25 february 1990. Lunch and dinner with Sarah [Gilles]. She has been working by day for Vogue and with the [Rolling] Stones at night. Mick [Jagger] wears a scarf around his lower face when outside. A cold? No, no. So long as one doesn’t see the mouth he is not recognizable. Also, ah, these working class boys, so refreshing. Mick fucks anything standing still. Does this happen to Sarah? I wonder, then decide no because she is one of them, one of the boys. Not interested in girls, however, her own boyfriend probably squirreled away somewhere; she is a member of this late-twentieth-century version of Our Gang.

Interested in abstract fucking, I tell her how Paul Getty’s then-wife led me to the top of the Moroccan palace and opened the grille, and we looked down on what she identified as Mick’s bare bum as he pumped away at someone whom I later recognized by her hair ribbon. Inspired, Sarah and I decide to go to the fabled DX Gekijo.

What a disappointment. It has been completely redone. Now the girls merely come out and do their dance, then their dildos, then each other, and finally clean the patrons’ hands with towelettes, and then loll and let themselves be fondled, during which they talk.

Imagine these sex goddesses—for so they once appeared—now descending and showing bad teeth in the guttural accents of Gunma. There was also a new and most unwelcome type—the hoyden. She did an eccentric naked dance, with splits, then came back and had a talk show. Also carried a small rubber hammer with which to hit playfully the heads of those customers who were rubbing her too hard or in the wrong direction.

The old air of mystery, of primitive religion, the innocent spectacle of customers shedding trousers and engaging in the sacred act of love—all this is gone. Customers no longer climb up. Instead, they stick in a finger or two and are admonished with rubber hammers. The worst is that the image of the goddess is gone. That of the kindergarten teacher, the indulgent mother, never far away, is now brazenly laid bare.

With Kurosawa Akira. kawakita zaidan

With Oshima Nagisa. kawakita zaidan

There is also a nasty undercurrent. In the front row are some Chinese—tourists or students or workers. Not much Japanese was spoken among them. Ms. Hoyden made a lot of this. Sly insults in the tongue her guests do not know. Undercover snickering from the audience. Man next to me, jovially, “Oh, these Chinese. They just don’t understand.” Don’t understand what? asks the suspicious foreigner. “Well, our ways, we Japanese.” Even when currying cunt, it is still we Japanese against all.

However, Ms. Hoyden got her comeuppance. Flushed with her success she took on Sarah. “Oh, I want that lovely white lady to take a picture of my pussy,” she said, brandishing her Polaroid. I said no. She turned on me, “Even though you speak Japanese and all, you got to let the lady speak for herself. Nice little white lady.” “Nice little white lady is not lesbian,” I crisply averred. Loud laughter from the crowd, pouts from hoyden.

Then her big mistake: she harangued the crowd. Accused us of being stingy in not taking picture of pussy (five hundred yen the crack), and did so with no placating humor. Crowd grew cool, cold, and then sullen. Too late she sensed the turn against her. Beating a naked retreat she one last time turned to face us. “Why don’t you just all go home.” Ironic applause. I had to apologize to Sarah. Yet another aspect of old Japan vanished.

1 may 1990. In the evening at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence, the reception for Martha Graham. She is ninety-six now, and we had expected her to be wheeled in like the cake, but the Armacosts always do things well: There she was, in another room, enthroned on a teak chair, and we were allowed in several at a time, like pilgrims.

She looked very Chinese—perhaps the chair suggested that. But Ming—late Ming. Her hair was pulled back tightly and she wore jewelry, like the idol she was. And, she looked lacquered, a living effigy. Cordial, smiling occasionally, and then, often, that terrible lost look that very old people have, like an aged child who has forgot its way. Then a graceful and unselfconscious recovery, and she was nodding and smiling. Then again, that awful lost gaze.

I heard the press conference was like that. Periods of lucidity, periods of blankness. Talk with an acquaintance about Copland, nearly that age himself now and even worse off. Some days there, some not; some days remembers everything, some days nothing. Not Alzheimer’s—that rarely permits these merciless retreats to sanity. No, just old age, and the dimming of the brain.

And I first saw them both when they were half this age. New York, the forties. Appalachian Spring. She had danced and he was in the audience. Smiling, bowing, hand in hand, the two of them. I did not know Aaron then, but I still remember him best smiling from the stage.

The notables lined up. A few of the American ladies attempt a curtsy. I did not join the line. The ambassador gave a speech. “Martha Graham: if America had a living national treasure, she would be it.” Yes, that is what she would be, staring straight ahead, stiff in her chair, her jade earrings barely moving—a living national treasure.

23 may 1990. Party for Kurosawa—eighty now and just returned from the Cannes festival. Prolonged applause upon his smiling entrance. Like royalty. But then he has always been tenno [emperor]. The difference is only in the new affability. This is stressed in the various speeches. Fat old Yodogawa Nagaharu, TV film fan, kept exclaiming, “And there I was back in the old days, I wrote all the ads for Sugata Sanshiro; so maybe thanks to me, Kurosawa is what he is today, ha-ha. But seriously now, what I want to remark upon is the difference. . . .”

A great difference. In many ways. Kurosawa, who so rightly scorned the Japan Academy Awards for years, now takes money from Lucas and lets Dreams be “presented by” Spielberg, now goes to the Hollywood Academy Awards, now allows Warner’s send him to Cannes. However, such thoughts as these do not intrude. Instead, Oshima makes an emotional speech and says, “Thank you, thank you, Mr. Kurosawa,” he who only a decade ago was saying coldly that Kurosawa was what was the matter with Japanese cinema. Best speech was Ryu Chishu’s. He must be near ninety. He stood there, now much older than when he impersonated himself in Tokyo Story, and said, “I don’t really know what to say. Congratulations anyway. I’ll step down now. Thanks anyway.”

24 may 1990. In the park, stopped to talk to the resident prostitute. Pageboy, sensible shoes. When in spirits, given to wisecracks. “Haro daringu,” in English. Followed in Japanese by, “Real empty tonight. I only did two.” “But that is good, isn’t it?” I ask. Shake of the pageboy, one hand reassuring the breasts. “Good? No, three or four is average.” “What was the most?” “Ten!” “Ten in one night?” “Between the hours of 7 and 11. Ten!” “You were busy.” “I was just flying around.” Laughter. Then, “Not so hot tonight. One in the bushes, one in the ladies’ john. No sense taking that kind to a nice hotel.”

I decided to ask something I had been curious about. “Do they know? Your customers?” “About half and half,” was the candid reply. “Those that don’t always get excited and feel my tits. Those that know half the time want to suck my cock or get fucked. You’d be surprised. Last week the straightest, butchest, gang-boy type you ever saw. Muscles, tattoos. And we get in the bushes and he drops his pants and bends over. Wanted it up the ass.” “Did you oblige?” “Sure—he couldn’t help it, probably got used to it in prison.”

“Do you ever mix the two and try to fuck the one that thinks you’re a lady?” Laughter, then, “All the time, all the time. It’s a problem.” Seeing I was ready for further details, “I don’t get fucked you know, too dangerous, and I don’t suck cock either.” “What do you do then?” I wondered, thinking this a singularly untalented male prostitute.

In answer he swung his handbag and said, “Want to see my cunt?” I said I did, and he produced an object made of rubber. Then he demonstrated, hiked up his skirt, put it between his panty-hosed legs. “Feels just like a cunt,” he said. “And I’m quick about it, have it right down there in no time. They never know.” “It doesn’t look much like a cunt,” I said. “Not supposed to. No one ever sees it. No, no don’t touch it, it’s still full of cum from those two guys.” “Don’t you wash it out?” I asked. “No, that would ruin it. They would know it was rubber. But with all the cum squashing round inside it feels like cunt. They think they got me all wet, think they got me excited, big ego trip.” “Big trip to the hospital,” I say, “What if the first guy is sick, then the second dips his cock in all that gunk and he gets sick, too?”

“No, no,” he said, “I am OK, I never get sick.” “I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about your customers.” “AIDS, huh?” “Yes, something like that.” “Well, I just don’t know,” he said. “If I wash it they’ll catch on. But once it is nice and squishy. . . .” “I just mentioned it,” I said, “as a matter of possible interest to the health department.”

Laughter, then, seriously, “In Japan, it’s only the rich people who have AIDS; they never come down here to Ueno. You got to have money to go abroad and catch it.” We talked for a bit more, and then he saw a likely businessman, portly, interested. Eventually they walked into the darkness, she with her dirty cunt secure in her handbag.

5 june 1990. To dinner with Louis Harris of polling fame. Taking my advice in New York, he came and talked with Tsutsumi Seiji of department store fame, hoping to get funding for Jimmy Merrill’s movie. It was at Jimmy’s place in New York that I first thought of this avenue. And Lou, with his customary directness, picked up the idea at once and came brandishing it. Seiji had meant to give him twenty minutes and, probably, the time of day. Instead, he sat, stunned in his own office, while Lou outlined.

Harris is extraordinary. I have never met anyone so completely certain. There is none of that doubt of self that one so finds, particularly, in Americans, especially in New York. And even those gestures in that direction (“at least, that is what I think” etc.) are merely social.

His wife sits by, stunned not by him, but by jet lag. “I’m sleepy all the time.” Not him. I cannot imagine him sleepy. Right now he only sips Chinese dumpling soup. “They have ruined my digestion,” he says, speaking of the Japanese and the schedule arranged for him. But one does not believe it. Nothing will ever ruin any single part of him.

Napoleon must have been like this. So utterly sure, so completely certain, that he carried all before him. Seiji must have been overcome. It is not the charm, which is considerable, but the certainty. So rare, so valuable, so irresistible in our rationalized times.

6 june 1990. Evening, explaining Ueno and low life in general to a foreign film producer who has asked for a few lessons. Having told him where to go and watched him enter, I fell into the hands of a hentai fufu. The male half moved into the dark near the pond, then, making sure I was looking, lifted his companion’s skirt like a stage curtain, to show me she had no panties, nor had she shaved. Then he dragged out his equipment and she descended upon him, looking me straight in the eye the while. I do not know what I was supposed to make of this, but realized that I was an object, a third party, a witness. So I smiled and she smiled back, difficult though that was. Then I stretched forth a hand to assist her. Instantly he was buckled up again, and with a “time to move on, time to move on,” he shepherded her around the shores of the pond, she looking back (longingly I thought) from time to time. This is what they do, pairs like this—inflame innocents like myself, then “move on” when things look promising. That is why they are called hentai fufu, “a perverted pair.”

8 june 1990. Spent the morning writing about the burakumin (reviewing Hashi ga Nai Kawa), the proscribed caste, even now in this bigoted land; its creation yet another ploy to control the lives of the citizenry that continues to this day. Perhaps continues now even stronger, in that the citizenry has been persuaded to surrender itself, to exercise self-criticism, to implant the watchful eye within the bosom.

Lunch with Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, anthropologist and also something of an expert on the burakumin, since her book, Monkey as Mirror, connects all these strands of historical Japan. She tells me that the publisher of the proposed translation said he would love to do it but with all these burakumin references he really couldn’t. Now if she could just take them all out. . . . I tell her that when my Inland Sea was translated the publishers (TBS-Brittanica) cut out all references not only to burakumin, but also to lepers.

She left Japan early, opened her eyes, and has never again shut them. “And you?” she asks. “You are me in reverse. How does it come about? How does it continue?” It continues, of course, because I am not Japanese and hence not subject to any of these insular customs. I am not expected to conform, indeed am encouraged not to. “I would not stay here, not even for five minutes, if I were Japanese,” I tell her. “But I am not. And that is all the difference. Plus, that I am a chronic non-joiner and early burst into tears at the prospect of the Boy Scouts.” She nods. She understands.

9 june 1990. With Jonathan Rauch, whom I take out to an Edo dinner and then to assorted glimpses of Ueno low life. He says, and I agree, that revisionism (let alone “Japan-bashing”) is not the proper term for what is occurring. It is simply that a group of journalistic scholars are describing Japan for the first time. And, I say, doing so for the first time without reference to the Japanese model.

It is amazing that for so many years, so many scholars (Reischauer among them) have accepted the Japanese Version. I never have, and I have always tried to accurately describe the place. But I simply did (and do) not know enough—as much, for example, as Karel van Wolferen knows.

Jonathan, so young, so bright, says that he has yet to meet a Japanese any different from anyone where he came from—Phoenix. The institutions are peculiar, but then all institutions are peculiar. The explorer finding Japan “different” is, in a way, merely discovering the last standing wall of the once-imposing Nihonjinron edifice.

30 june 1990. A Beethoven quartet a day. First I read d’Indy, and then Kerman. Then I listen to the quartet, with the score. Then I read Kerman again. So far I am most interested in Opus 95. In particular those two breathless chords, like some deathbed statement reconsidered.

Out at night enjoying the national mix. All sorts of different people. Homogeneous Japan—those who think they are homogeneous—feels threatened. On the bus coming back home there was a feisty little man with a toothpick and a domineering way with his wife. She was ordered to sit down, and then, himself standing, he looked around the bus. There was me and a Pakistani (probably), and two Filipinas, and perhaps a Chinese. And he turned to her and said in a loud voice, secure in his presumed insularity, “Nothing but damn foreigners these days.” (Saikin ya na, gaijin bakkashi da.) I looked up from my Kerman and transfixed him with my alien and basilisk eye. He understood at once that he had been understood. He looked away. Then when the bus went around a corner, stole a glance. Horrors, the gaijin was still regarding him with a mute but ominous stare. He shifted his position, turned his back, snapped at his wife. When I got off the bus, I was pleased to see that he had chewed his toothpick into a pulp. Stress.

