25 january 1960. Had Daiei show me Hiroshima, Mon Amour. It received bad treatment in Japan—Daiei, committed, put it on the bottom half of a double bill and showed it only in the suburbs.
Its destruction of chronology is impressive. Particularly I liked the feeling of intimacy achieved by two actors and a camera; and the hallucinatory final scenes of an apparently completely empty, moonlit Hiroshima. Wonderful passage where Okada Eiji raises his head in the nightclub and looks around, and we know that it is day.
Took Edward Seidensticker with me and afterward we decide what was wrong. He didn’t like it as much as I did. First, why Hiroshima? The use of that particular city seems to equate the atrocity with the simple shearing of the heroine, it makes a false connection—unless Resnais perhaps wanted two symbols of war: the dead city, the near-dead girl in the basement. All other slips are because Resnais knew nothing of the Japanese and made people do unlikely things.
Okada [male lead in the film] is, to be sure, a Western-type, and much may be excused (the fact, for example, that he and the girl ever got together at all), but I cannot imagine a Japanese man allowing intimacies in public like that, and the face-slapping scene is nonsense; what Japanese would do that? Would do it to a Japanese woman all right, but not a foreign one. When she goes back to the coffee shop or whatever it was, the noren curtain was still up. Resnais didn’t know that noren are always taken in. Rather ludicrous series of slips in the station scenes. Sound track carried Japanese platform announcements for three in the afternoon when the scenes are set for two in the morning. Only truly Japanese scene is where Okada reaches impolitely across the face of the old lady to offer a cigarette—that he would have done. Meaningless final scene: “You are Nevers, I am Hiroshima.” Ed is probably right in saying that the final scene is, after all, why they had to use Hiroshima. “Can you imagine his having to say: ‘You are Nevers, I am Fukuoka?’ ”
Haven’t seen Ed since his trip to Europe. Still both barbed and gentle—reminds of one of those smooth, ivory objects, which when properly pushed produce a small but sharp blade for opening letters, paring nails, cleaning ears and the like. Almost deceptively mild-appearing given his sharp tongue, which cuts. I stick my own out and together we reduce a number of mutual acquaintances to ribbons. As always with him I feel that I am being effusive and that he is being evasive; I always talk too much, he never talks enough. He does not talk in any connected manner: always comments thrown out to which one responds as ducks to bread. For that reason I always find it difficult to remember anything we have said.
26 january 1960. Dick Brown [friend, met in 1955] comes over and we drink hot buttered rum after hot buttered rum, becoming more loquacious the while. We talk about existentialism, how we originally became interested. It was through the Walter Kaufmann book [Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre]. Dick says, “It was like someone turning on the light or opening the door. I had always thought that philosophy was the history of epistemology, never even guessed it could be equated with anything I really cared for—with me, for example.”
I remember, too, the feeling, after I had read Kaufmann’s introduction. The liberty of realizing that I am responsible for everything that I am, and have been, and will be. It is no one’s fault but my own, and I have chosen. No matter how mixed up I have later gotten in Sartre and Heidegger and Jaspers, that has remained, with its hard-mindedness, its lack of sentimentality, its rock-like weight, and its cold comfort.
Dick has been thinking about it and has come up with a definition, which he has devised for himself:
Applied existentialism is the creation of the self into something (true and good and beautiful) by the ability to act on the basis of decision (commitment) that such-and-such is true, without the certainty that it is true.
29 january 1960. Have coffee with Watanabe [Miyako] studying the Kabuki here at the Kabuki-za—has been doing it for eight or so years now. Tells me that the role of the guardian barrier-keeper in Kanjincho was originally not a starring role, and that Togashi was simply played by one of the minor actors. But then a famous actor started starring in it and hence it grew; but the script couldn’t be changed and so began the various ambiguities that now plague the actor. Does Togashi know the scroll is empty, and if so when? Does he commit suicide afterward, and if so how to show it? She says Kabuki is full of things like this.
30 january 1960. Today the day I am to have my front teeth sawed off, Mary comes over to stay with me. Brings the new Noh record that she recorded, flowers, honey from Hokkaido, and cakes. We sit upstairs and picnic and she tells me about Cape Breton which she loved.
