The old destinations were Rome and Venice, Capri and Sicily, the new ones San Francisco and New York, or the gay ghettos of any large city. The old was proudly elitist and rather apologetic; the new view is militantly political, sometimes radical, espousing the idea that gay is good, exalting gay pride, and an egalitarian demand for the right to be different. Another difference: the older style, mine, was attached to the world as it is, the straight world. The new style turns in upon itself and invents a world that has few links with the real one.
In this way it is a bit like Japan, also an exclusive club, also a commercial venture with its own Japanese services for Japanese only. Why do I like one (Japan) and have difficulty tolerating the other (Gayville)?
28 may 1997. Reading Boswell. On 1 April, 1776, having heard of a pretty, fair girl on call, “. . . I sent for her and enjoyed her, and . . . a kind of license I have had . . . I thought this should be the last act of this fit of debauchery.” The ellipses are not his; they are those of his anonymous censors who sliced up the journal. He had had the bravery to put things in. I will too, and will here put in something I was going to leave out.
Tonight I was walking in Sumida Park and a tobishoku [scaffolding workman], still in his work uniform, spoke to me. He was in his late twenties or so, and had a pleasant manner. As we talked he said he had once had a foreign friend, met him several times, right here in this park. “Bet you played around (yappari itazura shita),” I said. He nodded and held up two fingers. “Twice?” “No, he gave me two thousand yen.” “That’s a coincidence,” I said, “I have two thousand yen right here in my pocket.” He smiled and asked, “You want to do it?” I said I sure did and we retired. He took his time but seemed to enjoy it.
Afterward I asked where he was from. From Miyazaki, in Kyushu. Then he asked where I was from. I said Canada, as I often do. He turned and looked at me. “My foreign friend from before was from Canada.”
We looked more closely at each other. “How long ago was it?” I asked. “Eight years ago.” “Was he wearing bifocals, like me?” “No.” “I started wearing them five years ago,” I said.
We sat on a bench and tried to remember. Couldn’t. Then he asked if I knew how he knew it was eight years ago. He said it was because just after that that he went to “school.” School, I wondered? This is what they call jail, he explained. What was he in for, I wondered?
“I killed a man. I didn’t mean to. I was drunk. He was drunk too and he kept picking on me, and I had this knife and I took it and wanted to frighten him and hit him in the leg with it. Hey, that hurt, he said. It is supposed to, I said. Then, I don’t know why, I stabbed him in the chest. I took him to the hospital. He died on the way. They gave me eight years.”
After that we sat on the bench and watched darkness settle in for the night, love having somehow once again joined death.
31 may 1997. On the way home I bought a Big Mac Juicy Double Burger and sat in the park to consume it. As I did so I was aware of being looked at. Glancing around I could see no one, and then noticed near me an inhabited cardboard box. In it was a man regarding me. He did nothing but look, did not lick his lips or hold out his hand. The homeless here never beg; they simply sit and slowly die. So I handed him my Big Mac Juicy Double Burger, one bite taken out of it, and he took it and retired into his box.
And I suddenly remembered fifty years ago, in front of the Ginza Hattori Building, now Wako, then the PX, making an identical gesture with a bitten hot dog. I was then twenty-something and he was about five. Now I am seventy something and he is in his fifties. Nothing has changed, except everything.
1 june 1997. To Fumio’s bar, the Zakone. He is having a week-long twentieth anniversary party, which opens tonight. The place is full—just like two decades ago. He gets out a new guest book so that I can be the first to sign it, then I am found a seat and given something to eat and drink. The place looks the same, still the same silver pinstripe wallpaper we chose to make it look bigger, still the same round bar he wanted so that everyone could see everyone. On the door and on the place mats—and now on the telephone card he gives to each who comes to the event—the drawing of people lying about in just any which way (zakone ni) that I drew twenty years ago.
But we are much changed. An older crowd now. Some, like me, having difficulty with the four-floor walk-up. And Fumio, now heavier, grayer—but inside just the same.
