Colin Marshall

Yan-san's comforting anti-dramatics

I just got to the end of Let’s Learn Japanese Basic II, a language-learning video series the Japan Foundation produced in 1995. Before that, I watched Let’s Learn Japanese Basic I which they put out in 1984. Together, they form a 52-episode series that not only teaches the mechanics of the Japanese language but follows the extended narrative of Yan, a youngish Westerner (I’ll guess Egyptian-American, though the show keeps it vague) in Japan to study and practice architecture. He also buys a boom box, visits famous shrines and beaches, falls for a co-worker, gets jerked around by said co-worker, flees to the snow country for solace, and gets drunk viewing cherry blossoms.

The last quarter-century’s Anglophone Japanese-learners regard Yan as legend. Some have even tracked down Nick Muhrin, the actor who portrays him. Japanese teachers screened these videos in class when they were new — when Japan rode high on the global scene — and seem to continue doing so today. I can see why; their production value strikes me as obsessively high, at least by the standards of language-learning shows. Sure, you have to get yourself in a mid-eighties mindset (which I’m always in) to really appreciate some of the computer graphics used in the strictly instructional segments, but man, those skits? The costumes! The sets! The camera movements! The sheer variety!

I have a hard time engaging with episodic art forms the way they’d like me to — hence my non-participation in our current televisual “golden age” — but something about the anti-dramatics of this type of show keeps me hooked. (Well, that and my desire to learn the language.) Let’s Learn Japanese and its brethren don’t care about doling out precisely engineered doses of plots about bombs planted in the middle of D.C. or desert islands brimming with polar bears or cheerleaders sticking their hands down garbage disposals. Their characters go shopping, mail letters, take day trips, clean the house, and hang out on rooftop beer gardens.

These bare-bones, everyday life-derived stories free the show up to concentrate on its own distinctive texture. I want to label the resulting style something like “cheerful utilitarianism.” Each episode’s form follows its function, but it does so with a stereotypical Japanese verve for somewhat ramshackle slickness and slighty goofy efficiency. In these qualities, I sense the indescribable aesthetic-philosophical sensibility that first turned my head toward in Japan way back when.

I’ve already started missing one thing about watching Let’s Learn Japanese: the characters. Or should I just say “the people”? You’ve got the stout, resilient Yan-san, of course, but you’ve also got the hosts, the amiably robotic Althaus-sensei and Umino-sensei, she of the elaborate sailboat sweaters. Above all, you’ve got the skit players: Basic I young dude Kaihô-san, Basic I gamine Sugihara-san, Basic I middle-aged combover guy Mine-san, Basic II young guy Ando-san, Basic II gamine Koyanagi-san, and Basic II middle-aged combover guy Kodama-san. I’ll miss those middle-aged combover guys the most — or should I say, I’ll miss those middle-aged bākōdo otoko the most.

Nihon no Jyazu

I make no secret of my interest in Japanese jazz. Madelaine and I did a two-hour broadcast of nothing but on KCSB a couple weeks back, and now you can find the one-off show, which we called Nihon no Jyazu, streamable, downloadable, and explained on the Santa Barbara Independent’s site:

The first of my many mentions of this came when I went digging through the station’s vinyl shelves looking for internationally interesting music. Picking up the Terumasa Hino Sextet’s album Fuji, I consulted my copy of All-Japan: The Catalogue of Everything Japanese. “Jazz and Japan shouldn’t mix,” I quoted the book as saying. “After all, the essence of jazz lies in improvisation—a concept largely absent from both traditional Japanese music and Japanese society as a whole. Japan may adapt, but it does not improvise.” So, reason one to do an all-Japanese-jazz show: the sheer oddity of it. But I’ve also found a second reason: There’s a whole lot of the stuff!

I learned this after seizing the opportunity to use an open two-hour slot last Friday night. Its regular KCSBer couldn’t make it, so I figured I could use it to make the Japanese jazz show I’ve so often discussed a reality, if only for one night. If not now, I said to myself, when? With only a few months left before I move out of Santa Barbara, I’ve got to cram as much free-form radio goodness into my life as humanly possible. Thus, if you happened to be listening between 10 p.m. and midnight last Friday, you caught Nihon no Jyazu—which, creatively, means “Jazz of Japan” — the one-shot show with wall-to-wall playing from the Land of the Rising Sun (not to mention a goofily valedictory sort of atmosphere).

