Not wishing that, we all trouped down the dank stairs, where the waiter in charge said it was perfectly all right so long as we each ordered a cup of their pricey brew.
This agreed to, we penetrated the potted foliage and saw a gentleman in the distance being fellated. He saw us too, and positioned himself the better to show the ladies his small but rigid, spit-slicked prick. I pointed out this detail and many another to my interested wards, and we roamed about, cups in hand.
There was a man who had his date laid back like a cello, and was manipulating her with one hand. Sitting in rear was one of the men from outside, maturely pert in a cloche and fox fur. “How come you got in with two girls?” he said. “It’s against the law.” I told him everything was against the law, including himself.
A young couple came in. Both were good looking and, it turned out, well built. Her breasts once uncovered were beautiful and his member, pants once down to the knees, was ample. As she skillfully blew him I complimented him on his size. “Thank you,” he said modestly. I then ran my hand over his bare bottom, at which point the member went limp and he sat down.
“He is such a party pooper,” said the blonde of me. “Does it all the time.” Thus admonished, I regarded the couple from a safer distance and watched his date skillfully repair my damage. When he was back in his stride I leaned over the back of their booth and said it was only fair that he practice cunnilingus upon her. He readily agreed and pulled down her panty hose. He was very skillful and reminded me of the octopus in the Hokusai print.
In the meantime my wards had also found something to look at. The two men right in front of them had their hands on their dates and were showing off their manual techniques. When they realized that they had an appreciative audience they scooted about to give the girls a better view.
“The younger one is more flashy,” said one, “but the older one is much the better. He is a real master craftsman.” “Like a traditional carpenter,” said the other. “Yes, notice the concern, the care . . .”
We then talked about desire and wondered why it was that photographs could be pornographic (that is, exciting) but that this—the real thing—was, somehow, not. I suggested it was because it was not sordid, and mentioned that I did not find color porn exciting but got worked up over black and white. They did not know what to make of this, but one said that the real thing (like here) lacked the safe endistancing of the photo.
This led to talk of voyeurism, since we were practicing it, and exhibitionism, since the others were. I suggested that such oblique participation made an act the more authentic. It was like being a witness—in the religious sense, a witness to god. This I said was perhaps why one was not turned on.
“Who’s not turned on?” they asked, eyes glued to the moving hands. I said that it was typical of the nature of the appeal that they would get turned on, if so they were, but merely by manipulation and not by the full fact of frontal sex.
Where, where? They wanted to know. I indicated the young couple’s booth where she was on her back, legs in the air, and he was on top, trim butt bobbing. The girls spared it a glance but soon went back to the sliding, gliding, fingers—thus proving my point.
The master craftsman turned around, smiled, and said that it was getting late so that they would have to leave. They came all the way from Saitama. Twice a month. He thanked us and we thanked him. Then I paid for our expensive coffee and we too left.
17 january 1997. Observing me, an acquaintance says, in mock disbelief: “You’re still at it.” He is referring to my continuing search. His assumption is that once a certain age is reached the search stops. At seventy-two I am well over whatever that age is supposed to be, and am thus something of anomaly. Conventional wisdom has it that in the wisdom of one’s years, one ceases to desire the object of the search.
But conventional wisdom is only that—conventional. It is never wise and indeed is often wrong. Existence is too vast for its petty confines, intended as these are for reassurance. Maybe in some age when humans, like animals, were urged mainly by their glands, interest ceased when glands stopped working. Not now. Glands are no longer even the half of it. Humans have complicated and enriched their existence. The search is internalized, psychologized, made central to this existence. Whether this is wise or not, it is what occurs.
And, it permits a kind of dialogue where there was hitherto none. It is a way to answer back to the demands of biology. The body says slow down, slack off, get ready to die. And the human spirit says fuck it. The search goes on because it is vital; it is life itself. To stop searching is to die. I admire the kind of mono no aware that permits acquiescence, but at the same time I resent such biological tyranny. In this sense I think that Kamo no Chomei (go along with life’s little stream) and Dylan Thomas (go not willing into that cold night) are both right. I am right too.