1 july 1990. Reading the short short stories of Colette, those that are all bunched together in the middle of the collected volume. I much admire this short-short form. These little netsuke are hard to carve, but worth it. Good for Colette too. When she gets long she often becomes winsome or jocular. She is best (as is everyone) when she is all bone and sinew. This short-short form saves the author from that authorial pose which, as I get older and older, makes me more and more sick. That ghastly attitude of looking on genially, smiling at a suffering world, the master puppeteer. Thackeray has it, James has it, even my worldly and discreet Colette at times. But not in these glorious stories. They make me want to write some myself.

2 july 1990. Busy day. Noon lecture, two hours, on Japanese culture for a group of adult academics from U.S.A.; proofing Kenneth Pyle’s new article for the International House of Japan Bulletin; rewriting the library notes; then moderating Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s talk on Tampopo.

Then I came home and found in my mailbox “The Best Radio Plays of Paul Rhymer,” that is, the best of Vic and Sade, the radio program that so delighted my childhood, which so formed me.

One of the joys of Vic and Sade was to stand to one side and learn to observe. Not criticize, observe. And to understand, and to accept. All of this was painless, of course. I thought they were “funny.” And so they are, but they had the transcendental humor shared by Jane Austen and Ozu.

Made of very little, a handful of characters (usually three) in themselves a unit (family), in one setting (house), and this minimal means permitted the depths of fellow feeling which this series occasioned. I never wanted to meet Vic or Sade or Rush. At the same time they were not “examples.” Rather, it was through them that great truths were viewed—beauty became truth.

In bed I read and read. Rhymer’s dialogue is as crisp today as it was fifty years ago. His ability to reveal without stating is marvelous. He is pre-Pinter Pinter. I cannot think of anyone else writing this well on stage and screen, radio being dead.

But as I laughed my eyes filled with tears. It was not nostalgia. I remembered none of these scripts. It was delight, certainly, at the rightness, the sureness of the performance. But it was more. Then I recognized it.

It was love. That infantile, all encompassing love that as a child I gave to Laurel and Hardy. It was fellow feeling extended until I loved them for being so human, so much like me. I love Vic and Sade as I love the people in Ozu’s Tokyo Story because I understand them. I do not want to leave them, and last night could not close the book. I awoke this morning, book still open, light still on.

4 july 1990. In the late morning I go to the American Embassy for the Fourth of July Reception. Great, joyous crush with, oddly, Chinese food. One woman in a red-white-and-blue straw hat. Otherwise, decent attire.

And there was Edward G. Seidensticker. “First time I am invited in years. Why, why, why?” “I think they wanted to look cultural this year,” I said. “Oh, you are such a cynic,” said Ed. Then, “What I really don’t know is why they invited you. Me, I can understand. I, sir, am a patriot. You are No Such Thing.”

Then I circulated through that great cool house, and outside in the garden saxophones were straining and people came up and said, “I bet you don’t remember me,” and they were absolutely right. Lots of military. So many chest decorations one could not tell the American officers from the Soviet.

Hours later, about eleven that night, I was walking home around Shinobazu Pond and there I beheld a familiar figure shuffling toward me. Yes, Edward G. Seidensticker. “All is well with the world,” I said. “We meet on familiar ground.” He stood, swaying, before me. “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” I told him I knew where he had been—to Asakusa. “Right again, sir.” And drinking. “A man may drink,” he said in the flat tones of Dr. Johnson.

Then, “Why do you suppose I was invited? I cannot imagine it. Oh, I was once on the list. Then I was removed. And now, lo, I am back on it again. Who does these things? Who makes up his mind about my destiny in this fashion?” “God?” I suggested. “Less levity,” he said severely, then, “Yours is even more of a mystery. Why would they invite you? Me, yes, for I must admit that I find the Fourth still Glorious. Yes, you may smile in that superior fashion of yours. But I am not ashamed. Glorious!” And tears actually appeared in his eyes. Then, “But you wouldn’t know about this, you old cynic, you. Well, off to home, which is probably not where you are going. I am. To write up my diary, sir.”

5 july 1990. Though America yammers and Japan stealthily buys up the world, there is very little visible of this new war. Perhaps because war is made by governments and not by people. Very visible it is in Washington—I read Ian [Buruma] on this. Another new book names names: the Japan lobbyists—visible even in Tokyo as Japan tries to slam shut the door to protect itself while at the same time menacing everyone else. Oddly no one has said the obvious. America does not have to buy Japanese. No one is forcing it to.

7 july 1990. Eric, required to listen to yet one more of my tales of conquest, said, “But you seem to have deserted Japan in favor of the Third World.” I thought about that and have now decided that it was not that I deserted Japan, but that Japan deserted the Third World.

Me, I have been faithful to that locality. It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the U.S.A., the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.

8 july 1990. There are no articles in the Japanese language, and the lack of a definite article truly circumscribes. One cannot say “the dog,” one must say “this dog” or “that dog” or “that dog over there.” But the genus dog, that which makes something of a symbol of itself (“the dog is the most widespread of canines”) is not possible. Symbolic thought (man’s triumph it is said) is not triumphant in Japan. I cannot imagine Plato thriving here, with all his absolutes (“Truth,” “Beauty”), but Aristotle thrives because he describes. Maybe this is why Japan is so backward (by comparison) in some areas: philosophy, and diagnosis. And perhaps why it is so forward in others. After all, symbolic thought, logical progression, abstract ideas—these are not all of life, either.

9 july 1990. A cultural collision—Japan versus U.S.—escalates. And yet the antagonists so resemble each other. Japan is an unguided missile. No one is in the control room. When you get the people all pointed in the same direction there is no stopping them. Where is the brake? It is not included in this model. And the U.S.—it cannot even get everyone going in the same direction. People in the control booth, but no one minding the store. Minding the till, however. Both problems are colossal. The U.S., ailing, unable to stop its violent and criminal twitching, unable to care for itself, drooling and weeping. And Japan, locked inside of itself, nose at the windows, gasping for breath, unable to stop its violent impetus, and unable to get out.

Today a taxi driver turned around and said, “Well, I hope you people keep bashing us. That is the only way we are ever going to get any reform in this country.”

A pronounced lack of fellow feeling (except for this sole taxi driver)—that is the harshest and truest thing one can say about the Japanese. In the West too a great lack of that quality, but it nevertheless exists. Here, all too often, the different is seen as inhuman. And even if some feel otherwise they are too cowardly to show it. But how the Americans respond to a show of fellow feeling. They open like flowers turning toward the sun, warming their cold and brittle petals.

25 july 1990. Continuing hot weather. And since no rainy season has occurred, continued fears of water shortage. Tokyo not at its best in such emergencies. Discomfort turns people in upon themselves. They close all the doors and windows, as it were. A train or subway car is filled with complete blanks. This fragile city breaks down upon any provocation. A light snowfall and traffic snarls; a small earthquake and all the trains halt; a typhoon warning and the buses stop running. This is a city designed to work only under optimum conditions, just like the country, and, in a way, just like the people.

In the evening I stroll around Shinobazu. The summer festival is going on. Stalls with plants, and stones, and whole trees. Lots of water. Caged insects, pottery you can paint and bake. This is usually when the city turns “Japanese” again—fans and yukata and geta, and an amount of flesh. Not this year. Just a few young girls, self-conscious (and uncomfortable) in summer kimono. There is less and less of this kind of tradition every year.

With Jim Jarmusch, 1990. unifrance film

17 august 1990. In any event, all other concerns eclipsed in the press by Iraq. What timing. Just when the U.S.A. had lost its evil empire, the USSR, and badly needed a new one. Had tried Japan on for size but something was lacking. This one has everything: military threat, innocent hostages, rape of stewardesses, looting, a lone ten-year-old-girl at peril, and behind it all greed, greed, greed. And, of course, the Threat is Real.

Of a consequence Japan is backed off the front page; carping is forgotten. As another consequence President Bush is off the domestic hook and balancing on the foreign one. The biggest relief for him must be the new and “vital” role for the military establishment, which must have thought it was going to lose a lot of money due to the collapse of the USSR. Now they will get more money than ever and Bully Boy can meet Bully Boy. Just like in a real war.

26 august 1990. To Kawakita Kazuko’s, a party for Jim Jarmusch. Takemitsu Toru there as well. I ask him for a school to which to give the Donald Richie Commemorative Collection of Stringed Chamber Music. He shakes his head. Tells me that he had wanted to give his score collection to the Toho Music School. And they refused. “Just no more space in Japan,” says Toru.

2 september 1990. Learned a very interesting idiomatic difference. It came about this way: I was getting a cold drink at the machine, and a young tobi­shoku in tabi and cummerbund flashed a broad, white smile and said, in Japanese, “I’m not Japanese, either.” Well, the big, dazzling smile directed at a complete unknown had already indicated that.

He was Korean, from Pusan, and was working high on one of the scaffoldings of the buildings going up around here. Now he was off for the day and thought he would go sit in the park, enjoying what cool the twilight would offer. While this was not issued as an invitation, I took it as such and joined him.

Strong, young (twenty-five, he told me), and with that courtly politeness of the Koreans among strangers. Handsome, blunt, very Korean features; big, hard Korean body, sitting there in the dusk with his legs open. Much taken, I held up my end of the conversation until it was practically perpendicular. But this was also necessary, because his Japanese was not all that good. Mine is much better, and so I kept trying different words until I hit upon one he knew.

He was, I learned, bumming around Asia. He would go to a country broke, work, get some money, and go on. He did not know where he would go next or for how long he would be in Japan. Had been in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Always somehow made out. Smiled at this. Big, wide, smile. I could see why he always made out.

Then, seeing my interest in him, he interpreted it in the simplest possible way and decided I wanted to hear about the girls in all these foreign places. He certainly knew a lot about them, including the two, yes, two, whom he had simultaneously enjoyed (friends of friends, no, no money, never), or the one who had enjoyed him just the evening before. Oh, just to think of them made his chinchin okoru.

Here came the interesting idiomatic difference: When we have erections, we sometimes say we “are ready.” The Japanese usually say they “are hard.” But the Koreans say something different. Dae-Yung speaks of his chinchin standing up by saying in English, “It is angry, very angry.” And here was the Korean tobi saying the same thing in Japanese, since okoru means to become angry. How interesting. I wonder if this linguistic fact has ever before been noted by scholars. I tried to tell the tobi about this, but he could not understand. The spoken language not sufficing, I resorted to Braille.

Open, free, in that Korean way, he did not know if the chinchin could okoru at such short notice, but sure, why not, and besides he was tired after work, would like to rest a little. Well, to make a long story short (another idiom) chinchin okoru-ed, and then we went and had a big Korean meal with lots of kimchee.

Name was Lim Chun Sung and he was to leave the next day for Nagoya to work, but would be back on Thursday. We made a tentative date in the middle of the month, the 15th, but he didn’t know where he would be here. At parting, with a big smile, as though it were a joke-gift, he taught me the Korean for chinchin—it is chote.

A most interesting linguistic finding. I had thought that Dae-Yung had made up the angry prick as a part of the pidgin through which we are sometimes forced to communicate. Not at all. It is a part of the Korean language itself. And how interesting that the Koreans have to get angry to make love.

15 september 1990. Surprisingly (since I had not really expected it), Lim Chun Sung kept his promise and appeared, now in a summer sweater with the New York skyline on it, but the same tobi pants.

Over lunch (mainly beer), he told me something more about himself. He is a nomad all right, but this was because he had some trouble in Korea. Just what this consisted of I do not know—his Japanese is really bad. But, it had to do with clutching and slapping and shooting and stabbing and hanging, I guess. I guess, because these are the motions he went through, smiling that big, white, wide accepting Korean smile the while. Also, he was more curious about me. Where did I live, did I live alone, had I any friends? I wish it were possible to trust people, to take them home, to share things, but it is not. At least not people from the park in Ueno.

Later, coming home alone, I cut through the park and saw the young man I often see: crew cut, mid-twenties, nice looking, and somehow sad, also watchful as though waiting for something good to happen in his life. And over the months, I have talked with him. It was not girls he was waiting for, but it did not seem to be boys, either. And though he had some interest in talking about the hentai fufu, it was not voyeurism (which is all they offer), and the resident whore, even, did not know what he wanted though she had her own opinion: “Homo da wa.” So this evening I stopped to talk. Said his stomach was bothering him, gave a quick, apologetic smile, and looked vaguely about him. Just then a large man in a loose coat passed, and his eyes focused and he gave a short salute. And instantly the scales fell from my own eyes.

Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself? “You’re fuzz!” (Deka da!) I spontaneously cried. He instantly assumed that held-in poker face, which means that I am right, and made no attempt to deny anything. “That explains it all,” I said. And so it does. He has no interest in these things other people in the park do, and the only thing he is waiting for is this criminal to walk into his life and get nabbed. “Awful for you,” I said, “to have to perch here every night amid all the perverts and wait and spy and watch.” But he said, smiling as though in apology, “It’s not too bad.”

What kind of criminal is he after? I wanted to know. Obviously no small fry. He is surrounded by these. Is it the Most Wanted Man or something like that? But, he merely showed his polite, closed face and did not answer. “But, I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “No you won’t,” he said, smiling. And I had gotten to know him so well, I’d thought, in the past months. You never know, do you? Things just never what they seem. Wow, isn’t life surprising? etc. So I went my way and left him there, lonely looking, a cop on duty, all night long. Officer of the law, protector of the peace, no matter what the respectable prostitutes and pimps and perverts think.

1 october 1990. In the evening to the opening concert of the week-long series commemorating Takemitsu’s sixtieth birthday. He is in the lobby wearing black, but Issey Miyake black, with a little white (Hanae Mori?) butterfly. Smiling modestly, he always treats these great events of which he is the center as though he is just another guest.

Great event—the Emperor and Empress come. Due to some misunderstanding it was thought that I was diplomatic and so I am given a red ribbon and sit in the first row of the balcony, quite near the royals, separated only by a secret serviceman or two. Hence I can observe them.

