The Japan Journals: 1947-2004

by Donald Richie

  A passage is described. The eyes regard me; the finger is raised. “As soft as this,” and the finger strokes my cheek. “No,” he says, correcting himself, “that is too aggressive. Like this,” and the finger strokes my cheek even more softly.

  The girls are covertly gazing at the two foreigners, one of them stroking the other’s cheek. One giggles. He turns to look but the sight does not register. He is still seeing Parsifal.

  Wagner—very right for someone as tall and serious as he is. The short, curvy, giggling girls are miles from this. He stands on his iceberg and stares, thinking.

  Then, this train of thought having moved us to the unexpected terminal of Pierre Cardin, I am told how Wilson himself delayed a performance at L’Espace for two successive nights, making the suffering dress designer appear twice before his elegant audience to tell them that the Wilson work they had been about to see was not quite ready.

  Perhaps the slowness of the Noh has occasioned this information. But what, I wondered, could have been his purpose in telling me? With most, the motivation would be apparent. Look at me: I am this important; see what I can do. Not with Robert Wilson. The story was told with no pride, no smiles. It was just something interesting that had happened. Then silence.

  If he lived in Japan this masterful silence would be his most prized quality. Japanese from all walks of life would come to observe it. It is thought that nothing befits a person like silence; nothing speaks more strongly of character. And the monumental silence of Wilson—so unlike the ordinary quiet patches in an ordinary foreigner—would shortly become an object of national admiration.

  And how much, I wondered, was learned from the Japanese—from the Kagura, from the Noh. Slowness, silence—and when he does talk the need for an example (the walking fingers, the finger on my cheek), as though words could not be trusted even when (especially when) used.

  The two girls closely regarded our silence. They had never seen any foreigners like this before. They cannot understand that we were, right now, the more Japanese.

  29 september 1981. With Kurosawa to see a special showing arranged for him of Fellini’s La Citta della Donna—without subtitles. Thus I could understand it no better than he could, but was spared because he turned down explanations. “Gets in the way of watching the picture,” he said. We sat side by side, and I wondered what he was thinking of it—this most disciplined of directors watching two and a half hours by the most self-indulgent.

  Afterward I asked him if he liked Fellini. “Well, I’ve seen almost everything,” he said, not answering the question. But why then had he wanted to see this new film? “Well, it’s this way. I’m going to Sorrento to pick up the Donatello Prize and Fellini is supposed to give it to me. Then we have to talk about something. So I thought I should see his new picture.”

  Later, I went to the JAL party, a big buffet at the Otani. The special guest to lead the toast was Takamine Hideko. I had not seen her for years. She is now older—it shows in the shape of her face, the sharpness of her features. Old, and in the manner of Japanese women, angular. And, as old ladies are supposed to, she has developed a whole new set of public mannerisms: argumentative, forthright, and no-nonsense.

  She also cultivates that slight awkwardness that Japan finds winning in its aging famous, as though she is surprised at the fuss made about her. Her pre-toast speech was about how she lost her wedding ring down a JAL plane toilet and how kind the staff was in getting it back. Just the proper sort of story—down-to-earth, no-nonsense. She has grown to fit her role. Later, I talk with her, wanting to ask her about Naruse. “Oh, Naruse,” laughing heartily, “What a long memory you have.”

  Later, at home, I started remembering her in Naruse’s Flowing, and in Yamamoto’s Horses, when she was still a child. Then I remembered that Kurosawa was assistant director on that latter film. And then I recalled the story that he had fallen in love with her, that he had wanted to marry her, that nothing came of this, and that he was not loved back. Now he is seventy-one and she must be in her sixties, and I had seen them both in the same day and they had not seen each other.

  7 october 1981. To see Professor Doctor Takemi Taro, President of the Japan Medical Association. Not ill. I am editing his book. Had been warned that he was touchy, egotistical to a degree, and purposely difficult.