4 june 1997. Something seen fifty years ago and then missing for forty, are people squatting. This is the Asian position for resting—sitting on the heels. In postwar Japan, however, the posture became provincial, and dressed up women could no longer do it in high heels. Yet, it never entirely died out. One saw it in the country and in the country-like sections of the city—Asakusa or Ueno.
But now it is back, and the squatters are young people. There they squat in their nose rings, their low-slung pants, and their dyed hair. This, the traditional Tokugawa position for rest, has become the young’s position for hanging out.
6 june 1997. Late, going home, I pass a group of squatting high schoolers. One of the boys, obviously seeking to impress the girls, says that foreigners are funny (okashii no yo). The sight of me has prompted the remark and he is, like everyone else, unaware that some foreigners speak Japanese. It is thus not a provocative remark, but an observation he might have made of a passing dog, in reference to dogs in general.
I am not offended by the remark (it is scarcely personal), but I am interested that the remark was made at all. He made it because he wanted to assert their feeling of being in a group. By defining those outside this group as funny, he strengthened their group feeling of not being funny. This made everyone feel good. And for so long as a feel-good grouping is necessary, we will have xenophobia, racism, and all the rest. The only solution is to dissolve the pleasures of groupery.
Had I become angry, felt slighted, outraged, etc., I would have become as culpable as they, for I would have brought my own feelings of group (as a foreigner) to strive against theirs.
7 june 1997. At International House Mr. [Tatsuya] Tanami told me that at the Japan Society recently they were speaking of intellectual exchange—country to country. Then they realized that there were no Japanese they could exchange, because there are no intellectuals.
We tried to decide why and agreed that there are none, because to be an intellectual you must espouse your own independence and your own probity, unswayed by political affiliations. This is an impossibility everywhere, true. There ought not to be Catholic or Communist intellectuals, yet it is said that they exist. If so, however, then they might be, like Sartre, intellectuals first, Communists second.
In Japan, however, everyone is, whether they like it or not, Japanese first. Intellectuals, like everyone else here, are spokesmen for their political (Japanese) identification. Even if they are anti-establishment, or what passes for dissident here, they are still oriented by their nationality and its demands.
Until there are real individuals, there can be no real intellectuals.
Those given to an exercise of the intellect, inclined toward abstract thinking about aesthetic or philosophical subjects, seem to thrive best when words are not used: painters, composers, and filmmakers. Mr. Tanami and I try to think of a proper Japanese intellectual. He can come up only with a dissident manga artist.
14 june 1997. I hear that the old Weatherby plot, house now gone, holds a brand-new parking lot. The Japanese-style garden has thus been razed; the beautiful sarusuberi tree has been carted off or destroyed. I know why—the land will now be a place for autos until a certain time and then, in a different tax bracket, the land will accommodate, finally, the desired, massive new building.
3 july 1997. I learn that Meredith [Weatherby] has died. He left Japan well over a decade ago, took his friend, Mizuno Fumio, with him, and then dropped all of his friends. Last Friday he was eating and something went the wrong way, and by the time he reached the hospital he was dead.
I owe him much. He taught me how to
write; he first published me. At the same time, he later neglected me as he finally neglected everyone, and so I neglected him. At the same time, I wonder that I should have so little feeling for the death of a man with whom I lived, who in many ways formed me, and who was for a time generous with me.
But I do not feel culpable. Meredith so changed. From a man who loved good writing, who liked stylistic experiment, who gave me Arabia Deserta, who encouraged and then published my Companions of the Holiday, even though (or because) it was about him and his household, he turned into a person who turned on the TV in the morning and left it on until late at night, who stopped reading Japanese, then stopped speaking Japanese, to whom everything was too much trouble, eventually even living here, finally living at all.
4 july 1997. Both of us dressed up, Seidensticker Sensei and I accompanied each other to the American Embassy. They had two seatings (though no one sat down), and no ambassador as yet. I discovered the green tea and the food, and Ed discovered the gin and the tonic.
I am doing a panel on Japanese literature for International House, and the idea is that the best translator talks about his specialty. Donald Keene I will ask to do Mishima, and Ed I will ask to do Kafu or, if he wants, Kawabata, and Howard [Hibbett] I will ask to do Tanizaki and . . .
