing black, but Issey Miyake black, with a little white (Hanae Mori?) butterfly. Smiling modestly, he always treats these great events of which he is the center as though he is just another guest.
Great event—the Emperor and Empress come. Due to some misunderstanding it was thought that I was diplomatic and so I am given a red ribbon and sit in the first row of the balcony, quite near the royals, separated only by a secret serviceman or two. Hence I can observe them.
They are gracious, as royalty is supposed to be. Certainly there is something Windsor in their waves but perhaps this is because there is only one way to wave. They are attentive during the music and appreciative after it. I wonder what they make of it—one hour and a half of Takemitsu’s beautifully crafted, small sounds. As I listen I remember his once telling me, “Oh, I would give anything to be able to write a good 2/4 allegro.” By the end of the concert I am feeling much the same.
5 october 1990. After some months, ran into Hideki [last name unknown]—a cook who runs his own place in the suburbs, late twenties. Brought him home. He got into all this ten years or so ago. Has no particular feeling for it but it is now all he knows. Has a bad opinion of himself and is consequently hopeless with women, at any rate never met the several with whom this low opinion would have assured affection. Has over the years stopped looking. Men are at least there.
Does everything but only, I feel, because he does not know what else to do. It apparently means little. Small excitement. He stands off and watches himself. Has casual if intimate affairs like with me, but his real friends would be as much strangers to all this as he or
iginally was. He is like a soldier who has somehow strayed into the other camp and stayed because he does not know where else to go. Is pleased to come, is pleased to stay, is pleased to go—is not really pleased at all. But it represents, I guess, something better than nothing.
6 october 1990. Haydn quartets—the delicious Opus 50. They are made up only of themselves. Like something perfectly tailored, not an inch left over, everything accounted for. And at the same time, a world of variety. I like art like that. That is why I like Jane Austen, why I like Henry Green, why I like Ozu, Bresson, and Tarkovsky. And why I do not like the big, inchoate people: Dickens, Liszt, and almost any other film directors one could name. Jonathan [Rauch] said, “You like Mendelssohn better than Beethoven.” Right.
10 october 1990. How Japan is changing. Now the rice market, the sacred rice market, is being opened. This commodity, which now costs seven times what it does elsewhere, will soon be as cheap (well, almost as cheap) as everywhere else. Not yet to be relinquished are all of those middle men who each take a bit off and thus drives up the price, all those distributors. But just as the small store is being eaten by the supermarket, shortly a successful single distributor will gobble up everyone in between. What will be slower to change is the reliance of the large concern on smaller subcontractors. It is these latter who have to work at a low price, with low paid labor. But so uneconomical is this (except for the large concern) that it cannot be expected to last.
16 october 1990. With Frank [Korn] to the Mukai Gallery, where a small ceremony was to be held in honor of his giving a complete set of Marian’s prints to the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. It was not a solemn occasion, what with the prints being counted, and the curators standing about and Frank pacing and me drinking tea. Still, I wished that Marian could have been there.
She was so ambitious for her art. And now a graphics museum requesting an edition of her work—how happy and proud she would have been. She often had shows at this gallery. I looked around, as I had so often at these various vernissages, but there was no Marian standing there, pleased, and smiling.
Frank took me to lunch and we talked about women. He maintained that he did not care what his women did so long as he did not know. As I well knew, remembering my strange and carnal affair with Marian, which lasted for years but occurred only a few times. I had felt worse and worse about Frank. I liked him better than I did Marian, but how do you let the cuckolded husband know this? We got drunk together once, in the wilds of Otsuka, and I remember almost pleading to let me tell him. Tears in my eyes, I wanted him to listen to my confession, all about his wife. And drunk as he was, with what skill he looped my confessions over my arm, turned me around, and sent me home. I never did get to apologize.
To change the subject I now asked him when his first time was. “Fourteen.” In Vienna. “A business person?” “Ach, no. Wealthy housewife. She used to have her chauffeur wait in front of the school.” “Did you do it in the Dusenberg?” “No, she would take me home. Have tea first. Maids in aprons, footmen.” “Where was her husband?” “At work probably.” Did this occur often? “Every day.” “What a strong schoolboy.” “Oh, no, each day a different school boy. I only got into the limousine once a week or so.” What prewar Vienna must have been. . . .
17 october 1990. I introduce a program of the films of Terayama Shuji at International House. When you look at these short pictures, you look into his mind. His mythology is there—beautiful, distant, wrong end of telescope, the past animated. And I remember him with his odd searching gaze, his rueful little boy smile, his sickly complexion—for the kidneys that killed him had gone bad in childhood. In the first film, the naval officer father takes off his pants, then his fundoshi, and staggers drunk and naked about the old farmhouse; and in the last, Terayama sits in his director’s chair, back to camera, as the play of shadows is dismantled, and then gets up without a backward glance and leaves. And in an hour and a half I have encompassed a life.
19 october 1990. John Haylock takes us out—Eric, Paul McCarthy, and me. We do not talk about sex but rather about religion and eventually about the saints. Paul tells of St. Agatha, depicted as having had her breasts sliced off and put before her on a plate. “Not a proper thing to discuss at table,” said John peering down at his sautéed slices of eggplant.