  I am ushered into large room. Burl paneling, expensive exotic birds stuffed in cases, a picture of Fuji by a famous academic. And, on one wall, a fat little man in full dress with the order of something or other, one hand on a globe—a globe of the world. The door opened and the fat little man came in—a one-man procession.

  His book is a series of diatribes against the government, against the insurance companies. I had been told that he poses as a philanthropist. But upon listening, I discover that he is one. He has “the health of the nation” as his major concern. As I listen to him hold forth he seems less ugly, and less short as well.

  His arrogance, I find, is caused by his determination that everyone be healthy and his scorn is for those who would compromise this noble aim. When the interview is over I look again at the silly painting on the wall. It no longer resembles the man sitting in front of me—dedicated, selfless, and in his way quite handsome.

  13 october 1981. Dinner with Richard Storry. Now frail, had a heart attack earlier, and just a few days ago suffered something that may have been another. He is now living, I should think, with full knowledge of his own mortality. Yet, as always, so gracious, so interested, so amusing, so just, and so affectionate.

  And so British. Only they have, I think, become so advanced that they may take an amused attitude toward themselves as a nation. To think of Storry is to think of civilization, of a culture so serious it need not take itself seriously.

  I ask for some information, if he has any, about the origin of the idea of kata in Japan, where it came from. No information is forthcoming but, instead (and certainly almost equally useful), encouragement, interest, expression of approval, and interest about the work I am planning.

  His disinterested encouragement—so different from the ordinary academic, particularly in Japanese studies, this willingness to help, to be of assistance. Tempered with the most enchanting waspishness about academic members. But these are always nameless, though very much there. Names are given only to those who are smart and interesting.

  It always surprises me to see goodness. I never believe in it until, like last night, it is sitting in front of me. And goodness is always dying.

  14 october 1981. In Mukojima Park, dusk. A group of men gathered. Heads turned as I passed. One of them, a fat man of fifty or so, smiled. When I came around the park again they were still sitting and talking. One of them called to me and I went over. They were talking about a certain theater in Asakusa, the hole in the toilet wall of which had unfortunately been boarded over.

  “You don’t remember me,” said the fat man. “It was thirty-five years ago, in another park. In Hibiya Park right after the war. You were very nice to me. You gave me a pair of sunglasses and took me to eat at Peter’s.” He was right, I did not remember him, and searching those fat features in the growing dusk detected nothing at all familiar. “Oh I’ve changed, I have. But not you. I recognized you at once. You foreigners, you never change.”

  I cannot imagine ever having taken this fat man anyplace, but I remember Peter’s, a certain restaurant back when there were few of them, near the park and something, for its period, of a rendezvous. Mishima used to go there, during that same period. It is in Forbidden Colors.

  “Time, time,” said the fat man and smiled at me.

  During the following year Richie suffered a heart attack, which resulted in his stopping smoking. He also began to receive awards (the first Kawakita Foundation Award was given to him), and he traveled. In 1983 he went on a world tour with Mizushima, who was having second thoughts about his marriage, though he had become a father. Richie’s journals continued to be composed not so much as a daily record of occurrences as a rea
ction to those things that he wanted to preserve—for example, the meeting with Marguerite Yourcenar below, a longer account than that which he published in The Honorable Visitors.

  16 october 1982. Dinner with Marguerite Yourcenar. She is with her companion, Jerry Wilson, sitting there in her coat and scarf in the big, cold downstairs room at the French Embassy Residence. The scarf, of loosely woven wool, is the same color as her intensely blue eyes. It is these extraordinary eyes, which though now hooded with age, give this elderly woman the look of youth. They and the mind behind them, which is, as I discovered, as agile, inquiring, amused as that of an adolescent girl.

  We talk of her work, she with complete detachment. “I am translating a play by Jimmy Baldwin. He is a good friend,” she says in her accented English. I mention her earlier translations of Negro spirituals. “Oh, yes, and that is not all. Now I am beginning to translate blues and soul. I am interested in this, and amusing it is to try to translate precisely.” Here she gives her young companion a glance that was both an affirmation and an acknowledgement, and I realize that he is interested in blacks.