The program features not only Japanese players (Hino, Makoto Ozone, Eiji Kitamura, Teruo Nakamura, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe) but Japanese players collaborating with Western players, Western players of Japanese ancestry, and Western players playing live in Japan. When Madelaine and I finally get to Japan — maybe next year — we I insist on organizing our trip around visits to as many jazz clubs as possible. I feel increasingly desperate to see Osaka, a city that seems musically rich, though I’ve also heard Kobe’s jazz scene specifically praised.

Why do I enjoy Japanese jazz so? I can think of three possible explanations:

1. Re-interpretation. For decades and decades, Japan has impressed the rest of the world with its penchant for taking foreign ideas, parsing them through Japanese sensibilities, then turning around and giving the results back to the world. Think of how Japanese car companies played it. Should we think of jazz differently?
2. Fervent fandom. I get the impression that, when a Japanese person gets into something, they get way into it. Though small pretty much by definition, the Japanese community of jazz listeners and players easily muster a disproportionately intense enthusiasm and dedication that results in a disproportionately rich jazz culture. cf. giant, statistic-heavy animated robots — should we think of jazz differently?
3. Filtration. Last time I visited Amoeba Music, the dreadlocked guy at the checkout counter looked up at me and said, “Damn, you got a lot of Japanese jazz.” Indeed I did, and not as a result of hours of labor. When you set out to find something as specific as Japanese jazz, I discovered, you find it either quickly and easily or you don’t find it at all. Tight browsing constraints, perhaps paradoxically, always improve my shopping experience. (Previous such constraints have included “only soul/funk/R&B from 1975-1984” and “only ECM vinyl.”)

Yoshihiro Fukagawa: Pâtisserie Coin de rue

Japanese films do one thing consistently right: when they involve a craft, they know that craft. They not only foreground it, but respect it. Perhaps you sense cultural cliché approaching — the sushi chef reducing the human hand’s every possible cutting motion down to a twitch reflex, the geisha applying her pure white makeup and playing her shamisen with equally spare refinement of decades, the calligrapher performing laying down brushstroke after brushstroke as if nonchalantly landing space shuttles — but the fact remains that non-Japanese movies hardly ever get this right. Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, to name one example, wasn’t really about pie-baking. For all its talk about and shots of filling and crust, it never elevated the craft beyond a part of its protagonist’s job and a combined metaphor for and backdrop element of her relationshippy story.

Juzo Itami’s Tampopo holds, and perhaps will always hold, the championship belt of Japanese craft movies. Not only does it draw on greater depths of knowledge about ramen than even the impressive amount of information on its surface would lead you to expect, it’s built around a core of ramen; take the ramen out, and you can’t replace it with, say, pies. While few Japanese films can touch Tampopo — in any regard, really — even the most heavy-handed, emotionally blockheaded releases in that country’s mainstream, and there are many, know better than to take craft lightly. Pâtisserie Coin de rue may lack nuance, if less catastrophically, but I can’t question its grip on the finer points of pastry-making.

The picture approaches this subject through its protagonist, a young not-quite-bumpkin — a smaller-city bumpkin, I guess — in futile search for the boyfriend who left for Tokyo to become a master pâtissier. Alighting on his last known pâtisserie of employment, she begs the owner and head chef to hire her, after which she sweeps the deck, endures the stink-eye from a slightly older co-worker, labors to break her simple pastry skills back down and build them up again, and, when disaster inevitably strikes, desperately lobbies a haunted legendary pâtissier to come out of his depressive retirement for one last big job to save the shop. Yes, really.

If Japanese audiences complain about being thought of as unsophisticated, need they look any further to find out why? If this movie didn’t know what it was doing with regard to the aforementioned craft and, to a lesser extent, with its aesthetics — for Japanese films also share a certain aesthetic strength right out of the gate — I’d have grown mightily pissed at all the violins, dead little kids, and ludicrous acting choices telling me what to feel. Yet I admit that I did hear a non-trivial amount of sniffling all around me at the screening. Am I so out of touch... ? No, no — it’s the other viewers who are wrong.

