by Ian Buruma
I might not have survived my childhood in Bowling Green, Ohio, if it hadn’t been for two things: my Aunt Tess and the Luxor Playhouse. Aunt Tess was my father’s elder sister. I can still conjure up her room in my mind: the maroon-colored walls, instead of the usual drab off-white; the reproduction of a Renoir painting, hanging in the front parlor, of people dancing in a Parisian music hall; the old Persian rugs, the Chinese landscapes in silk, and all the other souvenirs from Uncle Frank’s travels. Her room was like a cave full of strange delights, where one could hide from the ugliness of the world outside. Uncle Frank I only knew from stories. I was three when he died in a car accident on Route 7 on his way to Lima. But my aunt would show me pictures of Uncle Frank in various exotic places where he traveled to meet the suppliers for his tea business, which stopped flourishing in the late 1920s and went bust in the crash on Wall Street. Much later, in a moment of indiscretion on Mama’s part, I learned that he had been drinking when his car overturned on the route to Lima.
Those photo albums, bound in dark green leather, were an endless source of daydreaming. No matter how often I scrutinized the sepia pictures of Uncle Frank posing in front of a Chinese temple or a teahouse in Assam, the magic never wore off. I would pester Aunt Tess with questions about these enchanting scenes. What she didn’t know, she made up, and I didn’t mind it one bit. We invent stories in order to live. Once in a while, these half-fictional memories seemed to distress her. She stopped talking and silently stroked my hair, softly repeating my name: “Sid, Sid, oh dear, oh dear . . .” Sensing that something was wrong, but not quite what, I asked her whether she was hungry. I found comfort in her French perfume that stuck to my clothes, to the disgust of my father, who complained that I “stank like a bordello” every time I returned from his elder sister’s house. I had no idea what a bordello was, but my father’s condemnation made it sound very attractive. I associated it with the Moroccan Village at the Chicago World’s Fair. It sounded pleasantly foreign, like the food at the home of Frankie, my best friend at school. His parents were Italian. They ate garlic, which disgusted my father almost as much as Aunt Tess’s French perfume.
The Luxor was one of two moviehouses in Bowling Green. It was located on the corner of Wooster and Main. When I was small, Mama or Aunt Tess would take me to the other cinema, the Rialto, farther up on Main Street, where I saw Harold Lloyd hanging from that great clock and Dolores Del Rio dance with Gene Raymond in Brazil. But the Luxor was the more glamorous, with its bronze relief of Egyptian dancers in the lobby. The connection between Egypt and the movies still escapes me, but it seemed right at the time. As soon as Mr. Ray Cohn’s luminous Wurlitzer sank into the pit, and the titles of the first film (one movie was good, but a double bill was heaven) came on, I entered the lives of Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Lewis Stone. I can still see in my mind’s eye that slap in the face of Norma that made Clark into a star. And Grand Hotel. Those opening words: “Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.” Well, nothing except for jewel heists and movie premieres and doomed love affairs! The imaginary lives of John Barrymore and Greta Garbo meant so much more to me than my own drab existence. I spent hours imagining that I was Baron Felix von Gaigern, or Peter Standish. What small amounts of pocket money I received from my father, who always gave grudgingly as if parting with his last savings, was spent on the movies. Mother knew, but never told my father. When I was obliged to buy a present for my father’s birthday, she would slip me a few dollars. I always bought him a new necktie. I never saw him wear them.
The Luxor is also where I had my first erotic encounter. I never knew the man who gave me my first taste of adult pleasure. I can’t even recall precisely what he looked like, but I remember the moment quite vividly. I had gone to the movies alone, a habit I retained all my life. It was The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. They were sailing from France and just as they spotted the white cliffs of Dover, I felt a hand brushing my right thigh. I still wore shorts. The hand felt warm. I was surprised, but did nothing to discourage this sudden invasion, thinking it might be an accident. It soon became clear that it was no accident. The hand, more confidently now, made its way up higher, feeling my thigh as if to test its firmness. When the desired goal was reached, I felt a sensation that was utterly new to me. Instinctively, I opened my legs to allow more room. I heard the man next to me breathing and glanced at him from the corner of my eye. He was just a middle-aged man in a suit, giving off a slight whiff of hair oil. His eyes were fixed on the screen. Merle Oberon spoke the famous words: “England, at last!” The hand relaxed and was pulled away as quickly as it had arrived a few minutes earlier. I never saw the man again. Nor did I ever have a similar experience in the Luxor. Though not exactly losing my flower, it was the beginning of something that would become a major part of my life, the pursuit of pleasure in encounters with strangers.
