So, I turned into him. The first-person narrator in The Inland Sea would have been different without the example of Goodbye to Berlin. At the same time, though we saw something of each other over the years, we did not become close. I felt professional toward him. I had learned so much. So I asked his permission and dedicated Tokyo Nights to him. Now I am with him again reading these journals. How well he has captured his own tone. How painful the striving to be sincere, how apparent the failure.
7 march 1997. To the bank: my investments are up for renewal. The efficient Ms. Yamaguchi tries to make sense of it all for me. And indeed it is not complicated, but whenever I am faced with large numbers I go blank, do not comprehend. My bank account is not that large, and so my failing has to do with something else.
This I began noticing when I was a child. Simply put, I cannot comprehend money, particularly when it is mine. I remember Lincoln [Kirstein] being all thumbs when it came to counting the bills. My head is like his fingers. It is something I willed early—not to interest myself in what interested my father most. I did not consider that he had to be interested, he had me and my sister to support. I simply and selfishly turned against it. Now I am paying for it. I write down all the sums because, though I carry in my memory all of the Köchel numbers of Mozart’s pieces, I cannot remember how much money I have invested, and where.
8 march 1997. Karel [van Wolferen] over for lunch. He had given me his new article to read, a piece about Japan’s failure to come to terms with wartime facts, and the reasons for it. The rightist press refers to the masochistic leftist press (what there is left of it), and says enough of this. It is true that the left has tried to make political hay out of war crimes, as it has of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A result is that these atrocities are used as political ploys, and then the rightists say enough of this masochistic wallowing, when it is not that at all—it is political expediency.
I suggest that Karel make clearer that when the Japanese use masohisimu they do not mean our clinical masochism, and when the word is used in conjunction with comfort women and military brothels an odd image is formed. Also I think he ought temper his attack on Oe Kenzaburo, whom he holds aloft as a sniveling, self-proclaimed victim. But then Karel believes a nation ought to have an army, but not use it. When I tell him that this is a contradiction in terms, he shakes his head.
We go on to the horrid state of the Japanese young. They have no one to talk back to because no one is there. He wants to use their slavery to fashion as an indication of how controlled they are. After all, the hippy gear of thirty years ago was real counter-culture. But it now becomes fancy dress—punk and grunge fashion statements. Still, fashion statements are a kind of control, too.
13 march 1997. Took Peter [Kubelka] around. He is interested in how the past lives on, so I took him to Yanaka. In the various small shops where we went he found a rustic basket from Iwate. “Oh, this I must have. It is five thousand years old.” I said I doubted this. “No, really. This is how they made them—all over. Neolithic. Look. And still in use.” Then I took him to Kappabashi, where he looked at modern kitchenware and tried to guess what certain unfamiliar instruments were for. He asked their names and wrote them down in his notebook. He also bought a bamboo grater.
Food is another interest. He liked his toriwasa and wanted the recipe. (Blanch chicken breasts, mix with wasabi and trefoil [mitsuba], sprinkle with strips of seaweed, and serve.) At Ameyokocho we spent an hour looking at edibles and asking the names of each, all of which went into the notebook. “Is that an eel too? If so, then, kindly ask what its name is. Yes, unagi, but what kind of unagi?”
At the getamoniya in Asakusa the notebook got a real workout. So did Peter when he discovered he could eat there. He ordered one pit viper, and one portion each of baby bees, pickled locust, and boiled silkworms. We watched as the owner cut off the head of the snake and then put it on the counter where it bit the surface for a time. The blood was drained into a shot glass and grape juice added. “Grape juice?” wondered Peter. “Surely that is not Japanese. Surely it is an importation.”
He liked the marinated bees and the boiled silkworms. I tried one of the latter. It tasted, strangely, like mothballs. Did not like the bees. Too sweet. The rest of the snake was deep fried, bones and all, and served with cabbage and lemon. I tried a piece. Tough, no special taste.
“Not eating such things,” said Peter, “is just imagination. Things like this are highly edible. Protein.” My own imagination prevented my trying the locust, all legs and eyes, but I admired Peter for eating everything in his relentless pursuit of knowledge. To write everything down, to remember, to think and to savor—this is living.