“I want to do Tanizaki,” said Ed. “I did him first, and I do think best.”
“But if you do Tanizaki, then Howard will have no one to talk about.”
“So?”
7 july 1997. I went to see Hani Susumu, whose retrospective I want to do at Telluride next year. His films have never received their critical due, and that it was he who created the nouvelle vague Japonaise has been forgotten, though he is now locally very popular as the creator of African animal TV shows. We speak of this.
“You remember, when we were young and I was working at Iwanami, doing pictures like Children Who Draw. What I admired, no, loved in those children was their innocence, their enthusiasm, their vigor, and their naturalness. Well, we do not find children like that anymore. We haven’t for decades now. And that is why I turned to animals—to try to find the same thing. And I have.
“It’s society’s fault. I do not admire people, though I admire many persons. But I don’t like what society does to persons. It perverts them. Yet, I don’t want to attack society. I am not that kind of person. What I would like to do is to ignore it. Or, better, show something else. This is what I have done in my pictures—all of them, including the animal ones.
His wife, Kimiko, helps him, accompanies him. When she is out of the room he says, “There was another reason. When I was divorcing Sachiko [Hidari, Kimiko’s sister], I wanted to cause my wife the least possible trouble—and there was, you remember, a big uproar in the press—and so I just left. I went to Africa and I discovered the animals, and myself.”
22 july 1997. I read about the bonobo ape, which behaves in a way curiously familiar to me. Whenever it runs into difficulties—experiences stress as it were—it starts to rub its genitals, and those of anyone else around. The behavior is so unselective, so gregarious, that reproduction cannot be its aim. Its aim is successfully using sex as a substitute for aggression.
Looking at myself and making a comparison with the ape, I wonder if I am so filled with aggressions that I too am attempting to use sex as substitute. That is, when I am successful and can find the kind of sex I find appropriate.
When I cannot, however, as in this changing demography, and when I do not redefine what is appropriate, then aggression turns against me. I do not work; I do not really socialize; I take it out on the weaker, and experience that immovable-object, irresistible-force syndrome that is neurosis if I can cope with it, and psychosis if I cannot.
25 july 1997. The Kawakita Prize ceremony, the fifteenth. This year it is Imamura Shohei, who now walks with a cane, unsmiling as always, unconcerned with all social niceties, and when he speaks he does so with the unconsidered candor of a farmer. At the same time, he is capable of capturing on film the most delicate of nuances, the most excruciating of social patterns. I remember his calling himself a farmer once. This was when he said, by way of comparison, that Oshima was a samurai.
Oshima not there, but [Tomiyama] Katsue and I talk about him. Still in his wheelchair. She says the trouble now is psychological—he will no longer try. His wife is in worse trouble—psychiatric.
With Okajima Hisashi I talk about the sorrows of the Film Center. With his superior, Mr. Oba (they always move to different rooms at parties), I talk about smoking. Which he still does. “Warui yatsu (Bad man),” I say. “Warui yatsu hodo yoku nomu (The bad smoke well),” says he.
29 august 1997. “We saw you yesterday,” I said to Ed. “And what was I doing when you spied upon me?” he asked, “And, who is we?” “You were wearing your orthopedic shoes and carrying your cane and off to goodness knows where. We saw you from my balcony. Gwen and myself.” “How often do you see her?” he wondered. “About once a week.” “Well,” he said, “that is much more often than I get to see her.”
We were lunching with Karel and Ed was an hour late, having broken his glasses, gone to the optometrist, and then taken a taxi, which took over half an hour to accomplish what the subway could have in ten minutes. He was consequently a bit surly.
“Now, now,” said Karel. “Now that you are here, let us least have a civilized conversation.” This he began by asking the state of Ed’s memoirs (“tolerable”) and my memoir block (“permanent”). “Oh,” said Ed, upon hearing this, “Why ever? It is so easy, and so interesting. I am already almost an adult.” “Almost,” I said.
