2 april 1993. In the evening to Frank and Chizuko’s. They had asked Fumio to come too. Good dinner, and they both put themselves out to be nice to him—Frank even restricting himself to speaking Japanese. I felt that two sides of my life were coming together, since these people are my best friends.
Earlier, at home, a telephone call, a wan voice. Holloway. Out of the hospital and back home. Strokes forgotten, now it is the esophagus and trouble eating. But the strokes have done their damage. He speaks very slowly, and when I change the subject he cannot follow me for a time. When I ask about Michio he says that he is just fine. Is he glad to be home? Yes, he is. The tone is close to Eric’s now. It is like that of a good child, trying to conform, not to be exceptional lest he be punished.
3 april 1993. The Sekis, who run the photo process shop on the way to the park, ask me to join the neighborhood group and go blossom viewing in Yanaka cemetery. With them is Mr. Kato, the district historian, and a lot of friends including the local veterinarian. Mrs. Seki has made much food, including oden and rice with eel—and for me, a congratulatory dish, sekihan, red-bean rice. Much is made of my prize—local boy makes good—and I receive a big bouquet and a Momotaro doll.
But for me the real prize is that I am accepted by my neighborhood. My winning the culture prize means something to those with whom I live, and the man from the Taito ward office leans over and talks about ways in which I can help Yanaka to keep its character. The reason I am so welcomed is, of course, because it is Yanaka—a small neighborhood that retains its past and is proud of it. One that also feels threatened by development and does not want to turn into a downtown Roppongi. It is perhaps felt that I have the ear of the mayor.
So we sit among the tombstones, and the blossoms stir above us like a canopy, and through its embroidered holes stares a large half-moon. The Sekis‘ daughter sings, and their large dog dances, and the sushi shop owner tells me about the differences in onnagata tradition in the Kabuki. Playing the young girl he moves from the shoulders, playing the geisha he moves from the chest, but playing the courtesan he moves from the back.
Sake cups are raised, beer glasses clink, and I hold up my lemonade and wonder why I ever thought I was tired of cherry blossoms. Their ancient magic works, and we all look while a spring breeze ripples through the trees and a shower of petals remind us under the waning moon of the evanescence of all things, including Yanaka, including ourselves.
30 april 1993. I am more and more able to detect a small but evident pattern in the carpet. My life seems to have been predicated upon not joining. So far as I can remember I have rejected the group, any group—the Boy Scouts, my family. Any kind of teamwork also makes me uncomfortable, any having to work with others—whether on shipboard during the war, during the Occupation of Japan, working in companies (Zokeisha)—all were unhappy times. I first thought this probably had to do with my fear of competition, but now I am not so sure. The reason is that with everyone rushing out of the closet and joining parties and making parades, I know that I would never join them. It is not competition but politics I dislike. I loathe nationalism in all forms, including the sexual. It is small, petty, self-serving, and dangerous. Then why did I come to live my life in the most conformist country on earth?
1 may 1993. What began as an obligatory outing became a moving moment. Willing to take Frank’s aged sister off his hands for a bit, I agreed to escort her to the movies. So we went to see Mel Gibson in Forever Young. I never would have gone by myself, but thought she might like it, being so old, and at the worst I could nap. But I did not. From the first frame, I was struck by how much Gibson looks like my long lost, dead Uncle Kenneth, apple of my puberty-struck eye. And when he takes the little boy under his wing and teaches him how to fly the B-47, I was sitting straight in my seat, all quivering attention, while the sister slumbered, so palpable was the resemblance to my beloved relative’s teaching me to ride a bike. The film brought it all back, my confused, desperate, turbulent adolescence, one which I have just now been trying to recapture in A Divided View, which is about me and my uncle. Mel Gibson looks so uncommonly like Uncle Kenny that I sat there awash.
Afterward, I asked the sister how she liked it. “Not at all, it was silly,” she replied. And so, I suppose it was, but my eyes were wet.
4 may 1993. Was interviewed today for the Yomiuri by an interesting and straightforward twenty-five-year-old English girl named Naomi Coke. She had prepared herself well, and knew enough about me to understand how she wanted to shape me in the piece. And as we talked, I being as honest as I could, I noticed that she was opening herself more and more to me, and so I ended up knowing something about her as well. That is the only kind of interview that means anything—when you change places. We both agreed, without saying so, to leave out love.
