10 january 1996. On the street I see an acquaintance of some years standing. We always nod and sometimes talk. Usually he is looking around the theater, sidling up an aisle searching for someone to sit next to. Tonight he comes over, shaking his head. “Gone,” he says, “absolutely no one. And it has been this for months now.” I suggest the winter weather but he shakes his head bleakly. “No, they buy a tape, or rent it, and take it home and lock the door.” His gesture—a clenched fist moving up and down—completes the thought. I sympathize and continue on my way home.

As I walk, I think about what he had said. He is right, of course—ministrations such as his are no long needed. It is easier to do it yourself, and these self-centered youngsters are now typical in yet a larger sense. Brought up with little curiosity, and with a much-exaggerated idea of the dangers of their world, they are encouraged, boys and girls alike. Going into their rooms and shutting their doors is to be thought virtuous.

There they can study their brains out or beat themselves to death, the result is the same: a single person operating singly—no communication, no wish for, and eventually little ability for any contact.

I think of these solitaries and then look up into the evening sky where the e-mail courses and the internet surfs. Here, like modern sorcerers, fly the young, each alone, to type his or her way into what must pass as communication—but of a strange, limited kind: one where you must draw little faces with smiles or frowns to show what you feel—an analogue system of emotions, either yes or no, but nothing in between.

Here, it is said, a kind of dialogue takes place. But it takes place between two keyboards in two rooms in two cities or countries or continents. And the hands on those keyboards fabricate the person—he or she is arbitrarily created according to wishes or desires or compulsions of the moment: a protean creature, which can change into any self. It is not communication but imposture.

In a further sense as well—this is a universe of words, only words, and words are only agreed upon signals to denote a reality, not the reality itself. They are notoriously clumsy; they are coarse compared to the real. It is the real that is excised in this modern mode.

At the game center I stop to watch a young man standing in a simulator. Lights flash. He is wearing a helmet that hides his most recognizable part, his face. And a glove hides his hand. As I watch he seems to be fighting something. His weight shifts, the hand moves, the head dodges. It is probably a monster. His track shoes scuffle, he is perhaps running, like a dog asleep. I see a trickle of sweat run down his neck. He is perhaps afraid.

Alone he is indulging in the ultimate masturbation—that of person. He has voluntarily deserted the real for the fantasy, and pornography is one of the results when you do this. He is indulging in the pornography of fear, and his self is frozen in cybernetic attention.

A bell rings, the lights stop, he takes off the helmet. A young worker of some kind, he is smiling, the kind of weary smile the movies put on their actors when they want to indicate that a night of passion is over. He takes off his glove with what seems a practiced ease. He is back to himself.

But who is this? He has had an experience with no one, about nothing, and he is satisfied with this. If I, a real monster, were to walk up and spout flames of English, and put out a claw of companionship, he would be truly afraid and would turn his back upon the awful reality of me as he never does upon the comforting monstrousness of simulated reality.

I look and multiply this smiling young man by one hundred million. He is the future.

11 january 1996. At the International House, a reception for the visiting young artists, I give the toast and later am talking with Chris [Blasdel] who points out a short, bespectacled man and tells me that he is the leading hichiriki player in the Imperial Court orchestra, just as my friend Ono [Tadamaro], was the leading sho player—or had been. Did I know that he’d died last fall? Cancer.

Fifty years vanished and I again saw Ono as he was then, as he had been on that day in 1947, in his Bugaku costume and for me the very personification of the country. Since I never saw Ono again, he has remained always as he was then.

Chris, who knew him much later and studied under him, once asked how I could ever have been in love with him. I explained that I hadn’t been, that I never knew the man, and had only seen him twice. It wasn’t him with whom I was in love, but what I thought he embodied. I never made an effort to see Ono again, but I made many efforts to see the country within a single person.

Even now, when that kind of naturalness, that aesthetic sureness which I so admired is all but vanished, I still go around looking into tidal pools and turning over rocks, trying to find someone (preferably young, unformed, and handsome) who can stand for Japan. That I now find no such person does not discourage the search—it is, after all, its own end.

18 january 1996. After weeks of wondering how to do it, embarrassed city officials are going to move out of Shinjuku the homeless who camp out there in their cardboard city right along the tunnel that leads to the new city hall.