Watching Japanese movies and reading Japanese novels, I often wonder what it would be like to experience the kind of manic devotion to a craft Pâtisserie Coin de rue’s pâtissiers display. (Says the guy who spent last night intensively studying Dick Cavett and David Susskind in 1974.) I bet it delivers a real feeling of pride and security in one’s place in the world, but I doubt I could handle that degree of limitation. What if the apocalypse were to come, and there I stood amidst the wreckage, like an idiot, knowing everything there is to know about icing consistency — and mostly that? (Then again, I don’t know how much call a post-apocalyptic world will have for interviews, experimental film, and writing about the oddities of Japan.) I think of (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Momus’ post on the “superlegitimacy” of Japanese train drivers:

The west prefers us to be divided, to wear masks, to adopt a casual, pragmatic, rather non-committal attitude to our jobs. Only selected professions (entrepreneur, artist, designer, sexual pervert) are really seen as vocational in a passionate way, the way that would make you say 'He's what he does right to his core, he lives it 24 hours a day'. A western train driver might make us feel indifference, scorn and pity, or make us hope he had a nice family and hobbies to compensate for the under-rewarded, uninteresting drudgery of his job. This Tokyu Line employee seemed to have the very soul of a train driver. He had made train driving his religion. He made me feel admiration and jealousy. I wanted his commitment, his dignity. I wanted to wear white gloves and make delicate ceremonial gestures even while doing something completely pragmatic and down-to-earth. I wanted to cry out with ecstasy every time I crossed points. As this driver, I would never feel unimportant. I would feel, in fact, like a star.

So while I enjoyed the film’s exploration of its professional themes, as far as it went, there clearly remains much territory to mine. I’d also love to see or read more about a phenomenon so central here that it goes not only unquestioned but effectively unacknowledged: Japanese Francophilia. Some of these characters were supposed to have studied in France, but damn, they still have the demeanor of a bunch of tourists boutsta get a bad case of Paris Syndrome laid on them.

Kazuo Hara: A Dedicated Life

“Live with vigor,” the subject of this documentary says a few times in a few different ways. I like this bit of guidance, despite its vagueness — or maybe because of its vagueness. Everyone channels their vigor differently, after all. Mitsuharu Inoue seems to have channeled his into literary fame, a rebel’s reputation, 13 writing schools across Japan, legendary tales of his past, a trail of smitten middle-aged women, a modest sideline as a geisha imitator, and, of course, a Kazuo Hara film about him. Not bad, all told.

For those keeping score, Hara’s first three documentaries follow these individuals:

• Goodbye CP: outspoken poet, disability activist, and wheelchair-refuser Hiroshi Yokota
• Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974: Hara’s aggressively nutty former girlfriend Miyuki Takeda
• The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Second World War veteran Kenzo Okuzaki, who beats up interviewees and throws pachinko balls at the Emperor

Inoue doesn’t seem to belong in the lineup; he’s not, in Hara’s words, one of the “troublemakers.” That is to say, he makes only well-precedented kinds of trouble. Does he womanize? Sure. Does he angry up the blood of Japanese communists? Sure. But he doesn’t take to the streets with his bent and hobbling buddies, he doesn’t drive around in a sound truck denouncing society, and he doesn’t run off to Okinawa and shack up with a black G.I. By Hara’s standards, Inoue is a normal subject and A Dedicated Life is a normal movie, with color and speech that matches the onscreen lip movements and everything!

Part of me actually regrets Hara’s relative freedom from technical limitation here, since his seventies films’ bare-bones production so positively influenced their style, their form, and thus their interestingness. I feared this one, shot in the late eighties and early nineties, would go down a bit easy. As it turns out, it does go down a bit easy, but don’t take that to mean Hara has lost his daring; in a dead-silent sequence oddly reminiscent of Extreme Private Eros’ childbirths, he gets the camera into the operating room and shoots one of Inoue’s liver tumor surgeries. Funny how... abstract the human body’s interior looks when you really get in there.

Whatever the film lacks in roughness, it makes up for in scope: cut from 70 hours of footage shot over Inoue’s final years, it runs nearly as long as Goodbye CP and Extreme Private Eros combined. What makes it different from them in kind rather than just in degree is that Hara films around Inoue, not just Inoue himself. His previous documentaries stay pretty much locked on their characters, although you can see beginnings of the breakaway in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. Here, he learns as much about Inoue indirectly as he learns directly. Before and after Inoue’s death, he sits down with his friends, his colleagues, his smitten middle-aged women, etc., and gets their impressions of the impassioned writer.