The real treat, however, came in the matsuriya where he wanted to buy a hyoshigi, those pieces of wood that when clapped make a splendid stroke of sound. He bought two sets, shaman rattles, a musical rasp, two bells, and a small drum—paying the large bill with his credit card.
“What a fine day,” he said with that round, friendly, accepting smile. “Thank you so much. Ah, my lovely basket, I must look at it again.” And there on the street he unpacked his bag and admired his purchase.
14 march 1997. Reading in the Isherwood diaries. Should one use one’s diaries as vehicle for quandary? Christopher does this a lot, so does Gide—and others too . . . Rousseau. One should use journals for doubt, but as for muddle, I think not. It smells of hedging one’s bets. For example, this domestic dilemma of Isherwood’s.
“It is absolutely essential that this state of affairs” (living with the awful Bill Caskey) “shall stop.” The question is how. Either he leaves Caskey or he doesn’t. “Leaving Caskey—quite aside from being terribly painful—wouldn’t really solve anything. Unless there were someone else to go to—which there isn’t. . . . Therefore, we have to stay together.”
It does not occur to him to live alone. He does not see that he is impossible to live with, does not understand that being alone does not mean being lonely. Since his pattern is to fight with his roommates, then to suffer, I am left to gather that it is the suffering that is necessary.
18 march 1997. Cold, raining, and in the great tan pond below me are five slashes of white, like brush strokes—five heron fishing on this rainy day. They stay there the whole morning, occasionally taking a step or turning a head. And there, in the drizzle below me, sits the old man in the hat who seems to have grown there, like moss.
1 may 1997. Chris [Blasdel] takes me out to dinner—at the Nakano Tunisian restaurant. Afterward we have coffee at the Fugetsudo and talk about life after death. His idea is Rudolph Steiner’s—that the physical body vanishes but others linger. The “astral body” lasts as long as do flowers on the bier, which is why they put flowers there. Others last longer. After that, everybody repairs to the stockpile and then gets recycled.
I tell him his idea is somewhat like that of Nils [Kreidner], now over for the last time before leaving to go back to school in Germany. We had talked about life after death. I said there is none: it is like turning off the light. He said there is, kind of. Not heaven and hell, of course. These are real, but we make them for ourselves, everyday, right here. No, we transmigrate, but the number of souls is finite. Eventually everybody gets to be everyone else . . . eventually. This is original—I have never heard this theory before.
As for my light bulb—instant nonexistence—even the most superstitious Japanese would agree. I wonder if this might not be because the individual is so much less stressed here, and hence so much less valued.
4 may 1997. Since I am now writing my introduction to the translation of Asakusa Kurenaidan, I once more go there, to Asakusa, to see if I can find any trace of what I once felt. Fifty years ago it was still alive, this great entertainment district. The merry-go-round was still there, and the movie theaters, the yose, even some remnants of the park. No longer. It has been gentrified, something which can occur only in a dead neighborhood. There is an amount of created nostalgia—statue of Enoken the Asakusa comedian, a new off
ice building called the Denkikan, named after the first movie theater. The old theatrical district, the Rokko, is now gone. There is a sauna bath by that name and a new futuristic structure (Za Rokko), which houses cheesy little boutiques and fast junk food places. The only thing alive about the place is the Japan Racing Center, an enormous complex for people to go and place bets on distant horse races. The place is more insipid than depressing. I wander for an hour, but it is no longer Asakusa so I leave.
3 may 1997. Chizuko [Korn] here, alone, for a visit. I admire the way that she has adapted to life in New York—and life with Frank—neither at all easy. The carefully coiffed Chizuko, elegantly and expensively dressed, wafting the aroma of mizushobai, is gone. In place, a pleasant woman of fifty or so wearing a cotton shirt and granny glasses, with lots of big, loose, undyed hair. She is her age, has accepted it, and is perfectly natural with it.