Now, however, the homeless have legal representation (moving them is against their human rights) and lots of “student” support. Still, I expect all of this will cave in under government pressure. The city has built homes for the homeless, camp-like structures in inconvenient places, which, say the homeless, will be closed in two months anyway.

Nothing is being done at all for the Ueno homeless (in contrast to the Shinjuku homeless), but then they are not organized, not embarrassing, just pitiful and tragic. A few evenings ago, standing by the edge of the pond, watching the ducks, I was approached by a woman I had seen often. Her white hair is like thatch and she wears a blanket as though it were a cloak. She asks, oddly, if I have any cardboard. On this she will presumably sleep.

I did not, but she did not expect me to. Her question is to elicit money, and it is pathetic to see her trying to retain her dignity by asking for cardboard, knowing I have none. Pathetic though this is, I give nothing. She singles me out almost every time I go to the park. I did give her some money once but I do not now.

20 january 1996. I awake to white, dead light, and know it has been snowing. Also, the edge of the cold is different, sharper. Opening the window I watch the falling flakes, gray against the oyster sky. Maybe that was why I was dreaming about a hospital, an operating room, and the cold odor of chloroform.

Why are waking moments, the hopeful beginning of a new day, so often filled with death, I wonder. My doctor tells me heart attacks very often occur in the early morning hours—looking at me meaningfully the while. But my desolate wakings predate heart concerns.

I think they are always there, for everyone. We see plainest at the first, for man is the only animal stupid enough to know he is to die.

22 january 1996. Two middle-aged women are talking on the subway. While I cannot hear what they are saying, I watch their nodding heads, their narrow glances, their conspiratorial airs. This is so common—women as conspirators. One leans over to the other as though repeating something spiteful and the other grimly nods. Then the first begins to tell something funny and laughs a lot during the recitation. The other cracks not one smile. This is the way it always is with some middle-aged Japanese women when together—the talker always laughs, the listener, never.

I know why conversations take this form. It is because these women grew up powerless. Marginalized, their conversations are commiserations. Those narrowed eyes, the scandalized way of recounting, the lowered voices, the scornful agreements—this is something I remember seeing black women do when I was little, and effeminate homosexuals when I was older. Now the young Japanese women talk nothing like this. They are loud and often raucous, use man-talk and refuse to soften their voices in any pretense of gentility.

24 january 1996. Early this morning, six say the papers, the Tokyo police moved into Shinjuku Station and began evicting the homeless, those men who lived in their cardboard city in the sheltered tunnel leading to City Hall. Some two hundred homeless, some eight hundred police. It does not sound like a fair fight but, then, it was not supposed to be.

It was, however, a very Japanese one. It took years for the city fathers to act, and when they did they overacted. Yet those long months had not been wasted. The cops compiled complaints from nearby storeowners; they placated the public (what few needed it) with promises of a walkway, a people-mover, all the way from the train platforms to the very entryway of Governor Aoshima’s offices.

One of the bereft shouted (according to the paper) that such an attack as this should never have been tolerated in a democratic society. True, but what could have led him to believe that this is a democratic society? There will be no complaints. The man on the street (one such, interviewed by one of the papers, said that the homeless stank) believes it all necessary, and that is enough for most to rationalize, as does the governor, that “. . . the metropolitan government had no other choice than to mobilize the police.”

I wonder how I feel about all of this. My leftover liberal reaction is to voice concern and pity. But only to voice it, not to do anything about it. Last night I was picking my way home through the homeless in Ueno Station, feeling bad about them but not feeling bad for them, not to the extent of giving out food or money, for example. Empty sentiment warmed me, but not them.

27 january 1996. The police are having trouble with the evacuees. Some eighty of the homeless remain in Shinjuku Station, making noises, vowing permanency and, according to several quotes from restaurateurs in the proximity, “making a stink.” They are there also because they now have nowhere to go. The temporary shelter (complete with fence and moat) made for them can contain two hundred, but now contains less than half of that number. Nonetheless no more are being accepted because, you see, the deadline for entrance has run out. Also, since it was made for the Shinjuku sufferers, sufferers from other parts of the city cannot use it. Ten such hopefuls were rejected on the grounds that they had not lived at the Shinjuku eviction site.

In the meantime the government is attempting to steal some billions of yen from the taxpayers (about five thousand from each man, woman, and tax-paying child in the entire country) in order to bail out the criminal housing organizations whose generous loans the yakuza now refuse to pay back. The Diet is stalled. Sleek Hashimoto, the new P.M., says that this is the only solution.