They are gracious, as royalty is supposed to be. Certainly there is something Windsor in their waves but perhaps this is because there is only one way to wave. They are attentive during the music and appreciative after it. I wonder what they make of it—one hour and a half of Takemitsu’s beautifully crafted, small sounds. As I listen I remember his once telling me, “Oh, I would give anything to be able to write a good 2/4 allegro.” By the end of the concert I am feeling much the same.

5 october 1990. After some months, ran into Hideki [last name unknown]—a cook who runs his own place in the suburbs, late twenties. Brought him home. He got into all this ten years or so ago. Has no particular feeling for it but it is now all he knows. Has a bad opinion of himself and is consequently hopeless with women, at any rate never met the several with whom this low opinion would have assured affection. Has over the years stopped looking. Men are at least there.

Does everything but only, I feel, because he does not know what else to do. It apparently means little. Small excitement. He stands off and watches himself. Has casual if intimate affairs like with me, but his real friends would be as much strangers to all this as he originally was. He is like a soldier who has somehow strayed into the other camp and stayed because he does not know where else to go. Is pleased to come, is pleased to stay, is pleased to go—is not really pleased at all. But it represents, I guess, something better than nothing.

6 october 1990. Haydn quartets—the delicious Opus 50. They are made up only of themselves. Like something perfectly tailored, not an inch left over, everything accounted for. And at the same time, a world of variety. I like art like that. That is why I like Jane Austen, why I like Henry Green, why I like Ozu, Bresson, and Tarkovsky. And why I do not like the big, inchoate people: Dickens, Liszt, and almost any other film directors one could name. Jonathan [Rauch] said, “You like Mendelssohn better than Beethoven.” Right.

10 october 1990. How Japan is changing. Now the rice market, the sacred rice market, is being opened. This commodity, which now costs seven times what it does elsewhere, will soon be as cheap (well, almost as cheap) as everywhere else. Not yet to be relinquished are all of those middle men who each take a bit off and thus drives up the price, all those distributors. But just as the small store is being eaten by the supermarket, shortly a successful single distributor will gobble up everyone in between. What will be slower to change is the reliance of the large concern on smaller subcontractors. It is these latter who have to work at a low price, with low paid labor. But so uneconomical is this (except for the large concern) that it cannot be expected to last.

16 october 1990. With Frank [Korn] to the Mukai Gallery, where a small ceremony was to be held in honor of his giving a complete set of Marian’s prints to the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. It was not a solemn occasion, what with the prints being counted, and the curators standing about and Frank pacing and me drinking tea. Still, I wished that Marian could have been there.

She was so ambitious for her art. And now a graphics museum requesting an edition of her work—how happy and proud she would have been. She often had shows at this gallery. I looked around, as I had so often at these various vernissages, but there was no Marian standing there, pleased, and smiling.

Frank took me to lunch and we talked about women. He maintained that he did not care what his women did so long as he did not know. As I well knew, remembering my strange and carnal affair with Marian, which lasted for years but occurred only a few times. I had felt worse and worse about Frank. I liked him better than I did Marian, but how do you let the cuckolded husband know this? We got drunk together once, in the wilds of Otsuka, and I remember almost pleading to let me tell him. Tears in my eyes, I wanted him to listen to my confession, all about his wife. And drunk as he was, with what skill he looped my confessions over my arm, turned me around, and sent me home. I never did get to apologize.

To change the subject I now asked him when his first time was. “Fourteen.” In Vienna. “A business person?” “Ach, no. Wealthy housewife. She used to have her chauffeur wait in front of the school.” “Did you do it in the Dusenberg?” “No, she would take me home. Have tea first. Maids in aprons, footmen.” “Where was her husband?” “At work probably.” Did this occur often? “Every day.” “What a strong schoolboy.” “Oh, no, each day a different school boy. I only got into the limousine once a week or so.” What prewar Vienna must have been. . . .

17 october 1990. I introduce a program of the films of Terayama Shuji at International House. When you look at these short pictures, you look into his mind. His mythology is there—beautiful, distant, wrong end of telescope, the past animated. And I remember him with his odd searching gaze, his rueful little boy smile, his sickly complexion—for the kidneys that killed him had gone bad in childhood. In the first film, the naval officer father takes off his pants, then his fundoshi, and staggers drunk and naked about the old farmhouse; and in the last, Terayama sits in his director’s chair, back to camera, as the play of shadows is dismantled, and then gets up without a backward glance and leaves. And in an hour and a half I have encompassed a life.

19 october 1990. John Haylock takes us out—Eric, Paul McCarthy, and me. We do not talk about sex but rather about religion and eventually about the saints. Paul tells of St. Agatha, depicted as having had her breasts sliced off and put before her on a plate. “Not a proper thing to discuss at table,” said John peering down at his sautéed slices of eggplant.

I gave him Frances Partridge’s new volume of diaries because some friends of his are in it. Duncan Grant, for example. This reminds John of the portrait that Grant did of him, left behind when the Turks invaded Cyprus. When he returned he found the flat a shambles, and there by the fireplace, crumpled, was the portrait. He unfolded it and found that some Turkish soldier had used it to wipe himself. Not, perhaps, a proper thing to discuss at table.

20 october 1990. That sense of “them” and “us.” The polarization; the breaking apart. It is stronger than ever. Visible everyplace. Though I can feel its attraction, I am one of the few, I think, who is aware—or at least aware and disapproving. I do not trust myself. I find myself thinking: them, them, them. How much is real; how much is “me”; how much is “them.”

If it is true that “they” oscillate between open and closed, then they are going into a closed phase. The faces are closed; the minds are closed. At least the occasional opposite is no longer common: the open face, the open question, and the open smile.

Very well, the new bourgeoisie: timid, craven, yuppie. But how much now, I wonder, is it “us” as well—we spurned white lovers. Was it ever any different? Did I not experience the exceptions? And have not affluence and time made these exceptions fewer?

I do not know. But at least I question myself. This is not done by many foreigners here. They hate. It is there, on their faces, and in their books.

21 october 1990. To see Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. How luxurious to sit in a movie and from the first shot know that everything is going to be all right, that an intelligence is guiding, someone whose artistry, technique and morals you can trust.

And what a packed film it is. From the first, information is pouring in from different circuits. There are the visuals, smooth but fast, then there is the dialogue, which is broken, fragmentary, then the voice-over which is echoed by dialogue, and at the same time is not talking about the visuals, and then there is the constant music, hits of the day. And just as Robert de Niro ages and puts on his bi-focals, so the music changes from big band smooth to hard rock hard.

Wonderful shot: out of the taxi, into the back door of the Copacabana, down the stairs, through the kitchen, out onto the floor, the headwaiter, the table carried and laid, the floor show, our people watching, champagne poured. All in one fluid shot, and everything choreographed along the way.

It is intelligent and frantic, just like the director. I remember him here, all eyebrows and tics and malaise. And Isabel Rossellini (they were just married) trying to soothe him (it was in their fake Louis XV suite at the Tokyo Prince) and he was smiling and frowning at the same time. The film is just like him. Style is the man.

23 october 1990. Big party hosted by Oshima Nagisa to celebrate thirty years of marriage. Also perhaps to raise money for the new film. [Tomiyama] Ka­tsue and [Kawakita] Kazuko figured out that a free party always manages (like politicians’ parties) to raise money. Usually nowadays when a person gives a party you are told how much it will cost you to go—equivalent of $100, $200. And so for a “free” celebratory party like this people usually get envelopes ready with $300 or $400 in them. Let me see, if there are 1,000 guests and each gives $300. . . .

At the event, the hall is so big and expensive (The Tokyo Prince Hotel), and the food so lavish (fresh lobster, boeuf Wellington, trout, mango, papaya) that it may have cost him that much. I bring a painting (one of my own) for them. Kazuko says, implying that I am getting off cheap, “Ah, you artists . . .” I ask what she brought. Flowers. “Ah, you florists . . .” I say.

Just everyone there. Everyone a generation later. I see lots of actors I have not seen since the days of Ozu—Tanaka Haruo, for example, now barely visible behind his age. Apparently I am also near unrecognizable. Approached by director Wakamatsu Koji, not seen for a time, with, “Wow, you got real old” (Waa, sugoku toshi natchatta ne . . .)—this from a fiftyish, wrinkled, salt-and-pepper oldster. I playfully pull one of his graying locks, but do not believe for a minute that his observation is without malice. I am, after all, the only one who has refused to take his cinematic effusions seriously.

He makes embarrassing soft-core psychodrama (or used to), and Noël Burch led the French into seeing great cinematic depths in Violated Angels. It occurs to no one that the reason for making it (nurses skinned alive) was non-cinematic. So, Koji was treated as though his junk meant something. And here he is a grand old man. If you last long enough just everyone becomes a grand old man. I am turning into one myself.

Then, a plump but well-preserved Yamamoto Fujiko gives a funny little speech—this long-stemmed Japanese beauty whom I will always remember in her single Ozu film, Higanbana. Shinoda Masahiro, all gray now but still very much the Boy Scout, asking just how I liked his Days of Youth, which I had not at all but can tell him I had recommended it to the Palm Springs Festival. Old Oba Hideo, he must be ninety now, gives the doddering toast, and the president of Toei the main speech. Not Shochiku? No. Shochiku, the company who first sponsored Oshima and then fired him, is not even represented. A scandal, but an expected one.

I leave early and hence miss the unexpected scandal. Oshima had asked novelist Nozaka Yoshiyuki to say a few words, then forgot that he had. Nozaka waited around, drinking the while, and by the time that Oshima remembered, was so smashed that he went to the podium, picked up the hand mike, and hit his host over the head with it. The irate and no more sober Oshima responded by brandishing the mike stand, and finally famous author and noted director had to be parted by force.

25 november 1990. Interviewed for a provincial paper. During it I mention that the Tokugawa period is not over, that self-imposed self-restraint, the acceptance of official guidance, the inability to stand out or stand up, and the fearful cowardice the government fosters—all this is Tokugawa. Wide eyes greet this. My interviewer has never once heard this opinion. Much intrigued. Wonder what it will look like in the paper. Japan-bashing? Probably.

27 november 1990. To my old friend Marcel Grilli’s wake. Since he was a Catholic it is a long, tiresome, self-serving affair with the priest giving his hype, saying such things as, “he experiences the greatest happiness who gives himself unconditionally, entirely, to God.” Service saved and made moving by a talk from Peter Grilli, who remembered his parent with temperance and consideration, and brought to the service the humanity it ought have had from the beginning.

After all this Thanatos, a touch of Eros—I am taken by Eric to the most expensive of the urisen bars. It used to be called The Herakles; now—times being what they are—it is The Fitness Boy. Due to the rain and the fact that it was Wednesday we had the place to ourselves, a number of bulging fitness boys lounging about. When we arrived they took off their T-shirts. In other professions you put on a shirt when customers come.

They sat around in their muscles, gratefully accepted drinks and smiled, and horsed about with each other in boyish fashion. With a bit of encouragement they would have horsed about with us as well. I inquire as to the financial arrangements. Expensive—about five thousand or so for drinks, then five thousand or so to take your choice off the premises, and then fifteen thousand or so for the boy himself, who always expects about five thousand for tip. It all comes up to three hundred dollars or so. “But,” says my host judiciously, “you must realize that girls nowadays cost twice this much.”

A large projected TV image (takes up one whole wall) of young Japanese doing unspeakable things to each other. At the corner, a smaller TV set showing something different—Roger Moore in fact. I ask why. Well, the big one is for the guests, and the small one (James Bond at present) is to give the boys something to look at. The boys, well trained, drain their glasses. Time for another round. The cute one, nude to the waist, stands up humbly and thankfully to clink glasses with us. Humble muscles—the way to the homo heart.

2 january 1991. Last night a New Year’s dream. Very vivid, beautiful, sad, mysterious. I am with Marguerite Yourcenar who is packing, getting ready to go. The train is waiting just beside the davenport, its smoke caught in the drapes. I am admiring her garden at the other end of the room. It is small, but climbs up the wall and is alive with lizards and salamanders, and water runs slowly down from the ceiling, and big snails fall heavily onto the moss beneath. I tell her she will hate to leave it. She says that she does not like leaving, but that it is necessary.

Then she gives me a large block of smoked glass. Holding it up I see, brown, dim, three men, as in a daguerreotype, one of whom is naked and shows a large, soft penis. They all shift back into the shadows, then out again. I understand that in their limited way they are alive. The entire effect is very beautiful, and I reluctantly hand it back to her. “Oh, no,” says Madame, “it is for you. You may keep it.” At once I am intensely, absurdly grateful. I cry, my voice breaks, and I make a small speech. I remember it still: “Oh, Madame,” cry I, “you have given me everything. And now you have given me my death.”

This was said with an insane sincerity, and such a gush of feeling that I woke up, the mysterious inhabited box in my hands as the dream began to fade. I know what it probably means but that is not important. Female approval of my looking at waving cocks may be what prompts that infant outburst, but what moves me is the beauty of it—the brownness of the miniature men, the broad whiteness of beautiful Madame, and my own emotion, surging, like a cut jugular, threatening to suffocate me with feeling.

3 january 1991. The annual party of Kawakita Kazuko and Shibata Hayato at their house—critic Kawarabata Nei, people from the Film Center and the Film Library Council, director Yanagimachi Mitsuo, and the dean of the TV film folk, old (eighty-two) Yodogawa Nagaharu.

And Osugi. He is half of an outrageous pair of twins. Pico is the other, but he has just lost an eye to cancer and is now more quiet. Osugi is not quiet. His screech cuts through any conversation, no matter how distant. And he is continually holding up his hands (a ring on each and every finger) for silence. However, he knows what he is doing.

