A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  In Kara’s play, the Eternal Virgin has stayed behind in Manchuria after the war, living in an underground café called Nikutai, meaning Body, or Flesh. Not quite sure any longer whether she really is Heathcliff, sometimes mistaking Café Flesh for the Yorkshire Moors, Kasugano is a ghost living in the dark, searching for her body, like a theatrical vampire trying to extract life from younger flesh. The flesh is provided by Kai, a young girl in thrall to the Takarazuka cult. She acts the part of Catherine to Kasugano’s Heathcliff. Their union is to be consummated in Kasugano’s grave. They dance, Takarazuka style, on top of a bathtub filled with the salty tears jerked from the eyes of a thousand virgins. A businessman with memories of thirst in the firestorms that ravaged wartime Tokyo pops up begging for water. The Manchukuo chief of the secret police appears from Kasugano’s murky past. In the grand finale, Kai/Catherine wears Kasugano’s face as a mask. “Look!” she cries, “we’ve found your face!” Kasugano can’t bear to look at it: “I don’t want my face. I am nothing!”

  There are many strands woven into this play: forgetfulness about the wartime past, the creepiness of pubescent dreams, and the confusion of identity in public performance. But above all, it is about nikutai, the body. Kara told me more than once that he saw acting as a form of masochism. By this he meant something quite different from Terayama’s remark that Japanese were masochists. Kara was not making a sociological point about the desire to obey higher authority. Actors, in Kara’s idea of theater, display their bodies to the audience. Actors were traditionally a despised section of humanity, a tradition Kara likes to invoke, but their bodies onstage gave them a special aura, what Kara calls “privilege of the flesh.” Kara’s mentor, Hijikata, called one of his dance performances in 1968 Nikutai no hanran, “revolt of the body.”

  This makes Kara’s plays hard to translate. Even in Japanese, the text needs the physical presence of actors to make it come alive. This is true of most plays, in any language. But the difficulty of translating Mask of a Virgin is also a matter of cultural references. Without knowing anything about Takarazuka, or Kasugano, or Captain Amakasu, the Manchukuo secret police chief, many of the jokes lose their punch, or become altogether meaningless. Kara’s zany humor also relies on clever puns, which work in Japanese, but rarely in translation.

  No doubt due to my inexperience as a translator, my version of Mask of a Virgin failed to find a publisher.* But I was glad to have done it. Kara’s theater to me was no longer just a dazzling and often bewildering spectacle. I felt that I understood him better after immersing myself in his words.

  And Kara, too, seemed to be pleased, or at least intrigued. Perhaps, despite his pan-Asian sentiments, a reputation in the West still had some appeal for him. Indeed, the mixture of love and hate that marked Kara’s generation, and that so often provoked their complicated feelings about Asia, made recognition in the West all the more important.

  Even though Mask of a Virgin languished in my desk drawer, my status changed a little. I was no longer just a curious gaijin, a film student, or a “spy”; I was Kara’s translator. But this new status, based on the skill to move from one language to another, was not without a certain ambiguity. Kara, as well as his wife, Ri, liked to point out to me that people who operated in languages other than their own were lacking in talent. Truly talented people stuck to their own language. Proficiency in a foreign language was a kind of performance, but without artistic merit.

  Kara couldn’t stand Japanese who spoke French or English too fluently. Such foreign-language speakers were particularly irritating when they showed off in front of other Japanese. He liked to imitate their way of talking in a kind of gibberish. I could understand his aversion. I, too, found Westerners who showed off their fluent Japanese annoying, even though, not infrequently, that show-off would be me. This was not just a matter of being made to feel inadequate, or, in Kara’s case, a version of the gaijin complex. It probably goes to something deeper than that, the idea that a person speaking too fluently in a language other than his native tongue is inauthentic, without a clear identity, an impersonator—a “spy.”