And continuing on is the three percent tax that so infuriated this patient public. Why do the people put up with it? Because they have no infrastructure through which to do anything else, that’s why. There is no way for them to express indignation. Consequently we all pay three percent on everything; we will also pay off the delinquent and fraudulent loan organizations; and the homeless will be all swept under society’s carpet.

2 february 1996. With some friends to the boy brothels of Shinjuku. The first is named Janny (Johnny). Some half-dozen boys are behind the bar and the master, one Mr. Manabu, sits at the table with us and explains his wares. They are all nineteen and they are all straight—two highly unlikely statements. The “system,” as it is called, is that one makes one’s choice, then pays for one’s drinks (when I later paid for ours I found the amount equivalent to $35), then pays Mr. Manabu the sum of $170, one hundred of which is for the bedraggled boy when he returns after his two hours of passion in a hotel room, for which you will be soaked with another $60. Altogether it will cost about $300. We leave, but it is not the price which has deterred us, rather that the acned youths on display did not seem worth it.

The next place was called B-Flat—though B-Sharp might have been a better name. We were smartly ushered in, face towels flourished, orders taken, and information cannily offered. All were nineteen, all were straight, third from left was biggest, two on the end knew how to be sodomized, most could be brought to perform fellatio, straight though they might be, and the financial system was precisely the same—indicating some degree of cooperation among such establishments as these.

We ogled the merchandise and one of us foreigners wondered which one spoke English. None of them did, it transpired. “Oh, in that case . . . can’t even talk to them.” I also looked the boys over, but they naturally did not possess that appearance of innocence and lack of guile that so appeals to me. One of my friends, however, definitely liked the one on the left who, as a matter of fact, was already smiling back at him.

When I left, business talk was on, and I later learned that one was eventually selected but that the chosen lad could not only not be sodomized, he also could not even sodomize properly. In addition, though able to perform fellatio he did not do so with any degree of zest. Maybe the place really ought to be called B-Natural.

3 february 1996. Cold winds from Siberia, no place for the homeless. They have disappeared from Ueno and the press is silent about Shinjuku. But the police are busy elsewhere. Now they are closing Harajuku. This was an area around the station and by the park that on Sundays was given over to the excesses of the young. There were bands and dancers and skateboarders and rock-n-rollers. It started some twenty years ago when the Takinokozoku, taking their name from a brand-shop, took to the Sunday streets, posturing and posing. Over the years the place has assumed the look of a benign counterculture—like the green plaza in front of Shinjuku Station in the sixties.

Law and order has long looked upon it with a cold eye. When the Iranians also gathered there to exchange their news and fry their kabobs, the cops found their reasons and moved in. Now they have moved on and destroyed the place by arguing that it is really only a “pedestrian paradise,” one of a number throughout the city, and they are closing them all because they really do no good, they provide meeting places for undesirables, and they do not benefit the merchants in the area. I notice that the Ueno and Ginza paradises are still open on Sundays. Perhaps some paradises are more paradisiacal than others.

6 february 1996. Telephone call, voice at the other end, polite: “Mr. Richie?” And the years parted. It was Zushiden, after all this time. Just thought he would call me up. I was still around? I was OK? Yes, he was OK, too. No, no, was only fifty-six, not time to retire yet. We ought to get together.

So we ought. His voice was that of thirty years ago, and I remembered the house in Otsuka, and Zushi making the bath and us both in it, and our fight in a hotel room when I was married and we could meet only in such places, and his marriage when he proved too big for the bride, and the bad daughter.

“How is your bad daughter?” I asked. “Just the same,” he said. “And she is still here, with us, unmarried, no one wants her. I don’t blame them.” And I said, “Oh, Zushiden, it is so good to hear your voice,” for I had not known until that very moment how much I had missed hearing it.

10 february 1996. I dump Jane, after all these years, something I had never thought I would do. And I know why—it is Emma Thompson’s fault, hers and the other “film versions,” and their vulgarity. Not Jane Austen’s fault, to be sure, but there had been signs that I would read no more.

We decorate ourselves with our books (besides initially enjoying them, learning from them, and feeling through them), and define who we are—they are our standard-bearers. I in this way went through Marcel [Proust], now Jane. And without any regret at all, except for where to find a home for my beloved discard.