He is a faggot giving an imitation of a faggot and being very good at it. And since he is a Japanese faggot, the bitchiness is soon seen as a pose and the malice as made up. He has become society’s idea of a homosexual, and by being so has defanged the opposition.

Also, he has another and more traditional role. He is the taikomochi, the male geisha, a traditional figure, very necessary to the better parties. Being men, they can be much more outrageous than women are allowed to be. Camping it up is an ancient tradition in Japanese society.

Also, like the fool at the royal court, the taikomochi is allowed to tell the truth. This is what Osugi does. He is the only critic on TV who is outspoken. Everyone else is conciliatory, bowing to power. Not him. He openly called the new Kadokawa film a stupid little boy’s epic, an infantile executive playing at toy soldiers. Many people listen, not to be amused by camp, but for information. He gets away with it because the accepted opinion is that no one would pay much attention to the opinions of a notorious fag. But everyone does.

I see that he and the venerable Yodogawa are now quite close. He calls the elder critic “father,” and Yodogawa turns to me with a small smile and says, “Of course, I am really his mother.” When they leave (hired car, ten-thirty sharp) people stand up, applaud, as at the end of a performance—which it was.

9 february 1991. With Peter Greenaway—interviewing him. I see it as a meeting, he, initially, as a duel. “. . . and I find the tube more noisy and bigger than . . . well, than, you,” he says before we even begin. I recognize the ploy, having met many British. After charm is on the troubled greensward poured, he loses his suspicions, whatever they were, and becomes interested in himself. Literate, amusing, charming, and pensive, but always testing the way, every step. Maybe he has had bad interviews in the past. Or been interviewed mainly by the English. At first the information is heavy with quotations, Truffaut, Renoir, etc., as though to mine the field. Later it becomes more personal—he is seen playing tennis in the final shot of Blowup. Says that The Draughtsman’s Contract ushered in the Thatcher era and that The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover ushered it out. Laughs. Is intensely concerned over impression made—he and his films alike.

With Sofia Coppola.

With Carmen Coppola, Takemitsu Toru.

11 february 1991. In the paper this morning that Inoue Yasushi died, in his eighties, pneumonia. Not unexpected, but sad. Sad because he was a writer who could imagine. He imagined the wastes of Dunhuang, the ruined Loulan, the various lives of the Emperor Goshirakawa, and the death of Confucius. These he reconstructed with the most scrupulous care, a base for his splendid conjurings. I have never found an arbitrary passage in his works, nor one that was not scrupulous in exposing his sources. It is rare to read a writer who retains the wonder of the past, who shows us the links between then and now, who treats the dead with respect. And now he is dead himself.

I remember him two years ago: I had arranged a showing of a film based on one of his works—Dunhuang. Though the film was a travesty of what he had written, he nonetheless courteously came and was introduced before the screening. He even stayed afterward to answer questions.

A tall old man, kindly and meticulous, a slow and smiling concern for just the right word, and—I thought—a sad gaze as he looked at the insensitive and corrupt version of his work. Or, maybe not. Maybe he knew that commercial cinema has its limitations, and no more resented this than he would have a child’s version of one of his stories.

Perhaps his wisdom was deeper than his taste, deeper even than his ethics. Maybe he simply sat and understood. And I remember his style: plain, particular, always in work clothes, and containing a great strength. He made no appeal, but after you read him you understood and you remembered.

16 february 1991. Party with Francis Coppola and family—wife, daughter, and father. Francis much less up, much more on an even keel. Have never seen him with his father before. “Don’t do that, Francis.” “Oh, you always say that,” says Francis. “Because you always do it,” says father. Then, to no one, “Know how I named him? Looked out of the window and there was this Ford going by.”

Daughter, only nineteen, is a forced bloom. I wonder if she was allowed any childhood. And now pushed into a movie role. Sweet. Unsure. Latches onto me in a nice kind of way. For protection. Looked around and decided I was the least threat. Also, I knew her before. Last time was when she was six. She does not remember but is told I am an Old Friend.

Later, the elder Coppola, Takemitsu, and I have long talk about music. Father talks. We listen. Tells about his lessons with Edgar Varese. “So poor he was. Used to meet him bringing back the garbage pail. Had to dump it himself.” Also, “He had no system of teaching. None.”

More stories, these about playing first flute under Toscanini. The Italian conductor shared the orchestra with Stokowski one season, and when it was Toscanini’s turn he would raise his baton, listen, then start screaming. “Bruta, bruta, that white hair freak he ruin my orchestra!” Coppola also indicates the difference between the two conductors. The Italian knew precisely what he wanted to do when he stepped on the podium. It was all worked out. The fake Russian, real Brit, knew nothing, waited for the orchestra to teach him—emoted, got inspired, etc.

And what is the most difficult flute passage in the orchestral repertoire? Is it the long exposed part in Daphnis? No, not at all, it is the last half of the scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Mendelssohn makes the flute “hop, skip, jump and skitter right up to the top.”

Takemitsu agreed, again, kind of, to do the score for the film they are making of my Inland Sea. We try to remember how long ago it was when we first met. Thirty years, thirty-five? He pats my cheek, “But you haven’t changed at all.”

No—he is the one who has not changed. Only grown. I heard the viola concerto on the radio the other day. That little boy could create such big, strange, wonderful sounds.

17 february 1991. Fumio in hospital, undiagnosed, danger of peritonitis. I find the hospital, go see him. He is lying curled up in bed looking much like he did twenty years ago when I would come back from work and wake him up. He is asleep and I look at him, needles in his arm, tubes everywhere, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

I weep, suddenly, unexpectedly. It is the sight of time recaptured, to be sure, but, more, it is worry and fear and the sudden possibility of his dying. All of the physical affection I once felt returned, and I put my hand on his arm. Unlike twenty years ago, when he was still young, he now woke at once, his eyes opening, staring at me, knowing neither himself, nor me, then slowly intelligence returns. “Oh, Mr. Richie,” he said, which is what he has always called me for two decades. We talk of the illness, what the doctor has said, how happy he is he changed hospitals, the good care they are taking of him. And we gradually return to being two adults.

There were no more journals for the spring and summer of 1991. The time was spent traveling, writing the Japan Times weekly literary column, all of the occasional pieces requested, and gathering material on early foreigners in Japan for what was to become The Honorable Visitors. His oldest foreign friend in Japan, Eric Klestadt, suffered a stroke.

21 september 1991. Rain, a different kind of coolness, and something determined—autumn. Even a few days ago summer cicadas called—but in vain. Now they are silent—the only sound is the rain falling steadily, purposefully.

Fittingly elegiac sound for the continuation of this journal, sporadic as it is. But I want to continue it for a while because I do not want to see life going by unrecorded, no notice taken other than the living of it.

The early fall of 1991—the Soviets lie in ruins, Yugoslavia ruptures, China simmers, America whines, and selfish, natural, pragmatic Japan, uninhibited by any fellow feeling, opens wide its little mouth. Peaceful here, except for those who came seeking it. The Iranians silently starve in the park, the Pakistanis have learned to batten off the others, the Chinese slyly rob each other, and the Japanese, stepping over the bodies, ignore all these frightened barbarians in their midst.

And Eric’s stroke, his lying for six weeks now, unable to read or write, barely to speak, right arm and leg gone, buried alive. He who took such an interest in everything can now take interest in nothing. No books, no TV, no radio, no music. Nothing left.

His nurse tells me that he throws away all of his magazines, unopened and unread. Though I don’t want them, trying to break through his apathy I tell him he should give them to me. He stares at me in that lopsided way that stroke sufferers have. I say, slowly, deliberately, that he is selfish. I say this because I want to reach him, to go beyond those little nods and noises that so insultingly seem to say that everything is all right. He opens his mouth and gets out a sentence: “I am selfish.” He has to be. He is fighting for his sanity, locked up there with only the windows of his eyes to look out of.

I go every day and the nurses are chipper, the doctor is optimistic, and Eric lies there nodding and trying to smile. Trying to agree, no words coming. And I remember how adroit he was with language, and how proud of it, how dapper he was with words.

His mind remains clear. He knows what has happened to him.

27 december 1991. Go with Chizuko to the private showing of Teshigahara’s new film, Basara: The Princess Go. Director there, and star, Miyazawa Rie. Also the big TV star Beat Takeshi [Kitano], and the well-remembered boxer Akai Hidekazu, star of Dotsuitarunen [Knockout].

He has gotten a little beefy, but is still astonishing looking. Impressed, hence—not like me at all—I actually go and introduce myself, tell him about my titles for his film, about my taking it to San Francisco. At once, with an athletic grace, he is up and off the sofa and bowing. Delighted, has heard my name. Big, beefy hand proffered in acknowledgement of my Westerness. And, the most ingratiating smile. It is one I know from the films and the TV, and can identify. Most people in love with themselves have this captivating smile, one that illuminates inwardly and does not warm. One sees it a lot in sportsmen, particularly body builders. You sure see it in the captivating Akai. He in turn introduces the model turned actress.

Actually little Rie-chan and he have more in common than their presence here. They both posed for the same photographer. She, notoriously so. Shinoyama Kishin posed her in Santa Fe with no clothes, and the portfolio Santa Fe, at nearly $40 the copy, has sold, says the papers, five million. She is more famous now than the Prime Minister who shares her family name. But unbeknownst to her and to everyone else is that the famous photographer has also taken a portfolio of equally nude pictures of Akai.

Once this very long movie is over, everyone has to pee, and I find myself at the trough with Beat on one side of me and Akai on the other. Beat does not get a glance but my eyes still ache from trying to look down at Akai without turning my head. Glimpsed the private part. Blunt, heavy, Osaka-type.

Tell Chizuko, who smiles, then tells me of her bathroom adventure: Little Rie-chan was in tears in the lady’s room. Why? I wondered. Doesn’t know. I think it was the strain of seeing herself for the first time in her first major role. Today was her first viewing. She had not known what to expect. Since she is very good, these must have been tears of relief.

28 december 1991. Cold night, chill wind. Came home early. Made own supper. Sausage from Frank, and French toast on which I put the Maine maple syrup, gift of Marguerite Yourcenar, and treasured in the back of the fridge. She sent it before she went to hospital, just after Jerry died. That was long ago. Now what remained was all lumpy from years in the cold. And it had changed. It had made its own mother, as we used to call what formed in vinegar. But it was sweet, like honey made from very old bees. I could spread it on the French toast. Which I did, and ate it. Mother Marguerite.

29 december 1991. Thinking back over New York—Jonathan [Rauch], Chester [Biscardi], Tom [Wolfe], and Susan [Sontag]. They live in an element I do not. Theirs is the current of contemporary thought, and they swim—mostly against it—and grow sleek. I have no intellectual climate at all. I have no one with whom to speak of these concerns, no one to learn from, no one to teach. For fifty years I have lived alone in the library of my skull. Thus, I have learned to live with the immortals. But, I no longer live with people who think as I do. Consequently, I am out of touch with the climate of my times, except for what I can glean by reading the New York Review of Books, the TLS. Susan once asked me how I managed to keep up with things, presuming that I did. And I innocently answered: “Newsweek.”

31 december 1991. Dinner with Fumio. He is forty-two now and fat. But I still see the boy of twenty-two, slim. And his character has never changed. He is still honest, no cant at all. Tonight we remember the times were got drunk together: Tsugaru on New Year’s, Ishigakijima, Amami Oshima, and (worst) Kurashiki, just before he got married. We were feeling awful and drinking made it worse.

Now he is divorced and I no longer feel awful at all, have not for years. He has his friends; I have mine. We are family now. He also has a hangover this evening. Party at his bar last night. Master has to drink or customers won’t. He has to make them drink to make a living. So he has to get drunk. “Threw up three times on the way home, managed to get out of the taxi to do it.” We eat Korean food. He perks up and by the time the kimchee is gone no longer looks bleary-eyed.

Now sixty-eight years old, Richie found ever-increasing interest in his journals. They became a way not only to salvage experience, but also to assess it. As his attitude changed, so did his tone. It became more intimate and more conversational. In addition to thinking of his journals as a work in themselves and not merely a repository for future use, Richie felt he really had someone to talk to—the future readers whom he now acknowledged. The journals began to show a structure of their own. Richie was aware of this and was interested to see it emerging, unwilled as it were, from the chaos of everyday life.

21 january 1992. New Year’s Day. I wander around. Look at the new buildings. The architecture now is the “kindergarten look”—buildings made of blocks, the cute made collossal. Is this, I wonder, the new rococo? Frivolity embodied by materials tortured into miracles of ingenuity.

With Leza Lowitz, 2002.

22 january 1992. I behave in the Japanese manner. I refuse something, have to be urged, I say I am wrong when I am not. This brings smiles and nods. But I am not seen as behaving “like a Japanese.” I am seen as behaving properly.

23 january 1992. A blond workman, long yellow strands straying from under the hard hat. Face that of elderly Japanese. The fashion last year was yellow streaks in the coiffeurs of the young. Now, in the manner of fashions, it has descended the social ladder. The proletariat has taken it up. It is the latest item in workman chic. Pierced ears are next.

26 january 1992. At the porno. Villain foiled in the middle, true love over somewhat later, and still the film has several reels to go. A divertissement-like coda consisting of pure fucking, no plot. Porno is constructed like the nineteenth-century ballet, like Casse-noisette. Story over at the end of the second act, the third is all dancing—Candyland.

28 january 1992. Dinner with Paul McCarthy. He tells me of being in Thailand and meeting an older professor at university there. Talk turned to Japanese literature and then to film, then to me. “Oh, yes,” said the professor. “Donald Richie. Isn’t she Donald Keene’s wife?” Paul, surprised, said, that no, he was not. “But surely Rizzi is a woman’s name, isn’t it, and they have the same family name; I had always thought that they were related.” Paul explained, but the professor was not convinced.