Good thing he did, since it turns out that Inoue lied a lot. His claims about founding the Japanese communist party he eventually spurned? Not so much. His claims about falling in love with a Korean prostitute in childhood? Not so much. Allowing Inoue to build up his own mythology — sometimes helping along with seriously Hara-atypical dramatic reenactments — as the others quizzically tear it down, Hara obviously got even more to work with than he’d bargained for. But this happens without judgment, and if you think about it for a moment, you couldn’t judge Inoue’s tall tale-telling without looking stupid: what does a novelist make his name on if not, uh, constructing elaborate lies?

I often think about the notion of living one’s own life as a work of art in and of itself; Inoue approaches that in a way hadn’t previously considered. If your art is fiction, it makes sense that your life as art would involve fiction as well. I assume that, like most of the Japanese novelists of his generation of whom I’m aware, he worked in the form of the “I” novel, a slab of autobiography with a light dusting of inventedness. (I know a bit more about mid-century Japanese novelists than most American readers, and Inoue never even made my radar before this movie, and it looks as if the entire Anglosphere only knows him through it. This piques my curiosity as to why.) Why not complete the circle and augment your autobiography with a dose of the invented even as you live it?

Kazuo Hara: Goodbye CP

This was Hara’s first film, released in 1972. Alongside Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974, it exemplifies what I call the Early Hara style: 16mm; black and white; chiaroscuro contrast; sound never, ever synchronized with image. Hara builts the movie, like any of his Early or Late, around an eccentric. Extreme Private Eros, etc., starred his nutty ex-girlfriend; The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On had bitter, unpredictable World War II veteran Kenzo Okuzaki. Hiroshi Yokota would at first seem like a contrast; he’s just a guy with cerebral palsy. But here’s the thing: he goes outdoors.

Much of this documentary’s non-stylistic impact depends on its historical and cultural context. In 1970s Japan, so far as I can gather, you didn’t let disabled people leave the house. Yokota seems to hardly ever be in the house, so packed is his schedule with handing out leaflets, giving street poetry readings, crossing intersections on his knees with agonizing slowness and shouting laboriously into megaphones. He’s something of a proto-disability activist, alongside a small, ragtag coterie of other CP sufferers. (One member, an enthusiastic photographer, comes off as potentially more interesting than Yokota, though perhaps only because he gets less face time.)

Yokota’s exhibitionistic tendencies dovetail well with Hara’s inclination to spark the drama by hand before capturing it with the camera. This intersection culminates in a shot where Yokota sits naked in the middle of a road. Hara has a history of art-based promotion of the marginal — he called his early photo exhibition on the disabled “Don’t Make Fun of Them” — but if Goodbye CP delivers a message, it’s, “Look upon this! Look upon this!” Throughout the film, Yokota has a big problem keeping his oversized glasses on his face — he could really use one of those foam rubber arm-connecting straps that were popular in the nineties — and it ends with a shot of least five minutes where repeatedly drops them and struggles to pick them up again. His voiceover expresses a newfound utter hopelessness for his own cause.

I’m sure people have labeled the movie “hard to watch” for any number of reasons: the subject matter, the unceasing air of tension, the harsh lighting contrasts, the lips that don’t match the words. I’d say it draws its power from its simplicity. Hara mostly just follows Yokota around in his day-to-day and, like any documentarian worth his salt, lets things develop as they may. In the sequence everybody talks about, Hara shoots a domestic argument between Yokota and his also somehow disabled wife — an argument about whether Hara’s presence is welcome at all — as their non-disabled kid darts to and fro, laughing. I can confidently name few other filmmakers who would have the nerve to get it all on film without flinching. If one skill in particular defines Hara, it’s that, once he finds one fascinating person, he never. Turns. The. Camera. Off.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Making Love

“Day was dawning over Tokyo, and I plunged a finger into her asshole.” There we have, in sentence-sized microcosm, much of what I’ve found appealing in the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Another nameless narrator finds himself in a situation he didn’t expect in a place he didn’t expect it to happen, one he wound up in by only the faintest traces of his own volition. Just as something grand happens in an exotic setting, a much smaller scale presents something decidedly more, er, intimate.

If all you knew about this book was that it contains that quoted line and that it opens with the protagonist handling his precious bottle of hydrochloric acid — “I carried it around at all times, with the idea of one day throwing it right in someone’s face” — you might assume it to be the work of one of those Frenchie “transgressives.” In the event, I’ve read few novelists less transgressive than Toussaint, who — and this may go some way to explaining that — actually comes from Belgium. I’ve never been to that country, but most of the accounts I’ve heard of it take great pains to stress its boringness. Nothing I’ve yet read of Toussaint’s says a thing about Belgium, which squares with that image, though I wonder if his homeland shaped what I’ll call his meditatively adventurous mindset. Seemed to do it for Hergé.