  She smiles. A strong, round face, wrinkled as a winter apple. A peasant face, Breton, Flemish, like the faces of Brueghel. Nothing of the aristocrat in her appearance. Firm, round body. But the youthfulness of her expression, the adolescent clarity of her eyes, they are from something earlier: an illuminated book of hours, Aucassin and Nicolette.

  I ask about work not yet translated, and happen to mention La Nouvelle Eurydice. “Oh, no, not that. What a bad book. You see I had had some success with Alexis, my first book. So I thought that the second should be larger, grander. It was a great mistake. It will not be translated, nor brought back into print.” I ask if there are other of her own works that she thought badly of. “Only one. My little book on Pindar. So bad, so inflated.” What then is her favorite, if she has one. She thinks and then says, “It is difficult, but I do think probably The Abyss.” From then we speak of her biography. “I am supposed to be writing the third and last volume. But here in Japan of course, I am not working at all.” When would it end? “Oh, around 1930 just after I started to write. After the death of my father.”

  When she speaks of death I notice now, and later when she speaks of the death of her companion, Grace Frick, that she looks through and past me. Those extraordinary eyes, distant. Later, following what train of thought I do not know, she again speaks of death. “I shall not kill myself. Not like Hadrian. Oh, he did not kill himself, to be sure. But he often thought of it.” Again her eyes sought the distance. Had she too thought of it? This I do not ask.

  With Edwin Reischauer, Isamu Noguchi. Hakone, 1982.

  I take them to dinner at the Chugoku Honten, which can be trusted to feed you well. Since neither she nor her companion eats red meat, we have abalone, sweet and sour fish, Peking style chicken, and green vegetables in cream, ending with fresh litchi and drinking Chinese wine the while.

  Jerry Wilson is around thirty. Open, American face with reddish hair cut very short, a small gold ring in one pierced ear. His French is fluent, with a heavy American accent. Where did they meet I ask. “Well, let me see, it was several years ago. He came with a television team that was doing something with me and we discovered that we had much in common.” Period.

  He sometimes lives with her and always travels with her. Last year they went to Egypt together and now are on this Asiatic tour. The conversation turns to Mishima, about whom she has written a book, and then to homosexuality.

  They had been to the Kabuki and had heard that there was a place where the young onnagata gather to relax. I tell them that there might be such a place, but that it is unvisitable. Instead there are, of course, onnagata-like places where I could take them, places where the young men are more feminine than any female. This, she said, she would like to see, and so in several weeks this is where I shall take them.

  Much as I want to know more about Madame Yourcenar’s long interest in homosexuality (“Alexis,” Hadrian, Cavafy, Baldwin, and Mishima), I ask no more. She had been described to me as taking the interest of a “scholarly amateur” in the subject, and so it seems to be. Her interest is detached and exists for itself, offering no further information about herself. It is an interest, I would imagine, rather like Colette’s. And for many of the same reasons.

  I ask her if I could ask her a very personal question, and she smiled and said that of course I could. So I ask a question I have long wanted to. What were her influences; who had formed her; what had she read that had made her style? She thinks and then says, “You must understand that when I was young I read everything. I read until there was no more to read. I devoured. And I retained. Therefore the influence upon me, a very strong one, is the influence of everyone. This is not a satisfactory reply I know, but it is the only one I am capable of making. Shakespeare, Pindar, Basho, all the novelists—everyone made me.” Pressed, she said, “Maybe most the Greek poets. Maybe it was them I most loved. That being so, maybe it was they who most formed me.”