11 may 1993. Dinner with Ed Seidensticker. We have Korean food and talk about literature. I tell him about Henry Green, whom he oddly does not know—though this author is in the direct line of those whom Ed most likes: Peacock to Compton-Burnett by way of Firbank. He tells me that once he was talking with the late Abe Kobo, who told him that he was fed up with everyone saying he was influenced by Kafka. It wasn’t Kafka at all, he said. It was Lewis Carroll.
Then we remember “Janet” with pleasure and reverence. She used to show us her organ while riding the revolving stage at the DX Gekijo, and one day, having often noticed us there, she leaned over as she went by and said, “Isn’t this the most boring thing you’ve ever seen?” We now observed a moment’s silence for Janet and then Ed said, “She must be a grandmother now.”
13 may 1993. Party for the Japan-American Friendship Commission. Ed Seidensticker comes, but this time he is off the wagon. Waves across the room, talks during Kenneth Pyle’s opening address causing the turning of heads, grabs a highball as it whizzes past. Comes over and says, “Weren’t you just charming last time. Wasn’t I just charming. Weren’t we just charming?” I ask him if he went home and put it all down in his journal. “You just bet I did.” I tell him that I did, too. Change of expression. “You did?” Yes, and that I am going to write up this very conversation as well. “Oh?” Then to reassure him I tell him that he did not feature in the salacious sections, that he is only in the literary sections. “Well,” he says, “in mine there are no literary sections. I do not write about things like that. But there are salacious sections. Oh, yes, salacious sections.”
26 may 1993. In the subway. Japanese middle-aged man and an older woman coming back from the MoMA exhibit in Ueno. He is carrying a sheaf of postcards, purchased there. She looks at the Gorky and shakes her head, then the Toulouse-Lautrec. “I rather liked that,” she says. “Yes,” he says, then holds up the Picasso. “No,” she says. Just then the train slides into the station and against the window is an illuminated advertisement for the coming Louvre show—a Velasquez infanta. “Oh, I remember that—saw a postcard someplace.” He frowned at her. “No, Mama—Paris.”
30 may 1993. Go to the barber. In the hands of expensive Mr. Abe, I answer his various questions. This time he wants to know my status. I tell him I am a permanent resident. “Wouldn’t citizenship have been easier than some exotic category like that?” So it would, but since no one would ever believe I was Japanese I decided not to be.
He laughed at this and said that if I were Korean or something then no one could tell. “Yes,” I answered, “but they—being Japanese—would have found out.” He smiled, then pursed his lips. That was very true what I had just said. And further than that, the Japanese had made a lot of trouble in Korea. Did I know about that? “Yes,” I said. “The Japanese were terrible,” he said shaking his head and bravely refusing to include himself. Just as I do when I complain about the Americans.
9 june 1993. A fax. [Kawakita] Kazuko has died. A sudden stroke. Fifteen years younger than I am—healthy, smart, funny, a friend for thirty years. I think I have misheard, I think that the dead will come around the corner soon and explain it all away. This evening I dream we are o
nce more looking at a movie together, Kazuko and I. It is Zéro de Conduite, a film we both love. And, when the boy turns a backward flip and the slow motion procession begins and the feathers fall like snow, I turn and she is crying.
17 june 1993. I go to the stationery shop to get envelopes and am told that, being out of the country, I missed all the festivities for the royal wedding—the Crown Prince and his Princess. I say I am delighted to have done so, that it must have been terrible: crowds, and policemen everywhere. Seeing that she can now safely drop her social self, the stationery lady says, “Oh, it was awful. All those cops. Nothing else on the tube either. We finally had to rent Raiders of the Lost Ark—that was all they had left.”
19 june 1993. Some Japanese now openly say things they would not have before. At least they never said them to me before. Again, a taxi driver. “Well, what do you think of the place?” he asks. I say I like it but add that this might be because I am a foreigner and I might not like it so much if I were Japanese. “It’s not because you’re a foreigner,” he says. “It’s because you are a white foreigner. If you were Korean or from one of these places like Pakistan or Bangladesh you’d find that the Japanese are not nice and helpful. We got some kind of complex.”