30 january 1992. Out with Leza [Lowitz] who now teaches at Disney. Told me a curious story about Mickey Mouse. Elsewhere he has four fingers. Apparently easier to draw that way. In Japan, however, four fingers is the common pejorative gesture for the burakumin, the proscribed class. Four fingers shown in derision refers to the four legs of a beast. With the Burakumin League now so litigious, they are taking no chances. In Japan the Mickey and Minnie logos are redrawn.

On the way back in the subway, I suddenly realized that being Japanese must be like being a teenager in an unusually repressive high school. Adolescents are always at the mercy of every fad—the sudden difference rendered identical in that everyone must at once evidence it; the single difference at once branding the person as hopelessly different. The truly different here in Japan are subject to all of the petty molestations common to high schools everywhere: banished, punished, and bullied.

Many Japanese are like high school students: unsure of self, settling for the group every time. And knowledge becomes knowing how to order the proper cherry coke at the single drugstore that is in fashion.

31 january 1992. The Donald Richie Commemorative Collection of Stringed Chamber Music continues to grow—now nine shelves of CDs, lots of LPs, and as many scores of the music as I can find. The catalogue is a dozen pages long now. I would never allow myself anything this expensive. Therefore it is going to a worthy cause, Tokushima University. Thus, I can enjoy it and not feel bad. It is really for someone else, all those anonymous, impoverished chamber music lovers I envision. It also means that I have to buy music I don’t like—the Henze Quartets for example—since I have to be complete.

Today, however, I get something I do like: a Schnittke Trio. Got it in a small and specialized shop in Shibuya, where I had gone to practice the piano at the Kawaii showroom for my performance next week, accompanying He Who Gets Slapped. I have decided on a Schnittke-like score, dissident mazurkas interspersed with inane waltzes and galops, and lots of padding when Lon Chaney is working up his grand theory. But like everything else in Tokyo, the enormous Kawaii practice room complex is full. I can hear Für Elise tinkling in canon, and the “Moonlight” peddling away into the distance. Will return later.

1 february 1992. Woke up at six to a strange light. Usually still gray outside. Now it was white, a pure whiteness as though all my windows had shoji paper. I got up and looked out. All white. It had snowed during the night and now Tokyo was covered. I might have known it was snow as I lay in my warm futon and listened to the quiet. Snow blankets all sounds. I could have been in the distant mountains.

2 february 1992. There was a strong earthquake this morning at four. The jolts woke me and I scampered to the door to prop it open, for it is a metal door that would jam, and then would come the fire.

As I opened the door, there was the peaceful starry night scene, all the snow before me and then, another large jolt. As I watched, all the snow fell—off the roofs, off the trees, off the overhead wires—pulled down in a second by the shuddering ground.

It was like the transformation in the danmari in the Kabuki. Only there the dark curtain drops to reveal the light. Here the white dropped to reveal the black. I savored this wonderful spectacle and was glad to have been awakened to see it. Then back to bed, asleep in five minutes, not at all frightened—too entranced by the extraordinary sight.

3 february 1992. Letter from Darrell Davis, who writes that he finds me “. . . decidedly literary . . . drawn to subtlety and completeness of characterization—of people, places, atmosphere—which seems to me a primarily literary pursuit. Is your continuing fascination with things Japanese a function of the incorrigible textuality of Japanese culture?” If so, this would explain, he thinks, “. . . the metaphorical direction your thinking about the culture seems to have taken—closer now to Barthes and to Burch.”

Maybe. “Literature,” I replied, “has been for me the screen through which I view the world. It began very young when I discovered the public library and realized that I could control my world though the word. Reading was one way. Writing was even better. But,” I continued, “in Japan I never learned to read or write. Hence all signifiers and no signified, just like Barthes.” And this means “control without being controlled.”

I still believe this. When you learn kanji you enter into a great mind-set: Things have only one meaning from then on—the assigned one. My spoken Japanese is all right, but since I can’t really read, it is still fluid, has not been defined by reading and writing, so I do not have to believe in it. My control is there, but only in English.

Darrell also says that he cannot imagine my feeling “at home” in Japan because, “. . . it is hard to imagine sustaining the kind of detachment necessary to write, the kind of reflective commentary you do when you’re at home.” Maybe, but then I find anyone who is “at home” in this universe a person seriously deluded. I would hate to be at home. But I do sometimes now think of myself as a bridge. But what kind? Suspension? Single span? Draw? Arch?

4 february 1992. Am snappy with the service. At Wendy’s the waitress is not paying attention to me, stares at the ceiling, looks around, peers into the kitchen. But, I am her customer, he to whom she owes her very job. I am cold as ice when I finally capture her attention. My eyes speak stern volumes. My tone could freeze. She stares. Does not comprehend, but is hurt. I am mollified, having caused deserved pain. But I do not relent. I keep it up until my hamburger is in hand, change grabbed. Only then do I permit myself a moué and turn away.

Turn away to look at myself. Why did I do that? How could I behave that way? And then, there swims before me another pair of eyes, light blue, cold, outraged. My mother! When she is with the help or on the telephone talking to a reluctant tradesperson. My mother, ordering the service about. That was whom I turned into. I bite into my Wendy, pensive. I begin to believe in genes.

The anima. Am I still carrying her around with me? It is undignified for a man going on sixty-eight to still act like the worst in his mother. It is unnatural. Or is it? Maybe everyone does this and either does not notice or is too ashamed to admit it.

6 february 1992. Invective accelerating. The U.S. and Japan cannot say bad enough things about each other. Bad blood in the family of nations. Battling siblings. Easy enough to understand, though nonetheless deplorable. The U.S. slipping, lost its great supporting enemy in the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It needs another one, quick. Japan, slithering out of control, all cool heads hot in this drive to greed, displays an enormous insensitivity to others, and its own real concern for itself. America, angry, finds Japan an ingrate after all we did for it, and Japan, tired of being the idiot younger brother, makes remarks about the American lack of work ethic. All of this is easy to understand. What is not remarked upon is that the bickering is good for the economy of both countries. Just as wartime makes money, so do unfriendly relations. I don’t think anyone really believes in this animosity except the stupid. But there are so many.

12 february 1992. A Ginza gentleman’s club, the last one. It is immaculately prewar. The paneling is light oak and the floor is parquet. The style is late art deco, with Aztec lines and a Grand Rapids finish. The small windows are leaded in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner, lozenges of gray and yellow. I look at walls, and there it is—a reproduction of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak, one androgynous ephebe leaning over another, against sun struck mountains out of The Arabian Nights—the same as that which hung over our Ohio piano and over which wandered my infant eyes, wondering at the immensity and beauty of the world.

13 february 1992. The sound of a temple bell. One does not hear the strike. Rather, the sound starts small and then rapidly builds, a soft explosion. The note is like some animal opening its mouth wide, the brazen roar afterward emerging.

14 february 1992. At the game center. Boy and girl playing Cop Killer, shooting electrical impulses at uniformed cartoon figures, who splatter or not. Two controls. He is shooting most of the cops, but she pulls her trigger now and again and remembers to smile when he turns to look at her. I see he has a package of chocolate on his lap. It is St. Valentine’s Day. She has given him the chocolate, as is customary, and he has taken her to the only entertainment he knows anything about—video games. She stifles a yawn when he is not looking. But he rarely looks at her. He is interested in the game. Pow! Wow! Zap!

19 february 1992. Japan-bashing by America has begun to make slight ripples here. I find myself regarded on the train platform or in the subway car. Just regarded, assessed. I try to look European.

As this schism grows I am aware of other cracks. Ones I have myself climbed into. Smoking, for example. Since stopping I have become militant, a born-againer. I cannot “stand” to see people smoking where they “ought not.” And so I march right up and tell them. And what a full, warm feeling I experience when I identify myself as a member of the “right” side. I feel for a moment almost a hate. It is warming, like a flame. This is what bashers must feel all the time—on either side. And they get hooked on their highs. Prejudice is addiction.

24 february 1992. The shinchoge is blooming in the cold. Spiked little blossoms of lavender and mauve, and giving the scent of summer right in the middle of winter. A lush, strong, tropical perfume—fleshy, like gardenia or magnolia—wafting from the small flowers, smelling of hot nights on these cold days.

Not a popular plant in Japan, however. The reason is that it was planted around latrines to temper the stench. The reputation lingers no matter how nice the smell. I had a plant in the house once. My cleaning lady’s eyebrows arched. This was not done.

25 february 1992. Dinner with [Numata] Makiyo. Back here for dessert and coffee, he asked to see the pictures I had taken of him on our various trips—in Europe, in America, and him at university in Hawaii. He is now thirty and had, I thought, done well. He has his own company, has branches abroad, is married, and is taking care of his ailing parents. Success.

Recently, to be sure, with the collapse of Japan’s inflated land prices I thought that as a developer he might be experiencing a slight recession. But I was not prepared for his suddenly telling me, in that earnest and schoolboy fashion of his, about a property in the desert outside Los Angeles that he has bought and is now making payments on.

Finally I understood that, in the oblique manner that has always been his, he was offering it as collateral. Collateral for what, and to whom? Well, to me. He needed a million yen before the end of the week.

This was surprising. I had not known things were so bad for him because he had never told me. I did not want the collateral, I said, but I would transfer the amount to his account tomorrow morning. One millon yen is a lot of money—eight thousand dollars. He promised to pay it all back by the end of June. Then I told him how surprised I was, and gently chided him for not letting me know the true state of his affairs. Gentle though I was, this push was enough.

He suddenly broke into tears—the first in the eight years of our friendship. The strong Makiyo cried like a man, choking back the sobs, face awash. Finally he said, “I wanted so much to succeed.” I knew that was so. For as long as I have known him, it has been winning the marathon, and believing that if you throw yourself into it you will get it, whatever it is. “My Way” is his favorite song. And now, in front of me, the person who knows him best, he must admit failure. I told him what one tells people—the truth: One failure is not for a lifetime; everyone fails at something.

After a time the sobs stopped. He wiped his face and smiled ruefully at himself as though he were his own little brother. I gave him more Kleenex. He understood me, and my reasons. I could no longer continue to embarrass him by witnessing his tears—so in the most open and friendly fashion I told him to get out. Tomorrow I will go to the bank, and at the same time will now see my friend as an allegorical figure. Makiyo—Financially Over-Extended Japan.

26 february 1992. Coming back from visiting Eric in the hospital I pass again the small house atop an embankment: low tile roof, paper windows behind which a lamp is shining, bamboo fence, and a plum tree in blossom. The simplicity, the beauty, the comfort. When all houses looked like this, I did not notice. Now this is one of the few left.

In the neighborhood, two like it are already gone. In their places, correct concrete boxes with metal roofs and double-paned windows, and that Tinker­toy look called postmodern. I know why too. Back then, tile and bamboo and paper were least expensive and came in standardized units. Now concrete and plastic do.

In the subway coming home I observe the young. Eyes deep in manga, ears surrendered to Walkman. They try to insulate themselves. I see them making their bulky hamburger-fed bodies small, the girls particularly conscious of their size, trying to forget it by banding conspicuously together and talking “boy” language.

Boys are solitary, wear black, hide in the corners. Neither sex has any use for the elderly staring foreigner. Nor should they. He can do nothing for them. They need nothing from him. And I remember when just such a look of mine could bring a smile. Back then they were happy to have foreigners talk to them. Now the foreigners are happy if they can talk to the youngsters.

21 march 1992. Reading Cyril Connolly. He says: “It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates, for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.” For him expatriation is all about escape. “It gives them a breathing space in which to free themselves from commercialism, family ties, racial ties.” OK, but expatriation is more than that. It is an embracing, a reaching out, a moving into as well as a moving away from. He seems to think so too—eventually.

Henry James, his example, “. . . was not an expatriate in so far as he repatriated himself as an Englishman.” Yes, but there seems to be another position, which Connolly ignores. Mine. I am at home in Japan precisely because I am an alien body. I am no longer a member over there, and cannot become a member over here—this defines my perfectly satisfactory position. One does not have to be a member of something.

23 march 1992. Fumio and Masudo come to Eric’s long-empty house to help me. They move his books, some three thousand of them, from upstairs to down, so he can stagger in from the hospital and pick out those he wants to take with him to Melbourne. I will catalogue the pictures; we have already selected his clothes. And everything else must somehow to be gotten rid of. It is like the last reel of Citizen Kane—all of those belongings. But Kane was dead and Eric is not. He must sit here and look at the ruins himself.

He cannot but think of better times—of the day he bought that book, or the week he read it. Things still have voices. They will speak to him. I can see him struggling not to feel. Through the partial paralysis pain still reaches. I cannot bear to look.

24 march 1992. The Kawakita Memorial Film Institute prize is given to [cinematographer] Miyagawa Kazuo, standing there on the podium, hands folded, smiling, eighty-four. I know his age because Madame Kawakita, sounding slightly scandalized, said, “Why he’s just as old as I am.” Mifune Toshiro, looking severe and sage, told me that he was seventy-two. Said it with an air of surprise and that kind of ironic seriousness that is so much a part of him and that has never appeared on the screen. Polite as always, he then remembered that some years ago he had promised to come to something or other I was organizing and then couldn’t. I had forgotten all about it, but he hadn’t.

Kurosawa, now eighty-one, told me about his new film. Does not have a proper title. “First time that ever happened.” Doesn’t like the working title, Madadayo, nor do I. I remind him that the phrase was used by Ozu in a film. He nods. One more count against it. Wanted to call it Hide and Seek, but Daiei doesn’t like that. Shakes his head, smiles.

25 march 1992. Perhaps more than an American high school, Japan is like an English public school. You are supposed to learn, excel, and win athletic distinctions—not for yourself, but for the house and for the country, for being Japanese. First on the field, all for the sake of your school. And then, the emptiness when you graduate.