  There are several scenes in Mask of a Virgin of a ventriloquist and his dummy. It is not always clear who is speaking through whom. They swap identities. Living much of my life among Japanese, speaking in Japanese, I sometimes felt a bit like that dummy myself. Mimicking Japanese figures of speech, or even adopting the physical mannerisms that go with a language—the bobbing of the head in half bows when speaking on the phone, smiling all the while—sometimes made me feel like an actor in real life. One would like to think that operating in a different culture is enriching. And so it is. But there are moments when the performer in a foreign language feels that he is leaving something of himself behind, or, to put it differently, that the foreign language is just a mask, concealing something more real, whatever that something may be. I would sometimes resort to odd defense mechanisms. One method was to deliberately exaggerate the Japanese mannerisms, turning them into a kind of parody. This performance could very well come across as a form of mockery. But it had a distancing effect. It gave me the illusion, at least, that I was holding on to an essential part of myself.

  I’m not sure whether Kara and Ri made their point about talent being monolingual out of tactlessness, or as a deliberate slight. The relationship between an artist and his translator is always a delicate one. An element of dependency is involved. When the translator is a foreigner in what was then still a relatively isolated culture, and thus represents a slender link to a wider world, relations can become even more complicated. It is important for the artist to make it perfectly clear that he is the one with the superior talent, even if the foreigner is better able to navigate between cultures.

  Donald Richie had warned me about the risks of joining the entourage of famous artists. Richie’s writings had done much to enhance Kurosawa’s reputation in the West. As a critical pioneer, Donald had put Japanese cinema on the Western map. Kurosawa was well aware of this and was keen to enlist Donald among his inner circle. Donald would be summoned for late-night drinking sessions, where the great man could let off steam to his intimates. But Donald chose to keep his distance, to protect his autonomy. He would observe, comment, criticize, or praise. “Wetness” was not his style.

  * * *

  • • •

  AROUND THE TIME I translated Mask of a Virgin, I ceased to be a film student at Nichidai College of Art. The scholarship had come to an end. I had to make a living. Since I was a photographer, I decided I should acquire some more professional skills. The best way to do this, I thought, would be to assist an established photographer. I had already dabbled in this by assisting some Magnum photographers. But Charles Harbutt, Burt Glinn, Burk Uzzle, and others were really photojournalists, loners who didn’t need much help, apart from Japanese translation. I felt I needed to learn more.

  A Japanese photographer kindly introduced me to Tatsuki Yoshihiro, who needed a second assistant. Tatsuki was one of the glamour boys of the Tokyo scene, known for his fashion pictures as well as slick and stylized nudes. He had done a famous book of black-and-white photos, shot in Paris and California, of an actress named Kaga Mariko. Kaga stretched out in a French hotel room, or posing in front of Santa Monica Pier, or pulling funny faces dressed in nothing but a fur coat; these were the kinds of images that appealed to a new Japan breaking out of its isolation, eager for Western exoticism.

  Tall and handsome, always sharply dressed, rather like a hip 1960s Italian movie star, Tatsuki looked the part of a fashion photographer. He drove a sleek silver and charcoal Citroën DS at a time when foreign cars were exceedingly rare. We had a quick interview in his chic studio in the middle of Roppongi, the most Westernized district of Tokyo, an area of discotheques, bars, model agencies, photo studios, and European restaurants. The first pizza place in Japan was just around the corner, initially frequented, so it was rumored, by fashion-conscious yakuza. Tatsuki glanced at my shabby fla
red jeans without comment and said I could start working the following week.

  On the evening of that same day, we met again by chance at a swank drinks party in Roppongi, full of photographers, designers, film people, and models. Kujo Eiko, Terayama’s ex-wife, whom I was still trying to teach English, had asked me to come along. This was not the kind of occasion where lowly assistants would normally mix with famous photographers, let alone chat with them informally. But Tatsuki was a man of great charm and tact. So we chatted informally over glasses of champagne. When it was time for him to leave, he whispered in my ear: “Tonight is tonight, but never forget that I’m the sensei.”

  It was the friendliest of warnings that this privileged gaijin should not forget his station. Sensei, in the artistic, literary, and intellectual worlds, is what an oyakata is among artisans, an honorific establishing superior rank.