One was at hand. Paul McCarthy, literate as he is, had never read Austen and so he received my Folger Society set of the novels and returned home well pleased.

17 february 1996. Gwen [Robinson] over for dinner—brought cod steaks and Toll House cookies. I brought out the family album and showed pictures of my family, lying there like pressed flowers.

This must have occasioned my dream: I was showing Gwen around the hospital I called home; there was a stir, and a grand procession entered. Very excited, I dragged her over and sank on my knees in front of a large, black woman who was leading all the others—banners, trumpets, doves flying overhead. Adoringly, I grabbed the big, black hand, turning to explain that this woman had saved my life “after the operation.” But the black hand was snatched away, and I looked up to see the white face and blue eyes of Madame Yourcenar looking reprovingly down. Guiltily I dropped the hand I had been about to kiss, reasoning that, of course Madame did not like displays of emotion. But then I suddenly realized the real reason. She had thought I had been about to kiss the ring and this would have blown her cover because she was really the Pope.

19 february 1996. I went to pay my taxes and the fat man to whose lot I fell glanced over my forms and told me I had taken far too many deductions and, anyway, where were my receipts? I told him that in decades of faithful tax-paying this question had never been asked. “I’m asking it now,” said Mr. Takahashi, for such was his name.

Said it in English. From the first he was firm, rebuffing my attempts to speak his language—for I speak it much better than he spoke mine. He was, it seemed, spoiling for a fight. I should be pleased, I suppose, that the Japanese are no longer intimidated by a white face and a high-handed manner. And part of me is. But another part is not.

So I told him that it was customary to accept what the citizen said and then, if necessary, carry on an investigation. “They cost money,” was the reply. “Well, you cost me money,” I said. He considered this and then he said, “OK, only next year you bring receipts, yes?” “Yes.” This was a very Japanese compromise, and I felt back on firm ground again—and got half a million yen refund.

20 february 1996. Zushiden is fifty-six now, graying, white in the eyebrows, heavier, the rounded shoulders of age. We sit at the Press Club and look at each other—it has been about six years since we last met. Then we fill each other in on who has died. Not so many on his side—but a fellow member of the Chuo Wrestling Team whom I remember as a tall, young student dropped dead jogging just last month. The Team is going to have its reunion next month—at the Imperial Hotel, and it costs the equivalent of three hundred dollars each to attend. “I will go though. I am curious to see what all those old folks look like now.” I tell him (speaking as his senior) that one of the best things about being old is that it is so interesting, finding out what finally happens to other people.

Over our fish (he cannot eat meat because of his stomach operation; I cannot eat it because of my arteries), we talk about finance. [Sato] Hisako has just told me that next month the banks are all going bust. “Even Dai-Ichi Kangyo?” I asked, referring to my bank, the largest in the world. “Oh, especially Dai-Ichi Kangyo.”

Zushi says he doesn’t doubt it. Japan has lived long all by itself, a single family. Now it cannot afford to. It has to live with other countries. It cannot protect just its own interests, this is now counterproductive . . . look at the economic mess. He himself keeps his money in stocks and bonds and the post office. Not that it makes any difference. If Dai-Ichi Kangyo goes, the whole country goes.

With Shiraishi Kazuko, Joan and Walter Mondale, Michishita Kyoko, Jack, 1996. donald richie

Talk turns again to the errant daughter, who has now reformed, has a job, joined something like AA for delinquents, and lives at home. “Twenty-six and not married,” said Zushi. “Wish she would.” I agree that that would be nice. “Nice for me,” he says. “Get her out of the house.” This leads to talk of women in general. He has a kind of girlfriend but she is in America. Just like me, I tell him. I have a kind of boyfriend but he is in Korea.

She was a college sweetheart. Did he know her when he was living with me? I wanted to know. “Let’s see, I was a junior then, no, I met her when I was a senior.” Then, with that big smile of his, “After I left you I graduated.”

After hot apple pie and ice cream (bad for both stomach and arteries), I said goodbye until the next time and then came home where I had a message on my machine from Fumio—telling me that Takemitsu Toru died this afternoon.