22 june 1993. Makiyo to dinner and then back with me. Now a father. Little Maki, ten days old. I am shown a picture: small, red, like most babies are, but she has his nose. I give him the silver baby spoon I got for the child in Australia. Then, turning from the future, we talk of the past and remember the time we walked across London Bridge, and the time we ordered that awful saucisson on the Champs-Elyssées, and the time he took the day-trip to Venice from Locarno, and the time he went to Zermatt and forgot to change trains and got back late and I was worried, and the time he went jogging in Detroit and all the houses looked alike and he could not find how to get back to my sister’s and I sat there and worried some more.
The past is what you share. It is what holds friends together. It is congealed time, and one examines it and remembers it. It is like touching, like holding hands.
24 june 1993. Kazuko’s funeral at the big Nishihonganji in Tsukiji. It is a high Buddhist ceremony—Jodo, Pure Land. Namu Amidabutsu, chant the priests over and over again, always ending on a slow cadence, like late summer cicadas.
Next to me is Shirley Yamaguchi [Yoshiko], whom I have not seen for years. Now a beautiful elderly lady. I had not known she was so close to Kazuko, but we are sitting with the family. Then I remember that she is an old friend of her parents, and that she was in a number of the pictures that Kazuko’s father made in China.
Speeches. Old Yodogawa Nagaharu, barely able to stand. Who would have thought that Kazuko would go before him? Then Oshima Nagisa’s, during which his voice shook and he began to cry.
In the fashion of Japanese funerals, the speaker faces the urn and the large picture of the deceased, and directly addresses the dead. Kazuko was called anata, though living one is rarely called that. And is told what happened during her life—as though she was again a child, or already a spirit. This is appropriate. The priests have decided upon a posthumous name.
While others are speaking of their memories, I remember mine. Kazuko in Cannes in 1961 when she was eighteen or so and I was meeting her for the first time. She had come down from school to be with her parents. A shy girl, very beautiful. And she discovered that I loved Vigo as much as she did. Then Kazuko unhappy during her first marriage, to Itami Juzo, but bravely making the best of it—cooking for me when I went over, smiling at her impossible husband. And my working with her: making titles for An Actor’s Revenge and her delight when we got it just right. And her laughter when we worked on the titles for Okoge together. And Kazuko in Hawaii just a year or two ago when we honored her parents at the film festival, and she and I took a long walk along the beach at Waikiki and we talked about what she wanted to do, what kind of films she wanted to bring in. And why not more Bresson? And just two weeks ago, when we had lunch and she said she was having trouble with one eye—something like double vision. Was that a sign of the stroke?
With Kawakita Kazuko, 1991.
I did all my crying and then the ceremony was over and the priests again began, and their voices filled the room, and the soft bells and gongs and wavering chants sounded so like a departure that it was as though Kazuko was standing there before us and slowly disappearing forever.
After I had offered my incense and bowed to the family, I did not stay and have tea. I was crying again and so I walked out of the big incense-filled hall and stood on the corner and waited for Fumio, who had been further back in the line. I remembered the funeral of Ozu’s cameraman and the funeral of Chishu Ryu, both of which Kazuko and I had gone to together. And I looked at the funeral announcement I had been given. And the salt and the single handkerchief. Just like the other two times. Always handkerchiefs. Why give handkerchiefs? To cry into?
Then Fumio came and we went and had coffee and talked about Kazuko. And wondered about her poor mother—Madame Kawakita—in the hospital, now near death herself, knowing that her daughter was already dead.
25 june 1993. Introduced and showed Ozu’s Floating Weeds at the International House. The film is like a still life. Everything is arranged, but arranged with such art that it becomes natural. We do not see the construction, yet we are aware of it: The touches of red in either corner of the frame, the pillars of the porch separating the quarreling couple, or the almost inaudible obon music (real, some temple down the way) just when the troupe is dying.
What I love about Ozu (and about still lifes), is that what is put before me is all there is, no hinting of depths below. And what is there is really there. More than look at it, we experience it. Peto’s pipe; Ozu’s red pot.