We talk about their life in New York, just the two of them, with a few friends—like my ex-wife, Mary. She talks naturally about his children (against whom she was dagger-drawn when here), she even willingly talks about the dead Marian. Maybe it is having to take care of the eighty-three-year-old Frank that has made her so herself.
5 may 1997. Boys’ Day, now called Children‘s Day (though girls are allowed to keep Girls’ Day on March 3), the last of that chain of holidays optimistically dubbed Golden Week. Today people, exhausted by their idleness, confronted by masses of leisure choices, idle around the pond awaiting welcome work.
Bang-bang, loud, impatient, someone at the door, something that almost never happens in this well-guarded apartment. It is the police, a single, spectacled man with a large clipboard. He is checking the neighborhood he tells me. And I am—he peers at his papers—Mr. Donald. I explain that that is my first name and he makes an erasure. He then gives his speech. He is here to help me. I live alone it appears. (I have long learned that the cops know much more about me than I think they do—and the same for everyone else in the archipelago.) So if, for example, I one day find myself unable to move (he looks into my lined face) I need only call this number (handed over) and either he, Officer Kato, or one of his aides will come to rescue me. Then with a smart salute and a bow he is gone.
I hold my piece of paper with my lifeline telephone number on it and smile. How fortunate I am to live in this country, how very lucky I am to have come here forever, how grateful I am for this present on Boys’ Day.
11 may 1997. To be political is to be engaged in administration, having an organized polity, taking a side in politics. Those who do have a stake in any outcome are attempting to create what they want. Disinterested politics is impossible. If one is political for gain it means one has faith in one’s strength; if one is political for “the people,” or any other such concept, one has faith in the object.
So many reasons for me to despise politics. It is self-serving; it is desire masquerading as good; at its worst it is rape, at its best it is seduction. Odd, since I do not resist any of this in its physical aspect (well, yes, rape), why do I so resist it in its ideological form? Why do I even think resistance possible? Politics is everything. I am playing politics even though I think I am not—pushing my agenda.
With such thoughts do I occupy my Sunday stroll. In Ueno Station I see coming toward me a limping, frowning old man. Then recognition—it is Edward Seidensticker. We stop. “What are you doing?” he asks. “My postprandial,” I say. “A likely story,” says he, smiling broadly. “And yourself?” “Back from Maebara. Had to talk on a poet. Woke up at five this morning to think about what I could possibly say.” “What did you possibly say?” “God knows.” “Want to have a coffee?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I am tired. I am going home.” Upon parting he added, daringly, “Good hunting.” “Tut-tut,” say I, waving a finger. “Postprandial.”
13 may 1997. At dinner Ed tells me that sumo is slipping. For the first time in a decade, seats have this week failed to sell out. Indeed, some four hundred, an unheard-of number, are left unsold. He ascribes this to a rule that people in the same stable cannot fight each other, and all the strong ones are now in one stable. I ascribe it to the essential idiocy of sumo. “But it has been popular until now,” he says. “ ‘You cannot fool all of the people all of the time,’ ” I quote.
Then he kindly helps me with my introduction to Asakusa Kurenaidan, the book I have been working on for fifty years now. I am beginning to believe that, at last, my half-century-old promise to Kawabata will be honored. “Of course,” says Ed, “you got all of your information from me.” I agree and add, “That is why in my letter I was wondering how to handle this matter.” “What letter?” “The letter I enclosed with the manuscript.” “There was no letter.” “There was.” “Well,” he said, “it is but a small matter—still when one has done scholarly work, one would wish for at least some recognition.” “That, Ed, is just what I said in my letter.” “What letter?” Etc. . . .
Later on we speak of death and dissolution. He tells me that when a person dies, his or her sphincter relaxes and he or she shits him or herself. I tell him that all men die with erections, such being the meaning of stiff. This reminds me of the conte drôle of Balzac, where the old maid plucks the corpse of the freshly hung thief from the scaffold and so avails herself that he regains consciousness.
We are into our desserts at this point and agree that it is a droll conte indeed.