But nobody’s numbly getting that acid dripped onto their nipples or anything; when I want to write about stuff like that, I’ll get to work on my Michel Houellebecq primer. That plunge is by far the most sexually unconventional act on offer in the book, the first but not the last to feature the owner of the orifice in question. Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte, a big-name fashion designer and the narrator’s longtime girlfriend, has come to Tokyo to put on an exhibit. The couple has come together in order, effectively, to break up. As a means of decoupling, this at least beats the hell out of an SMS message.

Nearly every element of the plot conspires to create a state of hazy unease which the text delivers with a curious resignation, in both senses of the word curious. The protagonist is traveling with his girlfriend, but she’s mostly occupied with professional obligations. And while she technically retains that title, both she and he know, on a deep level, that the union approaches its end. This all goes down in a land of whose language the protagonist is more or less ignorant; what’s more, he’s usually outside in particularly desolate wee hours. (Shades of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, but even lonelier.) On top of that, the protagonist spends a third of the novel suffering under a disorienting fever, and let’s not forget the floating question of who best to splash that acid on.

If Joy Press called Television spare and oddly limited, man, I wonder what she thought of this. Running barely over 100 pages, the book operates under what seem to be stiff textual and psychological confines. Its most harrowing piece of action comes then the narrator, his head clouded with sickness, hops on a train to Kyoto to visit a mostly absent Western teacher friend. He struggles to find his pal’s house and, once there, collapses on a mat and shivers for days. This situation is as strange and outwardly unproductive as he and Marie’s last-gasp attempts at sex early in the novel or his late-night break-in to the hotel gym to swim a few laps.

Yet there’s an intriguing interiority here, not just that of the Westerner bumbling through Japan, but specifically of the Francophone Westerner bumbling through Japan. I’ve long felt those cultures go well together, for sufficiently loose definitions of well. Some Japanese idealize France from afar to such a baroquely brittle point that, when they come up against Paris’ small rivers of dog crap and sullen, shove-y populace, there’s actually a syndrome for it. When I’ve seen French (or Belgian) writers and filmmakers examine Paris, they’ve usually done it with a kind of grand incomprehension — they throw up their hands, but they do it so artfully — that renders near-inconsequential details weirdly amusing. However the dynamic really works, it aligns well with Toussaint’s literary skill set.

(This would be as good a time as any to mention that I love Toussaint’s web site, which appears to be as internationalist as his writings themselves. I’ve gotta get me one of those. A few similarly neato Éditions de Minuit covers wouldn’t hurt, either.)

 

Kazuo Hara: Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

With a title like that, you barely need a movie, but Kazuo Hara made one. Though it precedes The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On by over a decade, it’s equally a product of the documentarian’s compulsion to follow eccentrics around. This time, the eccentric is not a combative middle-aged veteran but a twentysomething woman — specifically, Hara’s ex-girlfriend Miyuki.

If this sounds banal, rest assured that Miyuki isn’t saner — and indeed, may be less sane — than Kenzo Okuzaki. Certainly she’s just as determined to live live on her own terms, her mind’s cloudy list of which apparently dictates that she run away from Hara with their baby, move in with another woman, take off to Okinawa, hook up with a hostile-seeming black G.I. for a few weeks; dance in strip clubs, hang out with prostitutes, and run an all-woman commune. Yet most inexplicable act might actually be her submission to starring in this very documentary, which demands exposure including but not limited to full-frontally giving birth on film.

To the extent that people still talk about Extreme Private Eros, etc., they talk about that childbirth scene. It’s shot out of focus, and Hara blames his lack of camera expertise in the narration, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. As if watching Miyuki laboriously — as it were — push out the G.I.’s baby weren’t enough for us, Hara also gets footage, in greater clarity, of his lover/producer Sachiko delivering his own kid. (And what do you know, they’re still together.) The second baby has a more harrowing emergence, appearing at first to be a dead alien, but it’s the first’s that’ll stick with me.