Something very young about Mary, and one forgets how tall she is: She seems to shrink; she is Alice herself. Brings along an 1896 English guide for German tourists. Scene in the Stage Coach; Scene at the Promenade: (“Oh, and how long have you been ill?” “Since I last had the pleasure of seeing you at my uncle’s”); and On the Ferry: (“Oh, the wind is beginning to rise.” “Oh, watch out.” “Oh—the gentleman and the beefsteak”)—we read these dialogues to each other and roll about with laughter.
When the time comes I go and have my teeth sawed off. It doesn’t hurt.
5 march 1960. With Meredith [Weatherby] and Nagare [Masayuki] down to the Izu Peninsula to stay in a hotel that Nagare admires. A bright sunny day, growing warmer as the train travels south. In just two hours from Tokyo we are riding through orchards of blossoming plum and peach. One can understand much about Japan by traveling through it. In the evenings in the mountains one sees that the woodprint artists were not being creative when they merely outlined a far mountain in white and left the inside bare, the mountains really look like that. And the formalized blossom pattern one finds is nature itself: each tree looking as though the blossoms had been tied on by hand.
Almost hot in Mishima where we changed trains. Fuji above us, invisible in the clouds. A slow, pleasant, dusty train journey to Shuzenji, ravages of the typhoon last spring still visible. Then a longish taxi ride straight into the mountains, then the hotel. Much japonais moderne with floor fabrics used on the ceiling and the like, but the one building Nagare had liked (middle Tokugawa period) is rustic and pleasant. There we had a fine supper of fresh Ise lobster, sliced raw tuna, pickled sea urchins and bean sprouts, a clear mountain-lake-like soup, and—the main course—a wild boar stew, all washed down with sake and followed by fresh mandarin oranges, picked that day.
Later, while I work on my novel [Companions of the Holiday, 1968] Nagare and Meredith talk and drink, and I hear a touching conversation. He is telling Nagare that he is thinking of enlarging his garage and adding a room above it, asking if Nagare doesn’t want it as a workshop, pointing out that Nagare is now really a well-known sculptor, what with the pieces Mrs. Rockefeller bought, and the Museum of Modern Art purchase, and the coming show he is having at Asia House. Instead of traveling constantly from one seashore to the other, instead of working here, there, and everywhere, wouldn’t he like a place to settle down? And Nagare says no.
The contrast is complete. Meredith is secure (his big house, his bank account) and instead of creating, he collects. To be sure he designs beautiful books, but that isn’t so important as writing them. Nagare, on the other hand, has never stopped moving, and he is moving still. He hears about some kind of stones on the Sea of Japan and he goes there and lives in a hut and looks at them; in Tokyo he changes his hotels (always cheap though he has become wealthy) every night; he doesn’t even have a place to stay in Kyoto, but just keeps moving around. He knows precisely what he wants to do and he cares little for comfort or the other things that money can buy. Nagare nicely and kindly, because, though tough as the stone he works on, he is nice and kind, refuses and Meredith looks into his scotch.
10 march 1960. Go to my neighborhood bath (Zushiden still off at training camp with the wrestling team and I don’t like bathing alone anymore) and stay a long time. I am very fond of it; it is the nearest thing to church, to the barber’s, to a family.
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br /> They are all more or less alike, these baths, one to every neighborhood, there must be thousands in Tokyo: a large barn-like building, tall chimney attached that begins smoking about two in the afternoon and continues to midnight; big entryway with places for shoes, and a tile painting—mine is a crane, symbol of longevity. Inside, the building is divided into four equal-sized rooms. The back two (the baths) have a half-wall between; the front two have a partition with a booth for the girl in charge so she can survey both sides (men’s and women’s) at the same time. The clothes are left in large baskets. Pay the money to the girl—sixteen yen; shampoo or a razor are five yen each; usually carry your own soap and towel.
Most of the bathers hold their towels in front of them when they go in; a habitual gesture; you see the same gesture in fully dressed men when they are cold; they cover their genitals. Originally I thought it was because of the girls walking around but it is not. They pay no attention to the men or the men to them. This is the country of the time and place for everything and the bath is not the place for sex.