3
I ALWAYS THINK of that bus trip to Los Angeles in the summer of 1944 as my first Great Escape. Fresh out of high school, but just too young for the draft, I had no idea what I wanted to do, but one thing was for sure, whatever it was I ended up doing, it wasn’t going to be in Bowling Green, Ohio. My father was so disgusted with me that he had even stopped calling me “a damned sissy.” Mama looked permanently worried since she found me one day pulling faces in the mirror while uttering Marlene’s famous words: “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Spending the summer jerking sodas at Lou’s Drugstore was not really an option, as far as I was concerned. My sexual life was all in my own head, leaving me feeling exhausted as well as ashamed whenever I found temporary release in the privacy of the restroom. I thought I might go mad if I stayed home one moment longer.
A fortune-teller once told me that I was blessed with good luck. It was an easy thing for her to say. We all need reassurance. But I believe it might be true. I think I have a guardian angel who steps in whenever things become too desperate. My Great Escape in the summer of ’44 was made possible by my Aunt Betsy in Chicago, who had a friend, who was married to a businessman, who knew a man in motion pictures, named Warren Z. Noakes. Noakes worked for the distribution office in Chicago for the Twentieth Century Studios in Hollywood. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing this angelic figure, whom I never actually met, managed to get me a job as a gofer in the research unit of a movie to be made in Hollywood by the great Frank Capra. Mama wept when I finally left Bowling Green. My father was just glad to get rid of me.
My direct boss was named Walter West, a large man of few words, who happened to be blessed with an extraordinary eye for photographic images. He didn’t just watch film; he devoured it, greedily, with an appetite that was impossible to satisfy. Walter spent most of his life in the dark, like a bat, with his red-rimmed eyes trained on the end of the projected beam. Nothing excited him more than the sight of a stack of film reels. When I say that Walter was large, I really mean very large. I rarely saw him without a doughnut or some other confection in his pudgy hand, spilling sugary powder like dandruff all over his jacket. But he was a glutton for celluloid. Walter would work his way through the stacks in record speed to find that one nugget of cinematic gold that everyone else had overlooked. Our assignment for Mr. Capra (God forbid that I should have called him “Frank,” let alone “Frankie,” or “Chief,” as some of the older studio hands did) was to select a compilation of images from Japan—anything from Japanese newsreels to Japanese feature films—that would be used for a movie, commissioned by the U.S. government, entitled Know Your Enemy.
We worked in an office that was a far cry from my Hollywood dreams. I had expected to be in the midst of great splendor, with famous stars descending from marble stairs in white gloves, with imperious directors in riding boots and black-suited waiters hovering with silver plates offering glasses of champagne. I had never imagined all the hard work that went into producing the movies, all the hustle on the soundstages, all the shouting and screaming amidst the chaos of el
ectric cables, microphones, camera boxes, makeup women, continuity girls, best boys, first assistants, second assistants, lighting cameramen, soundmen, and whatnot.
But even the movie sets, of which I only caught occasional glimpses, passing through the studios when the red lights were off, were alluring compared to our shabby little office in a neglected building in the Western Avenue Twentieth Century Studios. There were two projectors, one for sound, the other for image, ripped out of their concrete casings in the cooling tower. A worn old table, piled high with film cans, and two or three rickety chairs made up the furniture. This is where Walter performed his magic, watching reel after reel and picking the cherries that Mr. Capra was looking for. Once in a while, the great man himself would appear, in an expensive double-breasted suit and a fedora hat, trailing cigar smoke and cologne. “Walt,” he would shout, “what’s old Santa got in the can for me today?”