25 january 1997. To Karel’s for dinner. We talked mainly about food—talked so little about politics that Karel mentioned that we weren’t. Long discussion about broccoli. Karel applauded President Bush for excoriating the unappetizing vegetable. I wondered at the wisdom of this, coming as it did from a leader who threw up at the banquet locally thrown in his honor. “Yes,” reminded Eithne [Jones], “but he had the decency to warn people.” American though that was, I pursued: he still spattered the Prime Minister’s shoes.
Following this was a discussion as to where broccoli came from. Karel was certain it was that home of many abominations, America. Others thought differently. The proper volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica informed us: The Mediterranean was home to the unpopular vegetable.
The only political talk involved a remark I made disparaging patriotism. “No, no, we cannot have that,” said Karel. “There is a difference: Patriotism is good; it is nationalism that is bad.” I asked the difference. This was not forthcoming, but he added that it was good to support your country. I asked why, never having done so, and seeing little reason for attempting now.
31 january 1997. With Arturo [Silva] to the opening of the new photographic exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art. He is still thinking about the Festschrift for me. [This eventually became The Donald Richie Reader.] To this end, he has compiled a list of questions: Why did I get married; how do I reconcile the “emotionality of the journals with the cool person you present yourself as?” And then my “self-negating, voracious sexual appetite?” and, “Why did you never come out?”
This is going to be a strange kind of Festschrift. But, though I naturally think of Kinbote [the editor in Nabokov’s Pale Fire], such questions might be interesting to try to answer. I will attempt the last one: Why did I never come out?—Let me count the ways.
First, because it never occurred to me to do so. Why should I so limit myself—and only for the sake of security within the ranks? True, I grew up when such disclosure would have been damaging, and it would not be that now. But I can also see almost no advantages. Just that of having refused plurality and the possibility of the pale comforts of a single-minded security—life finally rendered simple and sure amid the questionable charms of solidarity.
Second, an existential objection: When you name anything, you limit it; you slam the door on becoming and insist upon being. If a person comes out, he proclaims his belief that he is only one thing, has never been and could not ever be another. This is creepy.
Third, a political objection. A person who comes out chooses to predicate himself on his sexuality. And only on his sexuality. Whether he so intends or not, he has made a political statement. He is Homosexual; the world is not. And it is the world he has chosen to address by coming out. He has turned sexual preference into political preference. By insisting upon difference, he has condoned division.
But you are not socially responsible, says the critic. Of course not, I answer. Would a socially responsible person have chosen to spend his life outside his own society? I am not thinking of making life better for future queers, I say. I do not believe that life gets better for anyone. I believe
it gets worse, and that in an increasingly overcrowded world more and more groups will splinter and battle, and what social comfort is left will be crowded out. Reforms are based on faith.
So, as I ponder why I never “came out,” I realize how limited the question is. To come out means to have gone in and I never did. I have always been out—that is, have hidden nothing. The thing is, I have never advocated it, and it is concern at this that creates questions such as: “Why did you never come out?”
13 february 1997. I look from my window—a bright, cold day. In the distance, above the myriad concrete blocks of Tokyo, lie the blue folds of the Chichibu Mountains and beyond them a silver sliver, the snow on the distant Japan Alps. Nearer, the single finger of the Ikebukuro Sunshine Building, assorted business office spires I do not recognize, and, over the pond, the enormously ugly ex-Hotel Cosima. Having gone broke, it is now the Tokyo Sofitel.
Across the pond too, itself now brown and slate blue, the Benten temple, all white and red, with a green octagonal roof of its own. Passing by it, small figures, some walking, some on bikes, all bundled up. Two small bridges, the ducks brown smudges, the gulls white flying dots. Nearer, on this shore, the promenade.