21 february 1996. Chris and I went to the wake for Takemitsu this afternoon. It was held in a small hall, and they had not expected so many to attend. When we got there the director was explaining to the family that he had thought only they would be there, that he was not prepared for the throngs, and that he hoped everything would be all right—by which I suppose he meant that he would not run out of incense or white chrysanthemums.

Toru was in a brocade box at the far end of the room, and on it was a color picture of him. I laid my white chrysanthemum in front of it and prayed. The box seemed so very small, like a child’s coffin, and then I remembered that Toru was indeed small, but when he was alive with his bright eyes and his big smile one never noticed.

His widow and daughter were there, looking as though they had been hit. On the steps I talked to Yanagimachi Mitsuo—Toru had done a beautiful score for his Fire Festival—and upstairs was Shinoda Masahiro and Iwashita Shima. He was crying. Toru had often written for his films, and had himself created much of Double Suicide.

28 february 1996. I lunch with Gwen and we talk about an early division we both made—that between lover and friends. You could never fuck your friends, and you should not make friends with those you did fuck. We wonder how this came about.

She thinks that she got the idea due to the anonymous brutality of her first experience. He was a cocksure young surfer, and she was sure of nothing. “I didn’t even know what was happening to me.” She did not enjoy it or even guess that she was supposed to. No orgasms for her, perhaps consequently, despite constant experimentation, none until she was over twenty. What she sought to repeat was the anonymity of the first encounter, its astonishing force, and the fact that she knew that somehow she made it happen—she had this power.

We both agree that sex is about power, no matter how you cut it, and that the both of us are adept at losing the battle in order to win the war. We are also pleased that we have to a degree graduated: I love my friend, Dae-Yung, and she loves hers, Tim.

13 march 1996. Dinner at Michishita Kyoko’s—the other guests were Shira­ishi Kazuko and Joan Mondale. Our hostess busied herself with glasses and dishes, and her female guests commented upon them—praising and finding pleasingly curious this and that, then turning gigglingly affirmative as women of a certain age often do together. It was nice for them, like playing house.

I, however, the only man, could not play. Further, the house cat, an ex-tom named Jack, having been raised with women, smelled me out, grew jealous, and attacked me under the table with his claws. Kyoko, more mother than wife, got under the table to get him out, and in so doing bumped about and knocked over a large vase of lilies, which landed on Jack, who with a howl was out of the room for the rest of the evening.

Excitement over, champagne drunk, sashimi downed, we could turn to interesting talk. Joan is reading the anonymous novel Primary Colors and is appalled by it. I say that I have never heard of a president so vilified as Clinton. “Yes,” she says. “You know, Bush had a way with reporters. If they wrote something bad they were banned from the White House. Since they were on the White House beat they, as it were, lost their jobs. Very effective.” I said that the Clintons should do something like that. “Can’t,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Only Republicans can do that.”

Commotion in the hallway, Jack alarmed. It is Ambassador Mondale himself, not expected, who had come to see what it was all about. We’d finished the fish but he said he had eaten anyway and he began, in his patient and gentlemanly way, to find out about us. Me, he said, he felt he knew since he read me. Kazuko, however, he did not, and asked many a friendly question.

She, large, be-kohled, and sitting in her spotted fur, bloomed. Though I had often known her to be an assured and self-centered poet, I had never heard her so eloquent. Born in Vancouver, brought here at seven, she told what it felt like. There everything so brightly colored, here everything so gray—wartime Japan. “And they tried to make us believe that Americans, English, Canadians, were all devils, but I knew better. I had been there.” At thirteen she worked in a factory and it was bombed on their single holiday. “Maybe that is why I became a poet,” she said.

Then Michishita talks sensibly and feelingly about her growing up in far Sakhalin, and how her parents fled, and how many of her friends did not get away when the Russians arrived. “But, you know, all the governor’s family, the police chief’s, they got back to Japan at once. It’s always that way. That’s the reason for the vertical society, so that those on the top can get out easier.”

We then talked of the local royals. Mondale had been presented and admired the choreography and was impressed when Michiko remembered meeting him in Belgium long before. We were all filled with admiration for the much-maligned Michiko, and I told my impressions. The ambassador shook his head and then said, in the most American manner, “I just don’t see why the man doesn’t protect his wife. He must certainly have the power to do so. Why doesn’t he just say, ‘Lay off, guys,’ to those chamberlains?” I mentioned that much of the animosity had come from the empress-dowager. He nodded his head knowingly: “Mothers-in-law.”