Since it was my job to run errands for Walter, or anyone higher up the pecking order than me, which is to say, everyone, I rarely had the chance to watch the movies with them. But what I did manage to see was a revelation. The images selected by Walter were sliced together by Capra, with graphics supplied by the Disney studio, and commentary spoken by John Huston. It was pure propaganda, of course, to show our boys in the Pacific what we were up against: a nation of robotic, fanatical, modern-day samurai programmed to kill and die for their Emperor. Pictures of Japanese bowing en masse in the direction of the Imperial Palace, or blowing up Chinese cities, or marching across the Manchurian plains, were cut together with scenes from Japanese features. It was all most effective, I am sure, but I was less interested in the overall effect of the finished film than in the material we discovered in the process. It was the most marvelous introduction to Japanese film, and it didn’t take long for me to see, even in the crudest swordfight pictures, that we were dealing with a vast source of treasures.
One, in particular, caught our fancy. Made in 1940, it was called China Nights. Walter was equally captivated, so much so that he immediately sent me off to fetch Mr. Capra. At first Mr. Capra failed to see the point, especially of the main actor, who much later I realized was the great Hasegawa Kazuo. “What can we do with this?” he asked, waving his cigar impatiently. “This guy looks like a damned girl.” But gradually he got pulled into the movie. He and Walter were so mesmerized by the end of it that they forgot to send me away on an errand and I was able to watch the whole film with them. Since there were no subtitles, much of the story escaped us. It was the natural flow of the images, the beautifully timed cuts, and the camerawork, which was intimate without being intrusive. There were few close-ups, and no false glamor. Here was life itself being discreetly yet closely observed. I shall never forget the sight of Mr. Capra as the credits rolled after the last scene when the Chinese girl, who was about to drown herself in a river, is saved by her Japanese husband. Tears dropped on his carefully tailored suit as Mr. Capra heaved with emotion. Rubbing his eyes with both hands, he brushed his right cheek with his burnt-out cigar, leaving a dark smudge like running mascara. “The Japs are way ahead of us,” he said. “We can’t make movies like that here in America. The public wouldn’t have it. And that girl, Walt, who is that little Chinese girl?” Walt didn’t know, but promised to find out. Her name, we discovered, was Ri Koran.
I watched other Japanese films with Walt, some of them long and without interest, but many were almost as compelling as China Nights. I have no idea what we saw. Some of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces, perhaps, or Naruse’s? We wouldn’t have known what they were, anyway. It’s all a blur now. But the Chinese girl stayed with me. Walter and I used to hum Ri’s song with that lilting Chinese melody. Like Aladdin’s lamp, it conjured up images in my mind of an enchanted world beyond anything I could imagine, that promised Never-Never Land I had yearned for from the moment I could speak.
By the time I was ready to be called up for military service, we dropped the big ones on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I hate to say it, but this, too, felt like the brush of a wing of my guardian angel. The horror of an invasion of Japan does not bear thinking about. Besides, I was hardly cut out for soldiering. What saved me from that ghastly fate and precipitated my second Great Escape was a letter from Mr. Capra to a friend of his, a big shot at General MacArthur’s GHQ in Tokyo. His name was Major General Charles Willoughby. “Charles’ll take care of you,” promised Mr. Capra, as he slipped me a Havana from his coat pocket. I later tried to smoke this great thing and ended up feeling sick.
Actually, things were not quite as simple as Mr. Capra thought. Charles may have been able to take care of me once I was in Japan, but first I had to apply to the Foreign Service in Cleveland. And they would only take me on if I had some skill they required. Since I had no languages, apart from English, and no work experience besides being a gofer for Walter West, I was not an obvious candidate for an overseas posting. I could only come up with two skills that might be of any use: I could type like lightning (Champion Typist in the Ohio Schools Contest of 1941), and I had learned to take shorthand from Mama, who had once worked as a secretary for an insurance company in Chicago.