We then talked about great memoirs. I said the finest was Nabokov’s [Speak, Memory] of which, oddly, neither of these cultivated men had heard, and the second was Sartre’s [The Words], which they had heard of but not read.
Gwen appeared from another table. “Oh, Ed, we saw you yesterday . . .” she began.
“I have heard all about it,” he said.
6 september 1997. I had the Hanis, Susumu and Kimiko, over for dinner. After dessert, Susumu tells me how much he loves Kimiko, how this love grows. All of this in front of her. He says he first met her when she was fifteen, and he was thirty, twice her age. Fifteen, a child, and he knew he loved her at once.
This is not like most Japanese conversations, but then Susumu is not like most Japanese. While warm and compassionate, he has no patience with empty etiquette—what you talk about and what you don’t. In this he is like his father, Hani Goro, who was famous for his shortness with the conventional and his warmth to others.
Reminded, I asked something I had always wanted to know: How did his father die? He looked up and then said, “I think he willed himself to. He decided he had had enough. He thought he would die, and so he did. He wasn’t sick, you know.” Then, “And how will you die?”
We talked heart for a bit, and then he reverted to Kimiko. “Fifteen, imagine. I wanted to be a child molester.” He did not mention the other taboo, the fact that the fifteen-year-old was his wife’s sister. That they did not talk about [Hidari] Sachiko meant, I thought, that I couldn’t.
But then I realized that I was behaving in a manner much more Japanese than they were, so I talked about her. Both were mildly interested, as though in some distant relative, while Kimiko sat there looking just like a younger Sachiko.
“But I did the right thing,” said Susumu smiling just as he used to smile when he was twenty. “I left Japan because of all the media harassing. And I discovered Africa. And Kimiko came with me. We discovered it together. I changed my life.”
9 september 1997. Lunch with Karel and Ed—our last for a time: Ed to Honolulu, Karel to Amsterdam, and me to New York in just two weeks. “This is our Last Supper,” said Ed solemnly. “Actually, our Last Lunch,” said Karel. I then wondered if Christ had had a Last Breakfast as well. We agreed it was probably something light—just coffee and toast.
When we got around to literature, Karel wondered what the great American nove
l was. Ed and I told him that it was Huckleberry Finn, botched though the ending is. Moby Dick was too pedantic. Ed suggested some James, “. . . but not late—middle.” Hemingway? wondered Karel. No Hemingway, we agreed.
Got around to Irish women. I hoping to goad Karel into marriage, but Ed thought we were talking about the president of Ireland, and so that got us nowhere. Then Ed announced that he had probably just been to the sumo for the last time. It was the pain of getting there—he and his bad legs, his cane, and all those stairs. “And I sat there and I thought, well, this is probably the last time I will sit here.” Small, sincere tears appeared, and I, in deference to his feelings, did not ask, as I usually do, what is so attractive in the sight of two fat men pushing each other around.
Dinner with Ed as well, this time in company with Howard Hibbet, John Nathan, and Kato Mikio of the International House, our host, and sponsor of the translators’ seminar over which I am to preside next spring. There was some talk of translation difficulties. One then occurred.
The waiter announced that the fish that night was kanpachi—and none of us, including him, knew the English name. This sent him upstairs for the dictionary while we waited hungry, and brought him eventually back with the desired entry—amberjack. After all of this, none of us ordered it.
10 september 1997. I see that an earthquake machine has been temporarily installed in front of Ueno Station. It consists of a kitchen (sink, gas ring, table, and chairs) set on a platform attached to a motor. The public is invited to enter (taking off shoes first) and sit on the chairs. The motor is turned on. The kitchen shakes. One is supposed to turn off the gas, then crouch under the table. This a number of people do, cheered on by a man in a panda suit.
11 september 1997. The Kudara Kannon stares back at me as she has so often. This time, from the front page of a newspaper. She is no longer at Horyuji. She is in Paris. Always stylish in that elongated fashion-mannikin kind of way, she now looks positively chic. Made in the seventh century and seeming her age, she nonetheless exudes that assurance and poise we associate with beauty. She could be a modern anorexic model with acne.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 53