27 june 1993. I look at my bookcases. Bulging. Something must go. But what? I look more closely. The shelves are lined with those I love. There is Morandi, all the books I have been able to find on him, almost one solid foot of them—his small, still, perfect world of bottles and paint. No I will not let him go. There is Jean Cocteau, sometimes irritating but always fresh, new, irrepressible. So full of himself that he makes you full of him. I have over two feet of him. I could let part of him go, but never the novels. No, I will keep him. Ah, there is Madame Yourcenar. Everything she wrote. Sententious, wise, a bit ponderous, but always honest. How could I ever let Memoirs d’Hadrien go? Or the woman who wrote it. No, she stays. Borges, all of him in English. My companion for years now. Am I not tired of him? In a way—his donnishness tires. But to throw out Labyrinths—and the man who wrote it? Never. Jane Austen? Of course not. She is part of me. What to do, then? Well, Shakespeare, whom I really do not much like. But it is only one volume and tossing him out would not save much space.
30 june 1993. Rainy, deep monsoon season, and I take the two-hour express to the hospital in Kamogawa to see Holloway. Michio had told me that he is going fast now and I should not be too dismayed at how he looks.
But I am. Since he no longer eats, he has lost much weight, and he has that drawn look that Gene had before he died. Michio said he might be asleep, but he was awake and happy to see me. I am the first visitor they have had in the two weeks he has this time been in hospital.
He cannot leave it. The doctor says he thinks it will be about two weeks more. The cancer, of course, but it is slow and not yet painful. Rather, Holloway cannot eat. His hiatus hernia has narrowed his esophagus. There is nothing to be done. I suppose, like Gene, he is starving.
He does not seem uncomfortable, but he has no strength. He lies there in the bed, and his voice is very far away. He talks and I strain to catch what he is saying. “A doctor came in. Last Sunday. And—and he looked just like Dae-Yung.”
Holloway smiles. Then the smile fades and it seems he is no longer there. His eyes are open but he is not looking at anything. I know that he knows—not that he has cancer (this he does not know), but that he is dying.
I stroke his hand and he puts his other hand on my shoulder, and I re
member him forty-five years ago—that same hand.
1 july 1993. At NHK, being filmed. A documentary on the movie music of Takemitsu [Toru]. Peter [Grilli], just off camera range, asking the questions. I am no longer surprised that I can open my mouth and talk about anything—and that I never know what I am going to say until I hear myself saying it. I am still surprised, however, at how much—as I talk—I suddenly remember. There is Toru in his early twenties at the Sogetsu Kaikan, and as I speak I remember—not the other way around. He had on a tan corduroy coat, a way of tossing back his long hair. This I did not know until the words fell out of my mouth.
2 july 1993. A party at the U.S. Embassy to say goodbye to Ambassador [Michael] Armacost, (Ambassador [Walter] Mondale is coming), and to celebrate the glorious Fourth. To that end, ethnic food: potato salad, frankfurters, and hamburgers.
Ed Seidensticker there, talking about ambassadors. “Well,” he says, “Mondale is coming. But he will not be better than Armacost. Armacost was very good indeed.” So he was, I say, adding that he kept his balance. “Yes,” says Ed, “whilst all around him were losing theirs. The Japanese did not like Armacost, I am happy to say,” he says,” but then an ambassador is not supposed to be popular. The Japanese divide them into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ you know. The good ones were Reischauer and Mansfield. Not in my book. When they say ‘good’ the Japanese mean those who agree with them, that is all they mean.” Then, “That Mansfield—he wasn’t the American ambassador, he was the Japanese ambassador.”
Later I talk with Kanaseki Kuniko, Hisao’s wife—fine face, good bones, like a Mexican or an Eskimo. She asks me how many people I have had as lovers. I tell her that depends on how you define the term, but lots, if we are to be broad about it. Then I ask her if she was a virgin when she married Hisao. An entirely innocent question, to which she will not reply. So I guess I got my answer. Then Shiraishi Kazuko, the poet, came up in cerise and bangles. Our conversation was much to her taste. She is known for her black lovers, or was. Now they are yellow. My figure is mentioned. She rolls up her eyes. “Oh, no, for me, never,” she says modestly.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 39