Foreigners are told that they must wash outside the big tile baths, using the taps and little wooden buckets, and then get in. Well, maybe foreigners do but the Japanese certainly don’t. On cold nights, like tonight, they climb in all dirty and let the communal water soak it off. At best the tap rinse is a mere token: feet, hands, balls maybe, but not often.
Everyone says the Japanese aren’t dirty, that they are in fact clean. Well, I suppose they are cleaner than many, but no Japanese that I know bathes because he likes it. He bathes to get warm usually (once out and covered up the body heat remains, for the water is scalding) and he bathes to meet his friends. But not, I think, to get any cleaner than anyone else. Certainly not many bathe completely. Most men don’t skin back and wash; and I have been told that women think it is immodest to get soap up inside. Once the bath is over, too, the dirty underwear goes right back on.
But it is nice in the bath and that is quite enough. You sit back and scald. It is relaxing. Perhaps that is why, in the bath and turning lobster-red, Japanese will say things they would otherwise not. Perhaps this is why one can always hear neighborhood gossip in the bath.
One sits back in water, which doesn’t feel as dirty as it is only because it is so hot, looks at the picture (all bath houses have one, a giant mural against the back wall, sometimes Western-type scenes—castle and sailboat and deer, sometimes a Chinese palace, nothing Japanese in sight, all oil on tin and mildew), reads the advertisements (Love Beauty Salon, Suzuki’s Expert TV Repair, Fame Barber Shop), and listens to the gossip.
Today I learn that that nice Mrs. Watanabe (down the street) doesn’t know that that nice Mr. Watanabe (seen him on the street—glasses and a wen) is keeping a girl young enough to be his daughter. Also learn that the eldest Hamada boy (much given to body building, has a bulging neck) is going to be the death of his parents, plays around with girls, and him so careful of his body too. Then someone says that if he had Mrs. Watanabe around he’d keep two girls; another, that with parents like that he wonders the Hamada boy hasn’t run away years ago.
Maybe if I hadn’t been there I too would have had a defender the day my grocer turned to a neighbor and said, “And that foreigner, the one with all the hair; you know he never pulls down the blinds . . . well, the other night . . .” but just then he saw me bending forward with interest. I wanted to find out what had happened just the other night but he sank deeper into the hot water until just his eyes showed.
Once out of the tub then everyone washes (my soap at present is Chlorophyll Cow) using a sponge and a kind of pumice stone on the hands and feet. My towel has naked ladies on it, which is always good for a conversation or two.
In the bath the attitude toward sex is representative. No people have it more firmly in place. They are a bit puritanical sometimes, and a number of prudes exist, but there is no people less prurient. What they are prurient about is money. Some Japanese treat money as we treat sex. But, as for sex—well, there are no young bloods trying to peak over the partition.
14 march 1960. Mary comes over and we talk about Atsumori. [In the Heike Monogatari he is the beautiful Taira youth unwillingly killed in battle by the Minamoto warrior Kumagai.] She sees Kumagai’s dilemma as an existential one. He has involved himself in battle, has committed himself to it, and then is confronted (in Atsumori himself) with something he appreciates, likes, and wants to live. Yet his committed business is killing, not letting live. He is caught.
Atsumori, actually, is much more ready to play the game than he. He knows he is caught, knows that he chose, knows the rules, and is willing to die. He is quite ready to sacrifice what he is, his being, his personality. Kumagai’s problem is that he has recognized the originality, the individuality of this other person and, once having recognized this, once having removed the blinders that make killing possible, can no longer want to kill.
Mary thinks that this idea is at the root of much Japanese drama—the Kabuki giri-ninjo, for example. I think of doing the Atsumori-Kumagai incident as an existential episode, as a novel, a short novel. Just two characters, the army rushing about in the distance, sea, sand, shore, pines, but each detail dwelt upon. Do it in the style of Robbe-Grillet, but make it more interesting. Make it a slow-motion study—one hundred pages to tell thirty minutes. And behind the story, a full existential exposition: man makes himself, man chooses. [These thoughts later turned into a film script, and eventually became the historical novel Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai.]