15 may 1997. I take a long walk and, as I have for half a century, revel in the city, in Tokyo, the largest of all cities. When I am in the country I am enchanted for an hour or so, but then become uneasy. In a small town I walk the few streets and then begin to feel closed in upon. But in a city there are always further reaches, places one has never seen, those one never will.
I remember Baudelaire walking with spleenish content the streets of Paris. He said that the pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy. So it is. He said it was because the multiplication of number. I, agree, adding that it is because of the multiplicity of seeming opportunity. In a city anything can happen, in the country little, and in the grave nothing.
19 may 1997. Am reading the admirable Umberto Saba: “A poem is an erection; a novel is a birth.”
22 may 1997. Ran into Ed and we went and had a drink at an izakaya, the kind of place I almost never go—first because I don’t drink and second because I feel I am ruining the atmosphere (very Japanese) for everyone else. Ed drinks, however, and ruining atmospheres was never a concern of his. Rightly so. They ruin ours (all that smoking) much more than we with our foreignness ruin theirs.
We talked about food dislikes. He does not like unagi, my favorite. And I do not like natto, his favorite. So he orders natto wrapped in shiso leaf and deep-fried and, sure enough, it is delicious. We both agree about oden. I cannot abide it. He holds his nose when he eats it.
Then in a kindly and concerned manner he asks me about money. Do I have enough? This I take as friendship, because how many people would risk misunderstanding to so inquire. No, he does not want any nor does he intend to give me any. Like a true friend, he worries about my future. I reassure him as best I can.
25 may 1997. A review of my Public People, Private People says that, “. . . the present reader may feel a little envious of Richie for getting to meet people of a kind that no longer exist in an era that will never come back.” Is that true? About the era, of course, but about the people? Yet it was certainly easier to meet people back then. And not just because foreigners were perhaps helpful. Japanese acquaintances tell me that they now have the same problem. Strangers are not so open to experience as they were. Also, solitary people are rare now, though they were once common. People come either pairs or groups now—or, if single, they are accompanied and preoccupied with their cell phones. In all events they come self-sufficient. They do not need anyone. Now the only way to meet people in Japan is the same as everywhere else. Be introduced. One can no longer profitably cruise for acquaintance (nor for anything else), and this is certa
inly a change from the good old days.
And yet—walking in Ameyokocho I see a palanquin coming toward me, an ornate, phoenix-crowned, and very heavy float carried by a number of men and some women, all gotten up in some kind of Edo costume, the men showing their bare torsos, the hayashi of the drums and flute keeping everyone in step. The Ueno summer festival, or part of it.
Walking past it I notice that one of the men, loin-clothed, with an incongruous permanent wave, is looking at me. I look in return and he smiles, and with a free hand waves. It is my barber. Behind his chair at the shop he is the last word in modern: the perm, the dispatch, the cool way of today’s youth, the radio blaring American rock, and the shelves stocked with contemporary mousses. Yet here he is—a friendly young man straight from Edo.
26 may 1997. Am reading some modern “gay” diaries. They share a remarkable degree of disingenuousness. I suppose I share it as well, or else I would not so much mind it. But I have another reason for disliking it. And this is that those who write in this hypocritical manner are always pleading guilty to the lesser crime. Is this something that afflicts the tribe? My impatience is caused by my not wanting to be a tribe, but an individual.
Maybe this is the reason I so dislike the term “gay”—it has tribal connotations. It means, as we are often told, an alternate “lifestyle,” which is plainly familial. Gays do this, gays do that, they also shop at gay stores and employ gay lawyers; there is, I understand, a chain of gay undertakers—a profitable line. The term so stresses the collective that it can only reinforce a stereotype. This is why I would prefer a pejorative, like “queer.” Here the stereotype is much less focused because no one wants to focus it.
A useful distinction is made by Robert Aldrich [in The Seduction of the Mediterranean, 1993]. He says that there are old and new models of homosexuality: The old was an aesthetic model, but the 1970s gay model promoted hedonism rather than intellectualism. The earlier idealized and spiritualized; the new put a premium on physical expression and espoused a happy promiscuity.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 52