31 march 1992. Warm, sunny day, and the cherry blossoms are out. Ueno Park is covered with them, clouds of pink—like a Kano screen. The sakura are in full bloom. And how could a country which looks like this every year be anything but artificial?

More than usual this year, I also feel strongly what poets have called the “menace” of these blooms. There is a tradition that finds them sinister—madness in the blossoms, with long-haired and crazy maidens cavorting under burdened branches. Or, as Mishima used to say, in a sinister way quoting some minor master, homosexuality (nanshoku ) is a “. . . wolf asleep under the blossoming sakura.”

A reason for my ambivalence toward this year’s blossom is that I remember Eric. One spring we were walking around Yanaka, and found in some temple courtyard a perfect sakura in full bloom. I have looked for it again and again in the labyrinth of that district, but never have found it. And now because Eric is mute and halt, and being carted off to Australia next Monday, I find cherry blossoms sinister.

1 april 1992. Woken at six this morning by hovering helicopters battering the air above me. Peered out. High up, two of them, stationary. What could it be—disaster? riot? coup d’état? They hung around all morning, puttering in the sky, making an enormous racket. Finally I discovered what it was: the cherry blossoms. They were up there taking pictures for the press, showing the extent of the quiet blossoming, making life below hideous so that they could present tranquil beauty on the covers of rag and mag.

2 april 1992. Thoughts on aging. It is not the thinning hair, the spreading wrinkles, the occasional misstep, or the misplaced word that bothers me. It is the creeping conservatism. I find myself agreeing with a majority opinion and am surprised to discover that emotionally I am with the masses, as I have not been since a child.

This seems to me craven. I grow afraid for self and even for property. The elderly, if they are not careful, turn bourgeois, anxious for their holdings. With this fear comes an inclination not only to be disagreeable, but also to collect injustices. All feelers out, I make up my mind about people in the street and idly criticize them—making it all up, of course.

When I am in temporary power, however, I am ruthless. How dreadful I could be if I did not watch myself. So cold, preemptory, for no reason but a chill center and fear for self. This is what growing old does, or does for me. It makes me afraid. I have never, all through my life, been far distant from that emotion, but now it moves closer, as close as it was in childhood. I must be vigilant and refuse it entry.

In the evening a party, sort of, for Eric. His expansive elder brother, Albert—carrying him off to the antipodes on Monday—was there, and the suave Sawada [Ichiro] in full kimono, and Frank and Chizuko. Only once did Eric look at me and slowly shake his head. The hopelessness of his awful life from now on. It was a moment of real communication. Then he returned to apathy.

4 april 1992. The wedding of [Numata] Shinsaku, Makiyo’s younger brother. It was held at the new Meguro Gajoen, a vast wedding palace, on the outside all chrome-period modern Japan. A fine example of the wedding industry.

The reception and dinner takes place in an enormous room, paneled in silk, chairs and tables faux Louis XV; hanging above all of this is lighting and sound equipment as in a recording studio: weddings as show biz.

Then the lights lower and John Williams is heard on the sound track; the spotlights flash on, and the voice of the compère asks us to give the couple a big hand as the portals open, and there stand the happy pair, he in hakama, she in wedding kimono, wig, and face painted white.

There are other touches of tradition. The compère chats throughout, in Japanese but the tone is that of Ralph Edwards telling you that This Is Your Life. Everything else is twenty-first century. No Wagner, no Mendelssohn, just E.T. And when the knife is inserted into the slit of the ten-foot high inedible plastic mock-up of a cake, a device is triggered that envelops both confection and couple in clouds of dry ice. The cut cake is wheeled off. At the end it will reappear, all wrapped, one piece for each guest. Or some cake will. It is always a different cake.

A toast next, champagne, then speeches from his side, speeches from hers, then a pause while the food is expertly dished about by the liveried waiters. The menu is “international”—Chinese/French with Japanese additions. Everyone holds back, as is proper until the sushi comes, and then something more basic than manners appears. In the scramble I end up with just one piece of squid because I was too polite.

The only foreigner there, I did not feel I ought to dive in like everyone else. For despite the international intentions, I was still something of an unknown quantity. People peered and then turned away. This was because they feared that I would utter something in a foreign tongue and embarrass them when they were not able to respond. Knowing this, I asked in Japanese a simple question about the printed menu (“What is that kanji?”) and everyone was much relieved.

The couple returns—the groom in a white satin suit with a frilled shirt, looking like Xavier Cugat, and the bride in flamecolored silk with fan and tiara. I am at the mike because I am to lead off the lighter part of the festivities, supposed to dilute the seriousness of the prior speeches. So I begin by being skillfully insulting—talk about the groom’s failed attempts to learn English, always a favorite topic. The crowd is receptive and pleased that I seem to understand my role. I am the Kyogen, an interlude during the Noh-like solemnities of this major Japanese ritual.

After me comes dessert (expensive melon, assorted petits fours) and more fun speeches about how awful the lovable pair is. Then songs and high jinks as the drinks (Chinese schnapps, hot sake, iced beer, whiskey, and sloe gin) take effect. My job done, I change tables, invited to the “family” table by Makiyo’s parents, who are now relieved at having married off their last son. Makiyo’s father is just like Makiyo will be when he is that age (two years younger than I am), and we share a cup or two while Makiyo looks benignly on at the getting-together of his two fathers.

I wondered if my loan might have paid a tiny fraction of this doubtless enormous bill. I said nothing. But Makiyo, with that way of his, understood, took me to one side, and let me know that the bride’s side had paid for it all. And then I realized that poor Shinsaku had gone yoshi. This meant he had been adopted into his wife’s family, was no longer on his own family register. It also meant that he was at the mercy of his in-laws. They wanted a child to continue the line and that was what he was there for—to make it.

I look at the groom, young, handsome, smiling, flushed with a drink or two, and wonder if he knows.

7 april 1992. In the evening I give a dinner for Tani, my oldest friend, now fat and rich and with four children, each by a different mother. It is difficult to see under all that weight, all those years, the poor, bright boy I once loved. I invited also Holloway and Michio. These three have not seen each other for three decades or so, when we all went to Nagano together, when Tani was still a student.

Now again we meet. They look at each other and observe the ravages of time, but before long they are remembering things and the years are falling away. “Remember that smoked trout? Remember when you told off the hotel lady because she wouldn’t let Donald play the piano? Remember in the bath when Tani invented this soap with a picture of a naked lady in it, to make dirty students want to wash more?” The past flowed back and bathed us all.

And, too late, I remembered that alcohol and Tani do not agree. He became noisy in his company-president kind of way, opened his pants and pulled up his shirt to show off his scar, a stomach operation for ulcers—he had worried that much making his millions. Also, since this is the way men in his world act when together, he began joking about the host—complaining about me all of these years, said I never once bought him anything but a suit and he still had it, he took that good care of it. Also that Holloway and Michio are always together. This was a good thing. Me, I always had to have someone new. Not that the new ones are very much. Fumio runs a bar. Makiyo—well it takes someone smarter than him to be a good developer. And even a Korean—nice guy but a Korean!

All of this is tiresome and I parry it as best I can, realizing at the same time that he is still jealous without knowing it, and that also all those early years in my shadow (I had the money then, he didn’t) made him resent me. It had never before come out because we had never been among old acquaintances with whom he could “joke” in this manner. Also he had never drunk this much with me before.

I know how he feels, but my idea of regard and of good manners is different from his. The ordinary Western idea of propriety is much more strict than the Japanese. I parry and turn pleasantly sarcastic so that my guests can have a good time. So they apparently do. At the end, Holloway says, quite innocently, “That Tani—still the life of the party. . . .”

11 may 1992. The elegiac thoughts occasioned by Dae-Yung’s going back home to Korea always linger. Today I walk by the pond in the setting sun, and have in the warm spring air autumnal thoughts.

I remember walking by the little lake in Faurot Park in Lima some fifty years ago, wondering what to do with my life. Eighteen, soon out of high school, and all I had really decided was that I would not stay in a place where I had to live only for how much money I could make, and what I could buy. This was how I saw materialistic wartime 1942 America.

And I did something about it. I left and eventually came to this poor, defeated island, where it was spirit that counted and not money because no one had any, and any money (what there was of it) was put in white paper before being paid over—that is how dirty it was. And it is here that I have remained, more or less happy.

And now, I look around. In fifty years it has changed: materialistic, peacetime Japan, 1992, where all that counts is how much you make, and what you can buy. I read Main Street and Babbitt back then and determined never to stay. It is now full circle: the Japanese are new-rich Babbits in the true American mold, and Tokyo is the new Main Street.

12 may 1992. In Japan, I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning. Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb.

E. M. Forster used to say, “. . . only connect . . .” and it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering, and concluding.

Maybe in another country the resemblances to where one came from would be strong enough that such continual regard would not be necessary and would not be rewarding. But Japan, which now so seems to resemble the worst of the land I came from, is actually so different that none of my habits protect, none of my prior assumptions are valid.

Denied, fortunate foreigner, the tepid if comfortable bath which is daily life back “home,” he cannot sink back and let the music flow over, mindless, transparent; he must listen, score in hand.

I know the difference well. It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticizing, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is the more comfortable; the latter is better.

I like this life of never being able to take my life for granted. The Japanese connect—in Forster’s sense—less than any other people I know. Lafcadio Hearn once wrote Chamberlain about the nonspeculative quality of most Japanese—though he meant it as a compliment. And it is true that so many are so submerged in daily routines, so anesthetized by habit and agreed upon opinion, that they rarely stick their noses above the surface. When people observe that some Japanese have no fellow feeling, this it what they mean. Closed, boxed-in lives, taking just everything for granted. Naruhodo, the world.

Except those who do not. Fumio: always seeing the edge between the apparent and the real. And all the women I have known, kept alert by the lives they are forced to lead. Women are alive, vibrating, connecting. These are those I love and celebrate, and myself never take for granted.

13 may 1992. In the train I look at my fellow passengers. The public Japanese now has an indrawn look. Like an indrawn breath, it means caution, reserve, care, and fear. To be sure, anyone staring about at the rate I do would everywhere encounter this kind of retreat. Still, some people (young usually) behave that way with each other too. Gazes do not meet, but slide away, glances rolling over and out.

It did not used to be that way. People were openly curious, frankly stared, and if you smiled they did too. Not now. You smile and they turn away, fearful that this is prelude to some unwanted intimacy. I can hear their mothers indoctrinating them, over and over again. Abunai comes the matronly tone. What a loss. Is it always lost in First World countries? Like the U.S.A? Is it only to be found in the Third—like friendly Thailand? Is civilization really a plague? Is Rousseau right?

16 may 1992. Life in Japan, cut off, in exile. This is how other people see it. I am asked how I keep up with contemporary thought. I cannot seriously answer, never having thought of such a question. And I see why. Here, undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal. My world does not change—and the best, in Arnold’s sense, is what I look at, listen to. Film for me is Bresson; art is Morandi. So I may be cut off, but I am always turned on.

19 may 1992. Went to the American Center Library to look up what they have on Jack Kerouac. A large, empty room filled with viewers and TV buzz and persons in frameless glasses, who look up and ask, “Who? Never heard of him. Will you please use our deck?” One pointed to a keyboard. I did not know how to use it. It was a computer of some sort. With ill grace and an unbelieving expression she pecked out after again asking, K/E/R/O/A/C. Pushed a button. Machine clicked. Nothing.

“We have nothing,” she said. “You do not seem to have any books at all,” I mildly remarked. “Would you care to see our magazine file?” “Can you really see it, or do you conjure that up too from buttons?” I asked, now revealing nastiness. She narrowed her eyes in irritation. “Are you truly a library?” I pursued. “Yes, we call ourselves a library,” she said. “You are wrong,” I said. “You are a database.”

I do not know what a database is, but my chagrin and rage at finding out what had happened to what was once a perfectly good library was not immediately to be denied. Storming out was OK, but it still left me with my Kerouac problem. One which became even more complicated when I returned home and discovered that I had spelled the writer’s name wrong. There is a U in Kerouac which I had left out. The computer, not being able to make allowances, could not find him, even if he was there, lying in the dark. Shall I go back? I think not.

22 may 1992. In the train going to Kyoto I meditate upon my former trips to the old capital. Almost half a century of them, from the eight hours of sleeping car at the beginning to the two and a half hours of bullet express right now. Over the years I have looked from the window. These used to open and the train stopped and I would buy local food and drink from farmer vendors. Now they are sealed shut, the vendors are gone, and in any event we stop only in Nagoya.

Just past Mishima is a culvert. Now it holds a bridge, pink, with a post-modern pergola on one side, part of a new golf course. But once, four decades ago, the train slowed down and I looked out of the open window and there in that small, wild gorge was a boy washing a horse in the stream. The animal was stamping in the water and the boy had taken off his clothes so he would not get them wet. The animal and the human, both naked, both beautiful and shining in the sun, and the train slowed down as though to show me this. I watched for the culvert this time. It is by in a flash, and I catch only the tiny trickle of water under the ridiculous pink bridge, but I remember and hold the vision of the boy and his horse.

Soon we are going past Fuji, soaring after the rains. And no one looks up from book or magazine, no, “Oh, look, Fuji!” Not even a child to crane a neck as this magnificent mountain moves majestically across the view. In all my trips before there has been someone, even if only a foreigner, to mark this passage with a bit of attention. Today, nothing. Fuji, like the bullet train itself, like Japan, like life itself has become a commonplace.

23 may 1992. Travel stirs. On the way back from Kyoto I thought of Tani and remembered his wedding, and with it came the smell of fresh water, the taste of sake, and into view slid the memory of his first wedding, in the country with his tough friends. It came in a shape like a small boat. All I needed do was to look up what I had written, and then the full memory sailed past.