  The first assignment was a photo shoot of models dressed in expensive kimonos for a glossy ladies’ magazine. My only contribution was to watch the proceedings. I can’t recall the name of the first assistant. Perhaps it was Tanaka, that is, Tanaka to the sensei, and Tanaka-san to me. We were almost exactly the same age.

  Tatsuki did not have to say much to Tanaka. The odd grunt and gesture were enough. These kimono shoots were routine. Tanaka knew exactly what the sensei wanted; nothing fancy, but everything had to be just right, with spotlights picking out the intricate patterns of colorful silk kimonos being modeled by graceful matrons. The appropriate lights were quickly set up with professional calm, with silver umbrellas to reflect the flash light. I was told by Tanaka to watch carefully, so I would know what to do next time. The next time, however, was not a kimono shoot in the Roppongi studio, but a photo session in a hotel room in Yokohama, where a Eurasian starlet would be pictured in the nude, sprawled in various poses on a wide bed with gilded fittings.

  The Hotel New Grand, built in the 1920s, was one of the few buildings to survive the bombings in World War II. General MacArthur once stayed there. It still had an old-world foreign ambience, brass doorknobs, high ceilings, crystal candelabras, and fake Louis XVI chairs. The alternative, in Tatsuki’s oeuvre, to this kind of Western old-world atmosphere, was to pose his nudes in front of beautiful Japanese temples or traditional samurai mansions with fine tatami floors and painted lacquer screens, almost as exotic in postwar Japan as the Hotel New Grand.

  Tanaka pointed to some lights with his chin and grunted with an air of great authority. Tatsuki was smoking a Gauloise cigarette on the balcony. Makeup was being applied to the starlet, who was still wrapped in a fluffy white towel. The sound of moaning foghorns in the harbor drifted in with the cool breeze from the open window. I had no idea what to do. After a painful interval, while I clumsily handled this light and that, more as a show of work than anything else, Tanaka growled, shot me a furious look, and did it himself. “Watch!” he shouted, as though to an obstinate dog who fails to accomplish a trick.

  It was annoying for Tanaka to have to utter even that single word. For I was expected to learn by imitation, silently, in the way all apprentices do in Japan. You don’t ask questions. Nothing is explained verbally. You acquire a skill by mimicking the movements of your teacher. It is called “learning with your body.” Sushi chefs do this, too, but they have more time than I did. An apprentice chef will spend years just mixing the rice or grating ginger before he is even let near a cutting board. To repeat a menial task endlessly and suffer the abuse of your direct superior is also a form of psychological (or as some Japanese might say, spiritual) training; hardship overcome as proof of devotion.

  The life of a photographer’s assistant in Europe and the United States is not necessarily any easier. I was just hopelessly ill equipped for it. If I had been more practical, I would no doubt have gotten the hang of Tatsuki’s lighting routines more quickly. But I wasn’t. Nor was I good at anticipating orders. In short, I wasn’t much good at learning with my body.

  Despite having the looks of an Italian movie star, Tatsuki was in many respects an old-fashioned Japanese craftsman. His father ran a photographic portrait studio in a provincial town on Shikoku, the smallest and least populated Japanese island. Tatsuki was one of many provincials who had come to Tokyo in the late 1950s to make his name. Sometimes, when the day’s work was done, he would sit back on his black leather sofa, one leg casually draped over a chrome armrest, and chat about his photography over a can of Asahi beer—or, to be more exact, we had a beer; he preferred a Pernod with ice. “I see myself as a kind of chef,” was one of his dictums. “My task is to make the perfect sushi roll.” He used the English word “delicious,” while pretending to tap a slab of tuna on a little ball of rice. It was not a bad way to describe his photographs. The concept—all that naked posing in piss-elegant settings—might be a trifle cheesy, but the pictures always looked very pretty. Tatsuki was a master technician.