There, by the water, sitting in the patch of sunlight, surrounded by shadows of tall buildings including my own, sit the old women. Every day from early morning, they come out in their coats and kerchiefs and spend the day. Unlike the ladies of the night they are not working—and they are all real women.
They have no work. And they have nowhere else to go. They sit and smoke. In warmer weather they were visited by equally aimless old men. At first I thought they were aged hookers. But, they are not; they are homeless. Every day they have nowhere to go and so they come and sit companionably in the sun. I don’t know where they go when it rains.
Lowering my gaze, I see on the other side of the toilet, hidden among the bushes, the old man who is there every day. He sits on a stone, bent almost double, and stays for hours. He too has no home. He does not move. The sun has long crept past him, but still he sits on his cardboard square. Blue cap, green coat. Hours he sits, face hidden in his upturned collar. He is dying.
Lower yet is the street. I bend over my balcony, and below me are cars and people walking. The world continuing.
16 february 1997. Doing proof on the [Lafcadio] Hearn book I am again struck that he, unlike [James Curtis] Hepburn, never learned Japanese, and yet that it is he rather than Hepburn who is credited with being the foreigner who most “understands” the place. Even if one uses the word in the Japanese sense (“understands” means “agrees with”), however, Hearn did not understand, nor did he attempt to. He attempted to describe, which is something quite different. Would knowing the language have gotten in the way? Possibly. Barthes would have thought so.
And then I think of myself, here fifty years to Hearn’s fifteen, but almost equally illiterate. Very odd—and both of us utterly dependent upon language (our own) for our living. I cannot say that Barthes’ beliefs apply to me. Though I distrust casual words, I still believe that the proper combination can preserve reality.
Why did I never learn to read and write? (I speak tolerably well—to be in Japan and not understand what is said to one would be intolerable.) But why, when I am otherwise so industrious, so lazy in learning the written tongue?
Ed [Seidensticker] (who knows the written tongue as do few others) thinks my ignorance a good thing. “I admire you, Donald,” he once said. “You never learned to read. Believe me, if you had, you would not stay in this country for five minutes.” Would, I wondered, the depths of mendacity displayed on the printed page drive me from my chosen land? Perhaps. Ignorance is also bliss.
I am not saying that I am better off illiterate, but that I can still manage, illiterate though I be. And, unlike Lafcadio Hearn, I do not attempt to hide this defect.
23 february 1997. It is now a year since Takemitsu died, and this afternoon his widow held a commemorative party at the Sogetsu Kaikan. Invited were people who had been close to him, people with whom he had lived and worked. Some music was played, and Kishida Kyoko read a poem he had written for her ten years before. A few speeches, the most interesting from his outspoken daughter, who said that there had been a lot of talk about the medication rather than the disease having killed Toru. She did not think so; the reason being that her father had worked closely with his doctors, had interested himself in his disease. Diseases actually, for in addition to cancer he had something call kogenbyo. (I have just looked up the word; the dictionary has nothing, probably I misheard it.) He knew what medication he was getting. Though this does not bar death by medicine, it makes it less likely.
The food we were served too had to do with the illness. As he lay in hospital, Toru could not eat. So he wrote imaginary menus for himself, and it was one of these we were served, food he would have wanted. There was deep-fried haddock and golden-brown glazed chicken, spaghetti with squid, fried rice with duck, and some odd items—boiled cabbage with shaved katsuobushi. Since he did not get around to the pudding there were no desserts.
Oshima [Nagisa] was there, the first time I had seen him since his stroke. He was in a wheelchair but looked fit given what he has gone through. He took my hand with both of his, and his grip was strong. So was his smile, no sign of the lopsided grimace of the paralytic—like Eric. He created this all himself—has been in training for almost a year.
Ooka Makoto told me that this kind of exercise is very difficult. There is nothing to hold onto. It is like exercising in free fall. He himself knows about it. He had a stroke some years back. But much lighter, he said, nothing like Oshima’s. Still, the battle to control the body, to retrain it, was not only difficult, it also seemed impossible. Had to start up once again—every day.