25 may 1992. Rainy, clouds lined up, waiting turns, the drip of the broken gutter on the tin roof beneath my window. It plays its primitive tune over and over. The rain hangs like a curtain and a wet spider shelters under the ledge. Time to board the past and steam into the distance, to close my journal.

Closing and opening the journal became more frequent in these years—and there are many more relatively untouched pages. At the same time, completely untouched pages are probably fewer, since Richie had begun culling them in a different fashion. He told his editor that he thought their value was only in the picture of Japan they offered, and of himself looking at Japan. Consequently he began removing whole passages. These he kept separate. Thus, Richie’s extant journals include several others in addition to this one. There are those written in New York (1949–53), the journals he kept while being analyzed, The Persian Diaries (devoted to the Iranians’ plight in Tokyo), the Journals—Exclusions, and (a later addition) a file titled Vita Sexualis.

1 july 1992. In Ueno I see a middle-aged man, Japanese, clad only in his underpants and sandals. This seems to me sensible, one of the common forms of summer dress. He is, however, drunk—weaves, mumbles. He is also seen by a policeman, sweltering in his gray uniform, who stops him, says something, then pushes him. The nearly naked man strikes back, and two more police appear since their koban is right there, on the park corner.

Not so drunk as to ignore danger the man flees, and is pursued and stopped in the middle of the street, in front of a suddenly halted truck. There he is thrown to the ground, and the three cops pull his arms behind his back. But he seems the stronger, or at least the more assertive. He flings them off. By now a crowd has gathered—impassive citizens, jeering Iranians, and myself. The three police blow their whistles to summon help. Two patrol cars and ten policemen come. These struggle in the street, hats falling off, perspiring, trying to look authoritative, but unable to contain one smallish nude man. They produce a straight jacket, but do not know how to put it on while the man yells and lashes out. He hits one cop in the groin with his foot and the Iranians cheer while the cop rolls on the ground. Finally, however, force prevails. The culprit is trussed up, put into a body bag, the top (in this heat) is drawn shut, and he is lugged into the waiting patrol car. The Iranians ironically applaud. The Keystone Kops try to look fierce. And I wonder why they did this. The man was no menace. He was merely drunk and naked and going about his life. But he put up a good fight.

3 july 1992. Dinner with Makiyo. As I drag out more reluctant information from him, I find things much worse than I had thought. From its affluent height of several years back, his Ace Corporation has fallen low indeed. The bubble has burst. Anyone in the development business is out of a job. I now learn that he and his wife are camping out in their former apartment, staying rent-free until it is bought by someone else, and have already sold off their belongings. They just have their bedding and their clothes. The fine office is gone too. He now rents a corner of someone else’s. We talk of his future. He is convinced he can make it, can get by, can return my money in another three months.

5 july 1992. Several encounters. At the hospital, getting my angina medicine, I have coffee at the single non-smoking table in the cafeteria. I asked the waiter for coffee, iced, no sugar. This they cannot do because, he says, they put sugar in when they make it. “And what do your diabetic patients do?” I ask. “They order iced tea,” he says.

An older Japanese woman looks at me, seated opposite, and asks, “Do you have diabetes?” I say no and she laughs. Then we talk about the singularity of sugar in the hospital cafeteria at all, and smoking allowed at all tables but ours. She says to stop it you would need only one person to take responsibility. Just one. But, she concludes, you won’t find this in Japan nowadays. I find that I remember Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” This I attempt to translate. Much taken with it, she writes it down on her paper napkin.

Later, on the subway, there would be a seat if the man would only move over. He has half a seat on either side. I excuse myself politely but he does not budge. Then I see why. The seat is made of stripes of varied color. He is securely in one such. This he thinks is a seat. His seat. It is marked like a seat. If the others leave space and are sloppy that is their concern. Then when he is doing something properly, according to the rules, this foreigner comes in and asks him to move, threatening the symmetry of the universe.

This evening in the park, high school kids are raising a rumpus, setting off fireworks right next to the Kenei Kiyomizudera temple, which has big no-smoking, no-bonfire, no-naked-flame signs next to it. A man in his pajamas emerges followed by a lady in a housecoat. “Make them go away,” she says. At first I think she means the idle, quiet Iranians lounging about, but she doesn’t. Looks at me and I say, “Those kids?” “Yes.” Then she says, “We called the patrol car half an hour ago. They never come.” The final rocket and the whooping kids leave. Ten minutes later the lazy patrol car pulls up. “What’s the commotion?” it wants to know. “What was the commotion,” she corrects and then lectures the sheepish patrolmen. After they tip their caps and leave she comes back. “That’s our tax money,” she says pleasantly.

“Do you live in that house here, right here in the park?” I ask. “Yes, that’s us.” “I’m jealous,” I say, “It must be wonderful to live here in the park.” “No, it is not,” she says. “One good thing though. These Iranians usually keep the noisy kids out.”

18 july 1992. Shibuya, never my favorite part of the city, has now, like Roppongi or Harajuku, become positively irritating. This is because it is fatuous. Filled with the chinless young in their finery, it is all about people shopping and being seen. The goods are junk but expensive, the customers are teenaged, rich, and bored. The mothers and fathers of the Japan to come. Cannot find what I want amid all the fashion. I want a sensible desk.

29 august 1992. Tamasaburo invited me to his solo dance recital at the Saison Theater. Four dances, and an almost equal amount of time taken up by the three intermissions. Such waste of time is luxurious—like those glossy pages made up mainly of white margins, or those vacant nouvelle-cuisine plates containing one potato, seven peas, a bit of fish, and lots of porcelain.

The longer number is a new one, The Princess Yang-Kuei-fei, which was very Parco-style—since Parco-Seibu-Saison [department store chain] owns the theater: lots of beige on beige, with pair after pair of tan chiffon curtains which grandly open one set after another, like the picture window in a model home, but with rivulets of dry ice surging across the parquet. Hidden behind the last, barely visible under the layers, stands the princess herself. When revealed, Tamasaburo is all Chinese, with a porcelain white face and hands, peach at the edges, pink around the eyes.

I admire the way that he has incorporated Chinese dance into this Japanese syntax: the sudden stances, the accusing look, and the masculine turn of the neck that Chinese impersonators cultivate. He had observed this well: there was nothing simpering about this Yang-Kuei-fei.

Afterward I went to the dressing room. He was still in make-up, and seen up close rather alarming, all whitewash and red paint. I was reminded of the ruffled Velasquez at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: From a distance that ruff is the finest tulle, one can even see the threads. Up close, it is Francis Bacon, all smeared whites, finger painting.

He was busy smearing lotion on himself, but wiped his hands, smiled, and handed me a big package. I responded with a wrapped, framed canvas. He was giving me photos of his former boxer friend, and I was giving him a picture I painted some years ago called The Boxer and His Opponent. One champ for another.

I left him scraping off the make-up and noticed that he wore his towel tight under his armpits, hiding his breasts, just as though he had any.

4 september 1992. Big official party for the ASEAN Festival at the Hilton, paid for by the Tokyo City Government. At the Hilton because it is just next door to the city offices. Also because the food is good. A spread: smoked salmon, steak tartare, and beef Wellington.

There, drinking rather than eating, was Edward G. Seidensticker. He had just arrived. “Why is it,” he wanted to know, “that when one is older the days seem to go by so much faster?” Then, to answer his own question, “It is because one is oneself so much slower.” He is then whisked off by three city officials, and in turn their deep talk is interrupted by the entrance of the Awa Odori dancers, who snake about the room deafening us all with drums and bells.

When Ed returns, I lead him to the beef where, chewing, he asks, “Why is it that just when things get truly noisy, city officials always take one aside for deep discussions? This one was about whether Japan is a hand-society or a foot-society.”

As the dancers cavorted among the tables, the pretty kimonoed girls in attendance produced tenugui and tried to place them around the guests’ necks. This was to indicate that one should join the rout. A number did. I saw ambassadors waving their hands and smiling foolishly. Not us, however. Ed simply refused.

I took refuge with Robin Berrington, the American cultural attaché. “Foreigners like this,” he said with a smile. “That, at least, is the general assumption.” Then we remarked that everything had been especially Japanese this evening—including not one, but two Fuji Musume, and an exhibition of mochi pounding on top of that. It was perhaps an ethnic return for ethnic entertainment, since the other ASEAN people from Indonesia, Malaysia, etc., had brought all of their things over for the festival. But was it not also “something for our little brown brothers?” We remarked on the absence of little brown brothers at the festivity. Perhaps they were having another party, separate but equal. We are suspicious of governments digging into culture.

Going home through the heat I remark upon the number of fans in hands. In the subway I read in the evening paper that sales for hand fans is over double what it was last year. A new ethnic interest, I wonder. Or just the heat.

6 september 1992. In the subway I see a young couple in each other’s arms, willing victims to their glands. And I experience impatience with them. Then, realizing this, I begin to wonder why. I could just as logically experience pleasure at the sight. Why did I choose to condemn these two? Then, something in the position of his arm and her head made me realize that I was associating them with the use of cordless telephones in public places. My objections were not moralistic. They were ethical. They were based on the irritation that public flaunting and other ostentations always ought call forth and with me invariably do.

7 september 1992. I am in the downstairs theater; the contortions I have already seen are continuing on the screen. The scene is where she, to taunt her husband, tangos with the other woman before beginning her short-term lesbian affair, a sequence I already know.

The tango is over and the band is playing the final reprise. I remember the scene because in back of the accordion player, a door suddenly opens. Some accident, probably, and on low budget soft-core you don’t retake. I watched this door opening and wondered what was in the room next door, but it was too dark to see. Now I will watch the door opening again. But it does not. The accordionist smiles as always, fingers flying, and the door behind him remains shut. But I had seen it open. What has happened?

A dream. It means what it means, but what else does it say? I know about the attractions of a safe danger, and I know about the pull of power—to buy from people something with which they might not otherwise willingly part. But what is in the other room?

8 september 1992. In the evening Tamasaburo over, bringing sushi for our supper. [A shorter version of this meeting occurs in Public People, Private People.] Wants to talk and so I learn a lot about his early life, about his feelings for his adopted father, about the replacements he has discovered since, and about how awful Utaemon is to just everyone, not just him. He also wants to listen. And so we have a real discussion about love and about life.

We talk about tastes. Since we share one, we wonder about this, what it means. He has accounted for it in his father feelings. Father-complex is the term he uses, there being such in Japanese. I say that being an onnagata anyway, it is not surprising that such masculinity is preferred. No, he says, the liking came first and being a female impersonator second.

I mentioned that our preferences do, however, imply not only some distaste for oneself but also the need for a degree of power. This is a new idea to him. His eyes widen. Power? “Yes,” I say, “successfully seducing—all seduction is about power.”

“But, I don’t like gays,” he says, considering, “not to sleep with certainly; they are too much like me.” “Precisely,” I say, “It is unnatural. Love is opposites, not similarities. Men and women are opposites, and in a way gays and straights are opposites too. But gays and gays . . . ?” “Unnatural,” he says with a laugh.

18 september 1992. Just back from Fukuoka, I miss Richard Howard and Anne Hollander, both of whom I wanted to see in Tokyo. They went to Kyoto by train as I flew over them on my way back to the capital. Talked to Howard on the phone. He is enjoying Japan and is much taken by the kindness but (lowering his voice) confesses also to being taken aback in that the Japanese do not know how to comport themselves as intellectuals.

This he discovered in his discourses here. Japanese on the panel did not discuss. They agreed and then, irrelevantly, gave their opinions. Nothing was built, nothing was concluded, and everything was at random. I agree, having noticed this often enough before, having heard Susan Sontag, another intellectual, complain of just this. How can I explain that there is another discourse other than the rational? How to tell them that logic is not the only structure. How to inform them that our dialectical narrative is not the sole one? So I do not attempt to. I merely say that they must not miss Ryoanji.

21 september 1992. To Kodansha to supervise the translation of my long essay on Yokoo Tadanori. Again I see the difference between the two languages and the hopelessness of communicating. My best effects fall flat because they are conceived in English and I do not know enough about the connotations of Japanese to duplicate them.

Precisely, I do not know the specific gravity of their words and they do not know those of mine. Particularly difficult are those ideas for which there are no words. So the Japanese use ours. Thus my “irony” becomes aironie, and “style” becomes sutairu. Do the Japanese readers understand this? I am assured they do. I doubt it. If anything they understand something not intended. Aironie will end up known, but only as something quite different from ‘irony.’

Editor is also apologetic. It seems that Yoko, Mishima’s widow, is not going to allow two of Shinoyama’s pictures in the Yokoo Tadanori essay, and she wants me to take out the part where I say her famous husband had no sense of humor. Actually I did not say that. I said he had no sense of irony, rather, that he had a sense of intrigue. He had no appreciation for humor, but had a great, braying laugh that stood in for it. He did, however, have a pointed sense of ridicule. But I am not, please, to say so. I agree. Yoko will be mollified. She has taken further aversion to me because, among other reasons, I did not like that camped-up, window-dressed version of the Noh plays she did, though I think Yukio would have. Also, anyone who knew her sainted husband as a living, breathing, practicing homosexual is anathema.

Working with the translator, I tell him that my reference to Issey Miyake and other dress designers is sarcastic. He understands. Suggests I call the celebrated couturier a yofukuya. I agree at once.

22 september 1992. I notice a change in women’s fashion; for once it is not ordained by the syndicate, but by women themselves. The ones I see are developing a new style. It consists of more expensive materials arranged in more expensive ways. Silks and velvets tucked and pleated, a torso swathed and looped. These things cost money and are commensurate with new economic strength. I recall that when the West was consolidating its financial position at the end of the last century, women’s clothing turned into expensive upholstery, labor intensive.