I gave him Frances Partridge’s new volume of diaries because some friends of his are in it. Duncan Grant, for example. This reminds John of the portrait that Grant did of him, left behind when the Turks invaded Cyprus. When he returned he found the flat a shambles, and there by the fireplace, crumpled, was the portrait. He unfolded it and found that some Turkish soldier had used it to wipe himself. Not, perhaps, a proper thing to discuss at table.
20 october 1990. That sense of “them” and “us.” The polarization; the breaking apart. It is stronger than ever. Visible everyplace. Though I can feel its attraction, I am one of the few, I think, who is aware—or at least aware and disapproving. I do not trust myself. I find myself thinking: them, them, them. How much is real; how much is “me”; how much is “them.”
If it is true that “they” oscillate between open and closed, then they are going into a closed phase. The faces are closed; the minds are closed. At least the occasional opposite is no longer common: the open face, the open question, and the open smile.
Very well, the new bourgeoisie: timid, craven, yuppie. But how much now, I wonder, is it “us” as well—we spurned white lovers. Was it ever any different? Did I not experience the exceptions? And have not affluence and time made these exceptions fewer?
I do not know. But at least I question myself. This is not done by many foreigners here. They hate. It is there, on their faces, and in their books.
21 october 1990. To see Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. How luxurious to sit in a movie and from the first shot know that everything is going to be all right, that an intelligence is guiding, someone whose artistry, technique and morals you can trust.
And what a packed film it is. From the first, information is pouring in from different circuits. There are the visuals, smooth but fast, then there is the dialogue, which is broken, fragmentary, then the voice-over which is echoed by dialogue, and at the same time is not talking about the visuals, and then there is the constant music, hits of the day. And just as Robert de Niro ages and puts on his bi-focals, so the music changes from big band smooth to hard rock hard.
Wonderful shot: out of the taxi, into the back door of the Copacabana, down the stairs, through the kitchen, out onto the floor, the headwaiter, the table carried and laid, the floor show, our people watching, champagne poured. All in one fluid shot, and everything choreographed along the way.
It is intelligent and frantic, just like the director. I remember him here, all eyebrows and tics and malaise. And Isabel Rossellini (they were just married) trying to soothe him (it was in their fake Louis XV suite at the Tokyo Prince) and he was smiling and frowning at the same time. The film is just like him. Style is the man.
23 october 1990. Big party hosted by Oshima Nagisa to celebrate thirty years of marriage. Also perhaps to raise money for the new film. [Tomiyama] Katsue and [Kawakita] Kazuko figured out that a free party always manages (like politicians’ parties) to raise money. Usually nowadays when a person gives a party you are told how much it will cost you to go—equivalent of $100, $200. And so for a “free” celebratory party like this people usually get envelopes ready with $300 or $400 in them. Let me see, if there are 1,000 guests and each gives $300. . . .
At the event, the hall is so big and expensive (The Tokyo Prince Hotel), and the food so lavish (fresh lobster, boeuf Wellington, trout, mango, papaya) that it may have cost him that much. I bring a painting (one of my own) for them. Kazuko says, implying that I am getting off cheap, “Ah, you artists . . .” I ask what she brought. Flowers. “Ah, you florists . . .” I say.
Just everyone there. Everyone a generation later. I see lots of actors I have not seen since the days of Ozu—Tanaka Haruo,
for example, now barely visible behind his age. Apparently I am also near unrecognizable. Approached by director Wakamatsu Koji, not seen for a time, with, “Wow, you got real old” (Waa, sugoku toshi natchatta ne . . .)—this from a fiftyish, wrinkled, salt-and-pepper oldster. I playfully pull one of his graying locks, but do not believe for a minute that his observation is without malice. I am, after all, the only one who has refused to take his cinematic effusions seriously.
He makes embarrassing soft-core psychodrama (or used to), and Noël Burch led the French into seeing great cinematic depths in Violated Angels. It occurs to no one that the reason for making it (nurses skinned alive) was non-cinematic. So, Koji was treated as though his junk meant something. And here he is a grand old man. If you last long enough just everyone becomes a grand old man. I am turning into one myself.
Then, a plump but well-preserved Yamamoto Fujiko gives a funny little speech—this long-stemmed Japanese beauty whom I will always remember in her single Ozu film, Higanbana. Shinoda Masahiro, all gray now but still very much the Boy Scout, asking just how I liked his Days of Youth, which I had not at all but can tell him I had recommended it to the Palm Springs Festival. Old Oba Hideo, he must be ninety now, gives the doddering toast, and the president of Toei the main speech. Not Shochiku? No. Shochiku, the company who first sponsored Oshima and then fired him, is not even represented. A scandal, but an expected one.
I leave early and hence miss the unexpected scandal. Oshima had asked novelist Nozaka Yoshiyuki to say a few words, then forgot that he had. Nozaka waited around, drinking the while, and by the time that Oshima remembered, was so smashed that he went to the podium, picked up the hand mike, and hit his host over the head with it. The irate and no more sober Oshima responded by brandishing the mike stand, and finally famous author and noted director had to be parted by force.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 33