15 march 1960. Zushiden comes home after ten days gone for wrestling team spring sessions, brown with the sun, smelling and tasting of the sea. We go out and drink in the neighborhood bars, filled even on weekdays with that frenetic gaiety which is Japan—tipsy bargirls, indifferent hugs on the dance floors, the face of beauty glimpsed in the distance, the toilet door ajar, the friendly bartenders—all weary to the eyes. Then we come home and go to bed.
16 march 1960. Marian took the Israeli General Moshe Dayan to the Kabuki, and I assisted. He appears taller than he is, balding, riveting all with his single eye; the other is covered with a patch, the chord of which cuts across his bare head like the string of a garrote. Around the covered eye the face is wrenched; the nose has been pushed to one side so that it slants diagonally across the face; beneath the patch one can see the edges of the hole. He looks like a Malraux hero.
His hands are enormous. Large, strong, flexible hands which, when folded, attract the eye as the face of others attracts. Large curved nails that seem to have once been pulled out and then let to grow back in. Speaks a soft, hesitant English. I heard him say a few words of Hebrew—his voice changes, and goes down. His English (as with most people’s second languages) is pitched higher.
With Marian Korn, Frank Korn, Heuwell Tircuit, 1960. donald richie
He has just returned from Izu and needs a cup of tea. We go to the Imperial, and he talks about his collecting. He digs for things, and describes to me a Phoenician glass vase, a large one, that he has found. “It is not difficult, but one must know where to dig to find. I know some bulldozer people, and they, too, tell me when they discover something I would like. Most is too new, Greek and Roman you know. But occasionally nice, older, things are found.”
He turns graciously to Marian, indicates the tea, and says, “You saved my life,” then continues, “But it is ever so much more difficult to save life than to take it, just the other day . . .” and I listen harder, but Marian begins babbling about the relative merits of coffee and tea, and the rest is lost.
At the Kabuki Marian enthuses, but not too successfully. The general says, “I will not say that I liked it—it is too foreign. Still, it was interesting to have seen.” He is dropping with weariness, and his single eye is red, like some Biblical god of war. I leave them. They will have their problems. Marian has scheduled a great, elegant, expensive, seafood dinner with geisha. The General may like the geisha, but he has confided that he cannot abide even to look at seafo
od.
17 march 1960. Went to Marian’s, and she tells me about the disaster of the night before. Frank took an instant dislike to Dayan; the feeling was apparently mutual, and Marian spend the evening dancing with the general (who, it turns out, didn’t eat a bite at the all-seafood dinner), but who was most attentive, and while waltzing managed an erection that quite frightened her—she said it almost wasn’t human. I said that just looking at the thumbs I had guessed. She said she had had no idea. Said at first she thought it was his leg.
Marian is admirable, I don’t know anyone more honest about herself. She condemns others, but she also condemns herself; and she is harder on herself than she is on anyone else. Also has a knack of going directly to the core of a subject. At the same time, she also cultivates a kind of flightiness, plus a great deal of talking to hear herself.
Silly remark today: I’d put on the Vaughan Williams Wasps because I wanted to hear the march. “I didn’t know Williams was communist,” she said. “He wasn’t,” I said. “Must have been,” she said. “Only communists can write marches like that.” Wise remark today: talking about geisha and how they fawn over men and act seductive and pout. “This is,” she says, “the most primitive form of love-making.”
18 march 1960. Marian’s soirée-musicale: house packed, servants threading their ways about, almost a hundred guests. Tokyo’s nearest equivalent to the parties at the Princess de Guermantes’—not that tony but near it. Tokyo has no society (except for distant royalty and the dowdy wives of the ruling families; one was present last night—fat Mrs. Tokugawa, done up in a green kimono, like an expecting caterpillar), but it has its pretensions.
Marian quite wonderful at these functions; does whatever she wants all day long, doesn’t worry, doesn’t plan, knowing that it will go or it won’t, not really caring. Frank really caring much more, hiding this with laughter and cynicism but unable to quite hide the strain. Marian in her element like a fish finally back in water—flirting, kissing, carrying on, all meaningless to her, and consequently she is good at it.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 17