There is something else as well: The women are turning into royalty. There are lots of inset embroideries, tassels and cords, and crowns stitched onto the material. This makes the women a bit overdressed as they buy eggs and tofu in the neighborhood supermarket. There is also a smart turn to the military look—epaulets, aide-de-camp ribbon effects. I do not find this sinister. It is a part of the look of new money. All of this seen only in middle-class women, all of them now dressed in a particularly recognizable form of bad taste: the overtly ostentatious. (The covertly ostentatious forms a different kind of bad taste, that which is called good.)

27 september 1992. Sunset over Shinobazu. The sky an autumn orange, clean, clear; the buildings on the far side, already black as ash with lighted windows like embers; and on the darkened pond, the late lotus toss their leaves in the night breeze, showing green above, white below, like poplar trees when the north wind blows.

I think of passing time, of summer gone, but mostly I think of Magritte—that magical canvas of blue sky with nighttime buildings and a bright street light below. Art first, nature second. That is the natural order. Debussy did not look at waves; he looked at Hokusai.

Elegiac, I stand at the verge and watch the sunset slide into night. Never again, never again, I banally opine, and then again wonder idly if there is no way ever to hold onto the beautifully transient. No—one must instead celebrate the evanescence. That is the only way.

And I suddenly think of Roger Casement. That is what his diaries meant. With their lists of size, their correspondence of length and worth, he was in his way trying to stop time, to account for it, to turn these lads immortal. Of course, he never writes of they themselves, only mentions their single quality, but then that is the part he wished to preserve. And he did. There they stretch, anonymous, shadowed figures with floodlit groins. What I find unpleasant about Casement is that he also, with equal passion, put down how much he paid.

Me, I also want to snatch beauty whole from the mud of time. I want beauty, grace, and good will, to be recorded. That, and my own small part in arranging it.

1 october 1992. Frank and Chizuko take me out for what he describes as a “bite.” Ginza, back streets, elegant, restrained Kyoto-style façade. Inside all subdued colors, plain wood, the kind of place that even smells expensive.

It being autumn we started with a small tray of hors d’oeuvres, which contained a single piece of grilled sea eel on rice, a chestnut, half open, a quail egg disguised as a baby persimmon, a small purple fall potato, glutinous wheat paste in a maple leaf pattern, and pine needles made of soba, all held by a real maple leaf already turned. This kind of thing is cuisine-kitsch, and is dignified only by its expense.

Followed by fish, raw sole, yellowtail and bonito. After this, dobinmushi, an expensive Kyoto dish, a teapot filled with mushrooms—the excessively dear matsutake—shrimp, ginkgo nuts, white fish, and trefoil, all steeped. You pour out the soup into rustic sake cups and then dig into the pot.

Next, my favorite, nasudengaku, a young eggplant baked, then spread with two kinds of miso, then re-baked. Followed by duck, succulent pink slices in a sauce. Then, a perfectly toasted slab of rice ball with red miso soup and baby clams, pickles, and tea. Sake, whiskey, and beer as well, and the bill must have been hundreds of dollars. But that is what the best kaiseki cuisine has always been about—ostentation and the expensive freshness of things.

12 november 1992. I notice in the subway an advertisement for yet another revival of A Chorus Line. Why is this musical so popular here? It is revived more than any other. Then I realize that, of course, it is about a group—just like The Forty-Seven Ronin. It is a collective story and this is its enormous appeal to the Japanese. But only if it is done reverently, as A Chorus Line is indeed done. I remember the frowns I met when I suggested some years ago to a local dramatic group that I write a play to be called The Forty-Eighth Ronin, about the one who arrived late—overslept, alarm didn’t go off, hangover or something. Complete disapproval.

14 november 1992. Last night woken at three by the bosozoku, boys on bikes who roam the neighborhood gunning their machines and making the night hideous for us honest folk. That is why they do it—to offend the good burghers.

These are blue-collar punks we are told, caught in dead-end jobs, and this is their moment of relief. They are Japan’s modest answer to the skinheads. They were far from my apartment and did not really make enough noise to keep me awake, horrible as it must have been closer, but I was exercised that they would do it at all and so lay angry and sleepless.

Today the rightist trucks bore down on me, blaring, black, and decorated with blood-red Japanese flags. Inside sallow, crew cut punks sat smoking, most wearing dark glasses. The discommoded populace paid no attention, as always. I noticed that these trucks now carry posters of Mishima Yukio, their idol, it being close to the anniversary of his suicide. And I wonder how Mishima would have liked this apotheosis, firmly in the grip of these scrawny, chicken-breasted youths, pimply and white as mushrooms. Not much, I should think.

18 november 1992. My word processor turns on with a single chord. It is a minor chord. Today I suddenly recognize it. It is the chord which opens “Fêtes,” the second of the Debussy Nocturnes. I do not have perfect pitch, but then maybe I do. I know it is the same chord. Know it in the same way that I can tell how many times the clock has struck, how many times the phone has rung, without counting them, and long after the events themselves.

Went to see the 1955 Shin Heike Monogatari. Went because it is about events only twenty-some years before my Kumagai takes place. Wanted to see what the world looked like back then and trusted Mizoguchi, his art director and his photographer. Therefore I remain undistracted by the silly story—it is based after all on that Yoshikawa Eiji novel, which is one of the anti-models for my own book.

Mizoguchi creates past life in a different way. In the opening crane shots of Kyoto, in the slow, swooping glide that settles finally on a single character, and when Kiyomori confronts his mother with questions of his parentage, Mizoguchi makes fine use of a simple pillar—having each on one side of it. The pillar is always a pillar, never a symbol, and yet it shows us something that nothing else could have.

19 november 1992. I awake at seven, make my first cup of coffee, and drink it with buttered and honeyed cornbread as I read the paper. Then, depending upon what is on FM, I take a shower. Today it is the “Archduke,” so I do not delay the douche. Some days I do the laundry, but today it is raining and so I do as I usually do—write letters and tend to small tasks until nine.

This is when Frank calls. Every day. I encourage this. Living alone, I like something regular, a conversation with a close friend. And he needs me as part of his network. As one of his daughters remarked to me upon hearing of the morning call, “Oh, so you’re part of the company, too.”

After the call begins my work, on whatever I am doing. Right now it is The Honorable Visitors, and notes for Kumagai. Or sometimes I do my column for The Japan Times. This goes on until noon. Then I make lunch—soup, sandwich, salad—and then go out: to International House, to Sogetsu, to the paper, or to see a film to review for the Herald-Tribune—things to make money.

People seem to think that after forty-some books I could easily make my living from royalties. No, I would starve if I tried that. Five percent, or three—for my most popular book, two. In the evening, what is called social life. Tonight a late haircut, a quick burger, and ran into Jabu in the park.

This then is my day. How interesting if other diarists had thought to so spell out the prosaic, that which always gets lost. If only Gide had told what he had had for lunch. The future—at which all diaries are aimed—would be able to decipher the precious quotidian from such an account.

With Alan Booth, 1990.

20 november 1992. Talked with Fumio about who survives from Mizoguchi films. Most do not. From his last, Wakao Ayako and Kyo Machiko. From the others, only Kyo. Then we talk about types, and I say that I, who for over half my life was only interested in Japanese, am surprised to find myself enlarged: Greeks, Turks, and Iranians. Fumio answers that it is because some Japanese are no good (yokunai) now. I ask why, wonder if it is all this money. No, he thinks that many are now simply not educated to be responsible, caring, or imaginative. They have no fellow feeling and so they are not attractive. He thinks it is the failure of their parents to properly teach them how to be human. Then, thinking of the decades, he said, “Did you know that in just three years I will be as old as you were when we first met?”

7 december 1992. In the late evening, sleepless, walked around the pond. There sat ten drunk young women. Had been out at a year’s end party. All in their early twenties, dressed up, lolling, smiling, but at the same time wary. Oh, a foreigner. Where did I come from? Canada? One had a boy friend from there once. A bad lot. Giggles. We were joined by a resident prostitute—the little one with frizzed hair.

“Hey, you’re no girl,” said the leader—even drunk they had a leader.

“No, I am not,” said the skirted whore. “I am a hard-working husband and father.” This is true. I have seen his kids when they drop by to get their allowance.

“But you got a wee-wee,” said the drunkest.

“Yes, I have,” he responded with dignity. He then told them how his lucrative act was accomplished—a temanko, a “hand-cunt”—and the girls all leaned forward, fascinated. He was also fascinated, since he is very fond of girls and once asked me all sorts of leading questions about a foreign lady friend whom I had taken for a park walk. Wanted to practice further perversion—troilism. Now, his audience before him, he dilated and became more animated than I had ever before seen him.

8 december 1992. Go with [Kawakita] Kazuko to the Ginza Mikimoto to watch Francis [Coppola] as he deliberates between a large pearl pin and two pearl rings. For his mother, he says. I say that the brooch looks more motherly. “You don’t know my mother,” says Francis. “But mothers like brooches,” says Kazuko and this apparently decides him.

10 december 1992. To the wake of Atsuta Yushun, Ozu’s cameraman. He survived by over thirty years the director who made him famous. And when people talked with him, they only wanted to talk about Ozu. I remember Wim Wenders going after him, pushing, probing, demanding, until the poor man burst into tears on camera, with Wim gloating through the view-finder.

Now here is all that is left—the remains hidden under the altar, the picture, smiling out of its frame. I remember watching him work. It was on the inn set for Akibyori. Ozu would indicate each set-up, look through the finder himself, and suggest. And Atsuta, attentive, a small smile on his face, would shift the camera. He liked working with Ozu. The small smile was approval.

11 december 1992. Alan Booth is now dying. Has about a month left, says Timothy [Harris]. Neglected tumor got through to the lymphatic system and thence everywhere else. Says Alan is in pain but tries to ignore it. Tries, says Tim, to punish his body for doing this to him. He has so believed in the power of the will that he has thought it would save his life. I think of Alan, feisty, charming, self-serving, his orphaned London life still towering behind him. And I think of spleen and black bile and The Road to Sata. Then I realize what I am doing: Trying to simplify, to create some false cause and effect, to find reason in the unreasonable. I watch myself doing this and do not condemn. It is fear that makes me do it—fear of the unknown, fear of the vulnerable self, as bile-filled as was ever Alan.

13 december 1992. Walking through the high-priced shambles of Roppongi, I am suddenly aware of a feeling that I have seen it all before. In 1947. Why, I wonder, gazing about. Then I realize that I am looking at empty lots, lots of them, between the high-tech buildings. And this reminds me of the destruction of Tokyo—empty lots between the few buildings left standing. Except that now the empty places are all parking lots, land still too expensive to build on.

17 december 1992. PIA [Magazine] party for young filmmakers. Oshima there in a kimono straight out of the Takarazuka All-Girl Opera. Yokoo Tadanori in black leather came up, very pleased, he said, with my essay about him. “You know me better than I do myself,” he said appreciatively. “You know things about me that even I don’t know.” I nod. Probably so. For example, I bet he will now do something to distance himself from all of this official culture. After all, he is the big anti-establishment figure on the established jury.

Prizes are given. All the winners are about twenty, and how differently they behave from their elders. Only one or two take the trouble to appear embarrassed. Only one faked being overcome. Most chewed gum and stared at the audience and accepted the prize without a word or a bow. One young woman stood up and said she was very disappointed that she had only won the jury prize, when she had had her heart set on the grand prize. And sure enough, Yokoo, called upon to give the awards, stumbled over the pronunciation, pretended he could not read the characters, laughed, shook his head, scratched it, and behaved as I had expected.

11 march 1993. Spent the day in the train, all the way to Kamogawa. Holloway has had more strokes and is in the hospital there. Found him cheerful, or making an effort to be, lying propped up in bed, surrounded by the mess of a country hospital. Small strokes in the frontal area of the cerebellum, caused by not getting enough blood to the vessels. The reason for that is age—he is seventy-two now—and also that he is so stout that he doesn’t breathe deeply enough, and in addition his septum is closed, or something. They will ream it out or will make a hole in his throat. He looks mildly about as though not sensing his coming apart. Under all this I can still, in a smile or a glance, detect my friend of forty years ago. He also seems unaware that his friend, Michio, who has been with him for thirty of these years, is even more coming to pieces. Trembling hands, deep depression. It is hard for them to look at what is now staring at them.

I nap a bit in the train going back to Tokyo and wake up at Mobara. Why do I know this name? And then I remember. The village of Mobara was the turning point for the sea road to Kujikurihama, when back in 1947 we used to drive out in the jeep, Holloway and I, to the beach house, and I remember how he used to shout with pleasure and gun the motor as we raced across the fields to the open sea.

16 march 1993. Call from Michio, Holloway’s friend. Voice tight, control apparent. He cannot be helped by hospital. Nothing to be done. Brain will be permanently starved for oxygen. The doctor says he might die at any time, probably in his sleep. An apparent alternative is a stroke, which will leave him like Eric. “What will we do?” asks Michio. What is there to do, I wonder. They live far away, have no friends out there. “You are his only friend,” says Michio. I do not say that they ought to have made more. I offer to help, but there is nothing I can do except go to see him.

Afternoon call from Tokyo Shinbun. A statement, please. On what? “Oh, you didn’t know? Ryu Chishu died a few hours ago.” Bladder cancer, aged eighty-eight. I tried to think of something to say. I saw him first as the young projectionist in I Was Born, But, then as the father in Tokyo Story, and all the roles in between and after. I remembered There is a Father, for in that picture he had a stroke and died on screen. I remembered him on his back on the tatami while his son tried to help him. And that was fifty years ago and now he is truly dead. The reporter at the end of the line was waiting. I said something about his honesty as an actor. “Ah, honesty,” said the reporter, as though it were a new word.

Cold, a bitter wind, and my concrete square is chilled. I start the bath and go and sit in it. In my box of warmth I think of the coldness of the spring night. From the window I can see the stars through the steam.