We talked about the Toru boom, the fact that you cannot turn on the radio without hearing something of his. I wonder if that is a good thing, such exposure. Ozawa Seiji says absolutely not, first because Toru would not have wanted it, second because they usually play his various pop arrangements and only them, and third because a listener backlash is bound to occur. He laughed, “Look what happened to Mozart.”
I also heard from Non-chan [Nogami Teruyo] that Kurosawa is in a bad way. Broke his leg. Is now in bed. Sees no one, interested in nothing. We talk about Mifune. He perhaps, unlike Kurosawa, does not know what is happening to him. I learned that his wife took the child, upon whom he doted, and left when his Alzheimer’s became apparent. At the same time, his first wife returned to take care of him, which was very traditional of her.
All this temporal talk was relieved by [Kanaseki] Kuniko who, though as bereaved as anyone, Hisao having died only eight months ago, said, “Well, so what? I think about it. And I think of my going next. And I think, why not? I’ve had a good time. I’ve had a good run for the money.” And she smiled, that wide, happy smile of acceptance, which I so much admire in those strong enough to have it.
4 march 1997. Spring slowly approaches, each day a little warmer, though still chilly. I take a stroll in the park and pause to look at the ground near Benten’s island temple. It is rich, something pregnant.
The shallowness of Japan’s geological history is seen in the richness of its soil. Here in these relatively recent islands, the earth has never been much walked on. It is still itself.
I remember India, where the earth has been trod upon for millennia, so used by feet that it is as though baked, a smooth, claylike surface offering nothing to plants—turning back to stone. Not here. In Japan there is still renewal.
Walking on, circling the temple, crossing the bridges, taking the path leading around the lake, I think of renewal and that brings to mind the shrines of Ise. They are renewed every twenty years and are consequently always as they were. This has been going on since the seventh century (with one major interruption of over a hundred years when no one could afford to rebuild), and the last was in 1993, replacing the structures finished in 1973, which took the place of those bui
lt in 1953.
That is where I came in. I remember them because that 1953 was the year I returned to Japan and made my first visit there, and they were gleaming new, all white in the afternoon sun and still smelling of cypress. Then they grew old and gray and developed cracks and the reed roof turned to moss. After they were torn down the new structures were built (1973), but I do not remember those. The 1993 buildings, however, I saw a year or two later when Dae-Yung and I went to Ise. Still white, but no longer fragrant. Those in 2013 I will not see, but there is a strange kind of comfort in having accompanied the metamorphoses of Ise, and having observed—indeed, taken part in—this civilized reply to the demands of immortality.
5 march 1997. At Kitazawa in Kanda I see the Isherwood diaries. For this forty-dollar book I pay the equivalent of seventy dollars, the usual mark up here on foreign books. But I want to read it. I am looking for models of journal presentation, and his seems to have all the apparatus. Also, I want to examine the binding. I did not know that over a thousand pages could be so sturdily bound (this is only the first volume), and I was thinking mine might be too long.
Finally, I wanted to read Christopher on himself. It was from him that I learned the presentation of the discrete self—learned it through the Berlin Stories. In his diaries I can expect something more unbuttoned, and I may yet learn something. Presentation of self is a kind of seduction of the reader, and though I can do without Christopher’s soul searching, I am interested in his techniques.
I recognized him at once when we first met in 1957. We were so much alike. His admission of grave doubts about himself, his shrugging off of self, his half-appeal to one’s better senses—all of this constituted charm and was intended to lure you close. For what reason? To be seduced if he found you likely, to be made a part of the procession if he did not. And behind it all something very real, something large and kind and a bit sentimental. Since I am much that way myself, I backed off a bit, though I too was in love with Herr Ishyvoo of the Berlin pieces and wanted to be him.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 51