  We then talk of other things. I ask her if her admission into the Academie Française was time-consuming. Mr. Wilson laughs. “No,” he says, “she never goes.” She turns to me and smiles. “It is, you see, a club for elderly gentlemen and so I felt I ought not attend and they feel, I should think, relieved that I do not.” I ask if they pay her anything. “Not a penny. To be sure, the more assiduous” (she appears to regard the word and smiles, as though it is one new to her), “become caretakers in old houses or curators of collections and thus get an apartment free, but otherwise there are no material rewards.” “Only spiritual ones,” says Wilson and they both smile.

  After jasmine tea, we leave. She turns and I help her into her wool coat. From the rear she is a shapeless old peasant woman. She turns and I give her her handbag and she thanks me with a glance from those marvelous eyes. She is now a proud, sure, serene adolescent.

  18 october 1982. At the conference Isamu Noguchi, for the first time since I have known him, talked about himself. To be sure, he usually talks about his opinions, beliefs, etc., usually at length. But here he spoke of what it felt like to be him—Japanese ancestry, born an American, back to Japan before the war, back to America, his work, then back to Japan after the war, then back and forth, back and forth. He spoke about what he discovered in Japan and in himself, talked about stone and rock.

  Noguchi himself has become rock-like. He is veined and seamed and sits very still. As his outside has grown this patina, so his inside, his opinions, views, have softened, mellowed. It used to be that Noguchi’s ideas were the most adamantine thing about him. Abrasive. You could cut yourself on them. Not now. The rock speaks softly.

  Later, the long day over, we have coffee and talk of the Stravinsky/ Balanchine Orpheus, for which he did costumes and sets. He complains that in doing everything over for its revival he had to make everything larger. It was designed for the small City Center and not the large Lincoln Center. “It is really a chamber work. That is how I saw it, too, with my little rocks. Now those little rocks are enormous so that they will be visible in all that space. A great mistake. Scale is one of the most important of all things and we violated our scale. No. I violated it. Balanchine and Stravinsky kept things the same. Mine was the part that had to give. I regret it.”

  19 october 1982. Lunch with Edwin Reischauer. He talks about the Great Kanto Earthquake, which he remembers. Wasn’t in Tokyo but in Karuizawa. Nonetheless, the shock was so great that it knocked over chimneys and killed one person there—crushed under a roof.

  What he remembers well is the massacre of the Koreans, which began at once, only hours after the earthquake. They, the minority, were being held responsible, not for the earthquake, but for the terror and despair of the Japanese themselves. Ridiculous charges: poisoning wells and the like.

  He remembers a child, a girl, deaf, and consequently unable to speak. The crowd confronted her. She could not tell them that she was Japanese. They tore her to pieces. Whether
she was Japanese or not is not the point, of course. A child was murdered.

  Reischauer simply tells the story. He makes no apology, makes no attempt to account for what happened. Takes for granted that this is what the Japanese do—or did. Does not say so. No moral reflections at all. He knows his people very well. He knows and he accepts. So do I.

  25 october 1982. A curious dream. I was at a party at someone’s house. The style was art deco and I knew that it had been made in the 1930s. Also, as I gradually became aware, this was the 1930s. The others were all men and we were sitting around drinking. I was speaking with Ravel. It took me some time to recognize this because he looked nothing like his pictures.

  I also realized that I knew what was going to happen and he did not. It became very important to determine precisely in what year all this was occurring so that I would know how much time he had left. But he was charmingly vague. Pleased that I knew so much about his work, that I loved L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (“We must be the only ones, no one else knows of it”). Finally, I learned that it was about 1934 and I realized that the charming man in front of me would be dead in three years.

  So I told him about his last composition. He was very interested since he had not yet started to write it. I told him about the film Gaumont was making on Don Quixote and the music they would commission. “For Panzera,” said Ravel. “No, Chaliapin,” said I. “Oh, dear,” said Ravel. “That’s all right,” I said warmly, “You will not win the commission. Ibert will. But your work, called Don Quichotte et Dulcinée , will become much the more famous.” “Well,” said Ravel, “that’s something at any rate.” I did not tell him about the auto accident, the brain damage, the inability to compose, the operation, and the death.