An agonizing month was spent in Bowling Green, most of it at the Luxor, out of sheer boredom, and hoping, I guess, for some adventure in the dark, which never materialized, I’m sorry to say. But I did see Bring On the Girls with Veronica Lake at least six times. The only alternative at the time was Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck, playing at the other theater, but after sitting through that twice I turned back to Veronica Lake with relief. I had also, by then, discovered the solace of literature. My taste was untutored and thus indiscriminate. We had no books at home, but the Bowling Green librarian, a middle-aged man with thick glasses and an overpowering smell of talcum powder, was a guide of sorts. He introduced me to Thornton Wilder. When I said I’d like to read something more foreign, European perhaps, he suggested Jane Austen. When I had exhausted the stock of her works, I asked him for something else. He peered at me carefully through his owlish spectacles, as though about to divulge a risky secret, and ventured that I might wish to start on the French writer Marcel Proust.
When the letter finally came through, telling me to report in Philadelphia for embarkation to Japan, I was so happy I could almost have hugged my father. Instead, I did a wild improvised tango through the living room with Mama, which prompted my father to flee in disgust. He could call me a damned sissy for the rest of his life, for all I cared. Next stop was Tokyo!
4
MY FIRST DAYS in Japan were not promising. I was put up with other Americans in a gloomy office building that had once been the headquarters of a soy sauce company and now bore the grand name of Continental Hotel. Most of the inmates of this grim institution worked in one way or another for the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, also known as SCAP, or “The Old Man,” or “Susan,” in the less reverential coinage of my friend Carl. Carl was a fellow movie maven, whose knowledge of motion pictures was even greater than mine (he grew up in New York). “Susan” was a rather abstruse reference to a Joan Crawford movie, entitled Susan and God. Carl maintained that General MacArthur bore an uncanny resemblance to Joan Crawford in the title role of that picture. I can’t say I saw the likeness myself, but I was amused by the name, so it stuck, at least between us.
I didn’t yet have the benefit of Carl’s congenial company in those early days, however, so I felt lonesome in my billet, living on a steady diet of Spam and powdered potatoes. But since most Japanese would have given their left eyes to share this life of splendor, I knew I shouldn’t complain. When I wasn’t tap-tapping away in the typing pool of the Allied Removals and Transportation Division, I spent most of my time wandering around in the charred ruins of the Ginza. I’ve always regarded shyness as a vulgar vice. So I’d strike up conversations in my few words of Japanese with young men on construction sites, and sometimes even traffic cops, if they looked approachable, or market traders. I spent endless time trawling through the blac
k markets, where everything was sold from cigarettes to old bloodstained hospital blankets. Hawkers shouted themselves hoarse: “Fist-class American blankets! You’ll sleep like babies!” “Delicious pork meat! Just like mother used to make it!” Well, maybe it was pork. Old ladies stirred with long wooden chopsticks in great bowls of pig’s offal. Fights broke out over the price of a turnip or a pair of old socks. Young toughs in Hawaiian shirts and army boots kept a semblance of order in this pandemonium and took most of what they needed for free. I would love to have talked to them, but my fumbling attempts to do so did not, on the whole, meet with much encouragement. I once tried to talk to a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin to promote a picture featuring Deanna Durbin. He was friendly enough, in his toothless way, but our conversation ran dry rather quickly.
When I was tired of wandering, I would rest at various landmarks that stuck out of the ruins like rocks in a desert. At the Hattori Building, now the Wako department store, then the PX, I observed the sad transactions between large Americans in crisp uniforms, dispensing bars of soap or crackers or indeed anything remotely edible to the young men in Hawaiian shirts, who would no doubt make a handsome profit on these vital goods at the black markets. A crippled young woman sat in her usual place outside the PX with a little wooden box that served as a platform for American boots, which she polished to a perfect sheen, while repeating one of the few English phrases she had managed to pick up: “Japanese, no fucking good.”