  My relations with Tanaka continued to be uneasy. Learning with my body involved more than setting up studio lights. There were various symbolic ways in which seniority would be expressed. The way this worked is that Tatsuki would express them to Tanaka, and Tanaka would pass them on to me. Perhaps if there had been a third assistant, I would then have had the satisfaction of passing them on in my turn.

  One of these symbolic gestures involved the unlit cigarette. I learned about this the hard way, when Tanaka, sitting at the wheel of Tatsuki’s Citroën, waiting for the boss to emerge from a meeting, held up a pristine Seven Stars cigarette in his left hand. I paid no attention to this, until he suddenly barked: “Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do, you idiot?” In all innocence, I replied: “No, what?” He emitted a groan of sheer exasperation. “When I hold up a cigarette,” he finally said, with the sigh of an exhausted parent confronting a child who refuses to learn, “you light it, immediately.”

  I later noticed how Tanaka himself had perfected this to a fine art. He would swiftly reach for his lighter, at the very instant that Tatsuki’s hand reached for his pocket to retrieve a packet of cigarettes.

  Such were the trivial humiliations I should have learned to take in my stride. But there was another side to the senior-junior, senpai-kohai, relationship that I found even harder to put up with. Tanaka was not a man of obvious brilliance, but he meant well. Part of being a senpai is a duty “to take care” of the kohai in a more kindly way, too; firmness should be matched with shows of paternal benevolence. This usually involved drinking. Alcohol is the great lubricant of social relations in Japan. That is how people are supposed to let their guard down, speak more freely, even suspend the usual rules of hierarchy—in theory you can badmouth your boss, and all is forgiven in the light of the next day.

  In practice it meant that Tanaka would take me to a bar every so often, and get drunk. The tab was always on him. Tanaka’s face would get flushed, his eyes would take on the soft glow of boundless goodwill, and he would ramble on with kind, and sometimes even tearful, advice about my work, my future, the ins and outs of Japanese culture, and even my love life. I should not have been so thin-skinned. I should have protected my amour propre with a proper sense of perspective. But I found these patronizing sessions even more intolerable than being shouted at for failing to light a cigarette.

  Tatsuki could not have been nicer when I told him one day that I felt I wasn’t cut out to be a photographer’s assistant. He understood perfectly. My ineptitude was making it hard on Tanaka too. Tatsuki wished me good luck. I still think of him fondly. We never saw each other again.

  Despite my efforts as a translator, I still had not done much writing. But I was happy to review movies for the Japan Times, a job that Donald Richie had held for many years. I continued for about two years, until in 1979, I had grown tired of my own voice praising and dismissing the hard work of others. Most of the editors at the Times were Eurasians who found themselves stranded in Japan for one reason or another. The editor in chief, John Yamanaka, was half English, smoked a pipe,
and spoke with a slight stammer in the fruity accent of an Edwardian gentleman. A kindly man, whose name now escapes me, edited the arts pages. He, too, was half Japanese. The other half might have been American. He got stranded at the worst possible time, at the end of 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army much against his will. He survived the terrible campaign in the jungles of Burma. With tears in his hazel eyes, he once told me how Japanese soldiers got trapped in the swamps during the monsoon, trying to escape from saltwater crocodiles by climbing up palm trees, only to fall into their hungry maws when they were too exhausted to hold on any longer.

  Apart from the short film I made with my friend Tsuda, I had no experience with actual filmmaking until I was asked by a Dutch television company to make some documentaries. The VPRO was known for its adventurous programming. It had the best satirical comedies on Dutch TV. And Roelof Kiers, himself an established director of fine documentaries, started an omnibus program of short films from around the world. My contribution would be films about Japan.

  I made three documentaries: one about the Japanese army, one about the life of a worker at the Yamaha motorcycle factory, and one, which I have already mentioned, about the training of an elevator girl in a department store in Osaka. My crew consisted of a cameraman and a soundman. I had help with the editing from an old hand in Japanese TV. We would spend whole nights on getting the fifteen-minute movie just right. The most successful of the three movies, or at least the one that remains most vividly in my memory, was the third one, about the elevator girl.