Focus issues constitute only one of the limitations absolute poverty of production imposes on this film, but by determination or by accident, most of these limitations become wonky strengths. Hara appears to have used exactly two pieces of equipment: a hand-wound camera and a tape recorder. Lacking any means to synchronize these forces him to craft the sound and the imagery as two independent entities that must nonetheless work together. If Miyuki’s lips happen to match the words she speaks on the soundtrack, for instance, it’s the only moment that will happen in a scene. But the experience hearing one set of words from someone and watching them speak another — or laugh, or pause, or listen, or change a diaper — has a way of separating their words from their manner. Countless were the moments that felt like glimpses of an unusually nuanced portrait simply because I could process what I heard the person say and what I saw them do simultaneously but separately.

I don’t want to oversell the power of the movie’s ramshackleness, prone as I am to get ridiculously jazzed by all things microbudget, but it’s hard to imagine it done any other way. To its core, this is a far-under-the-radar project. We’re talking about a documentary where the director’s current lady and former one lean against a wall and interview each other and tumble into a discussion of how weird it is that they’ve both contained semen of the man holding the camera. We’re talking about a documentary where the director, reduced to tears by his subject’s callousness, near-silently weeps on camera for a few minutes — while still holding up the microphone. We’re talking about a documentary which the director himself can’t bear to watch. That’s what I call a selling point.

Kazuo Hara: The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

Errol Morris named this one of his top five favorite films of all time, and what’s good enough for Errol Morris is good enough for me. He highlighted the fact that, when this documentary’s main interviewer doesn’t get the answers he wants from a subject, he just tackles the guy and starts whaling on him. Morris, who’s spent thousands of hours talking to often inarticulate personalities for his own documentaries, surely must sympathize.

This sudden attack, which turns into a gridlocked pigpile, fits perfectly with the sensibilities both of the attacker, Japanese World War II veteran Kenzo Okuzaki, and the man filming him, documentarian Kazuo Hara. Bitter about being forced onto the wrong side of history, which is even more horrific than being forced onto the right side, the middle-aged Okuzaki spends post-military career denouncing the Japanese government by tracking down and grilling his former commanders, haranguing from a sound truck, and (as he proudly tells everyone he meets) chucking pachinko balls at Emperor Hirohito. Knowing a promising eccentric when he sees one, Hara follows Okuzaki around for a few years, shooting the many, many conflicts he rushes into.

Missing at least one finger and possessed of an odd, unsettling demeanor — I can only call it “aggro-nervous” — that doesn’t come through fully in translation, Okuzaki is a victim of his country’s bizarre wartime ambitions. He was shipped off to New Guinea, of all places, where things seem to have quickly devolved into a cannibalistic nightmare. 40 years later, his justice-crazed journey takes him into the homes and businesses of the surviving soldiers and officers who were stationed there, all of whom he strongarms into making some kind of admission, no matter how roundabout, about killing the natives, killing one another, eating the natives, or eating one another. The stories, though they conflict, just get Okuzaki angrier.

You’ll notice a piece of praise from Michael Moore on the poster. Normally, I wouldn’t consider that a good thing; as well known as Moore’s documentaries have become, I’ve always found the man’s taste astonishingly bad. But reading up on Hara, who turns out to be somewhat infamous in Japan as a maker of “action documentary films,” I can see that they’ve got something in common. Hara has spoken about how he doesn’t just want to shoot whatever happens to go on around him; he wants to make things happen in front of his camera. This agitatory (if that’s a word) mindset is also Okuzaki’s, and I personally find his browbeatings (and beatings) far more interesting than Moore’s leaden mockery of corporate executives. But each to their own.

Donald Keene: On Familiar Terms

Donald Keene, the most famous scholar and translator of Japanese literature alive, has published two autobiographies. This one, put out in 1994, is the first; the glossier, breezier, but somehow no less substantial Chronicles of My life came out in 2008. Rather than some multi-volume, each-decade-a-book-unto-itself Clive James autobiographical situation — though I’m a fan of that form, too — Keene’s two memoirs cover almost the same life territory. The second technically has 15 more years to work with, but Keene doesn’t seem to consider them nearly as eventful or interesting as the preceding 72.

That’s not without cause, by the way; they’re a pretty damned exciting 72 years. Exciting to my mind, at least, especially the middle 30 or so, when Keene was in tight with the Japanese literary titans of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Your Yukio Mishimas. Your Yasunari Kawabatas. Your Kenzaburo Ōes. Your Kobo Abes. It’s the Kobo Abes that particularly interest me, since (a) Abe is my favorite Japanese novelist, (b) information on the man in English is hard to come by, and (c) Keene and Abe were pretty good pals. Or they became so after clearing a misunderstanding in which, on their first meeting, the medically-trained Abe instinctively diagnosed the transcendently mild but (at the time) very tired Keene as a drug addict.

Keene himself is an interesting guy, no doubt, as you’d have to be to get into Japanese literature in the forties — and more on his autobiographical persona later — but it’s his association with all these fascinating Japanese writers that drew me to him. It’s the same reason I’ve been so into other memoirs like Ed Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central and (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) John Nathan’s Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. This hard-working, hard-talking, good-eating (and sometimes hard-drinking) community of novelists, poets, translators, and other literary figures was called, I think, the bundan. Sure, this bundan existed long ago and far away, but I’ve come to see it as a model that could in some sense come back suddenly and unexpectedly, given the right conditions.

As a vehicle for experiencing this time, place, and coterie, Keene’s mind is as close as you’re going to get to neutral observation. That’s not to call the man a passionless cipher; he often expresses great admiration for some things and people and great irritation with others. But given how deep he gets into literary Japan, he keeps a curiously uncrossable emotional distance. Keene’s dominant feelings are devotion to Japanese literature, love of classical music, impatience with ideology, dismissal of students not as devoted to Japanese literature as he is, and bemusement at what he considers his impossibly good fortune in life.

I can’t avoid commenting on the glaring absence of any trace of sexuality. The sexual neutrality Keene puts across in his writing about himself feels so deliberate that it backfires, drawing close attention to the very thing it excises. I have to assume, on his part, either complete asexuality or some variety of closetedness. Certainly the latter is more plausible, especially given what Keene’s peer Donald Richie called “the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists” of their generation. Indeed, Keene’s contrast with the liberated Richie, who’s written at least one entire unpublished manuscript on his Japanese homosexual encounters alone, could hardly be starker.

Still, that’s a reasons I actually find Keene’s persona in these books compelling. Below what I’m sure some readers would call a gentle, amiable, resoundingly bland surface exists an obviously complex fellow. And I admit to getting a kick out of imagining Keene, retiring self-effacement in a comb-over, hanging out with boisterous types like Abe, who would hand him cup after cup of his homebrewed carbonated garlic sake drink. (“I do not recommend it,” Keene writes.) Let alone the mental image of him sitting in a plastic pool chair alongside the Speedo-clad, flamboyantly muscled, ever-less-covertly gay Yukio Mishima, who even then foreshadowed his elaborate ritual suicide in the name of the glory of Japan.

Naturally, there’s also an element of self-flagellation to my reading books like this. I imagine it’s a surprisingly common cause for reading the autobiographies of those who have lead rich lives. I think to myself, “Donald Keene did all this stuff decades and decades and decades ago, without computers, without the Information Superhighway, without fancy-man Mac applications — hell, without reliable mail. What’s your excuse?” I certainly have no desire to become an academic, which was one of Keene’s goals from early on, and he would probably call himself a cautious, play-it-safe type, but still, there’s a courage of conviction in his life that’s way, way too rare.

Flickr tourism: Fukuoka

I’ve got big plans for what some call “location independence” — big, heaving plans, I tells ya — but until such time as I magically achieve them, I make do with in-cubicle travel. While “making do” has never been a big interest of mine, at least Web 2.0 and Beyond have made it easier than ever to do longing-inducing stuff like this.

“Walking” around various world cities on Google Street View has been a favorite e-pursuit of mine, but I think I’ve found one I like even better. I call it “Flickr tourism.” Though I’m not particularly interested in what’s normally considered “tourism,” I do find it stupendously fascinating to view all the photos every Flickr user across the world has uploaded and tagged with a particular location. While the city remains the same, the perspectives, the sensibilities, the aesthetics, and the types of curiosity all shift constantly.

It’s fun to do this with cities I’ve personally seen, like Los Angeles, Portland, or Vancouver. But I’ve recently gotten into Flickr-touring cities to which I’ve never been but by which I’m nonetheless intrigued. Today, it was Fukuoka, the biggest city on one of Japan’s smaller islands. I don’t know why I’m interested in Fukuoka, but it probably has something to do with Taichi Ichinose and his invaluable techno resource of the 1995 web, JapanEdge.

Flickr tourism has simple rules. You just search for the city’s name as a tag, view all photos uploaded, and browse until you find ten interesting shots. Here’s my Fukuoka:





















Several of these images come from one dude who goes by “Pokoroto”. He’s evidently walking across Fukuoka and taking pictures of everything odd he comes across. Naturally, I hate him for his freedom to do this.