We move on to Reagan. “Absolutely out of it, now,” he tells me, “though it is difficult to be sure—for so many years that man’s innocent ignorance and stupidity has served him so well. I remember someone’s saying that the U.S. economy was in trouble. ‘Well, yes,’ said the President, ‘but you know, it has to go down before it can go up.’ Then that big Hollywood smile. And he got away with it.”

I could imagine his feelings at seeing that fool in the White House. After all, he had almost gotten there himself. Now marginalized out here, he can do little but follow orders. This has not embittered him, however—he has grown nicely philosophical, if occasionally despairing. “Boy, do I have my plate full. That awful Okinawa [rape case] mess, and now China aiming at Taiwan, and I have to go to the Press Club and talk about it tomorrow and there is really nothing to do, though lots for someone to do. What are you going to do about it? I know, turn on the FM, get another cup of coffee, and write another book. Some people get all the breaks.”

15 march 1996. I just heard that Oshima has had a stroke. He was in the London airport waiting for a plane to Dublin. And I remembered our talking about his heart, his circulation. And I thought of him all alone and no longer himself. Later I learn that he was brought back and is now under rehabilitation—and I thought of Eric, buried alive by his illness. Later I tried to find where Oshima was, but was told that he wanted no visitors.

19 march 1996. Chris tells me that Miss Michishita came up to him at a party and told him that when I was at her house I behaved in a shocking manner. “Jack got under the table and rolled around as he does and then he started pushing against Mr. Richie’s legs. Oh, no. Jack is my cat, you see. And Mr. Richie, knowing that Jackie had been fixed, said, ‘Oh, he’s trying to get at my testicles.’ Imagine! He used a word like that at my table!”

5 april 1996. Dinner with Fumio. We go and see Kuroyanagi Tetsuko in the new Albee play [Three Tall Women]. Afterward we go and see her. She shows us all the wonderful makeup (skins, wrinkles, and gloves with liver spots and veins) to make her ninety-something in the first act. Tetsuko herself must be near sixty or over, and so this showing off of an extreme old age is something few actresses of that age would so revel in. But then Tetsuko is like that—terribly enthusiastic about real things.

They have cut the play. (The woman called A doesn’t get to screw the groom, I don’t know why.) But Fumio tells me that the translation is pleasingly colloquial and that Tetsuko lends her dryness, her humor, and makes the character both irritating and pleasing, which is perhaps something Albee intended.

7 april 1996. Paul [McCarthy] and I lunch in Ueno and then go to the Central Asia exhibition—a collection of Buddhist art from the caves of Dunhuang and the archives of the Hermitage. We examine an eighth-century mandala showing not heaven but hell—a spectacular delineation of the temptations of the Buddha, including sexual details I have never before seen in early Asian art. One of the beasts has an erection, another has its hands in curious places, and, right in the middle, a creature has bent double and from its asshole pour flames, which lave the lotus upon which the Buddha sits—an infernal fart. “It looks like Bosch,” says Paul.

9 april 1996. Alex Kerr over for dinner. He is leaving tomorrow for Thailand, has had it with Japan. Feels the changes deeply and finds no compensatory factors. We discuss the reasons. These include wholesale despoliation—once the most beautiful of countries, Japan is now the ugliest. The return of Tokugawa totalitarianism, as evidenced in the male young, etc. All of which he has treated at length in his book [Lost Japan]. We do not mention that it is no longer easy to sleep with the younger population, but the air of easy romance has certainly dissipated. We talk about Japan the way it used to be. He says he has heard that men worked naked but that, of course, is sheer romantic wishing. I say, not at all, and show him my pictures of the Choshi fishermen at work, ca. 1947. He drops his bread into the coq au vin in surprise, examines the pictures with care.

We talk about what this means. I say that public nudity is read (by me) as public availability, and that we are rather like imperialists regretting the Raj. This he agrees to, though regretting the regretting, and I say that the problem is that Third World Japan became First World, and that that is why he is going to Third World Thailand, even though he’s too late. We’ll both end up in a Dayak long house and even there it will be too late. He agrees. He takes a long look at the naked fishermen, and we have chilled peaches with frozen yogurt and speak of other things.

15 april 1996. Ed appeared with a large black eye, a scratched nose, and bruises on the upper lip. “No, no,” he said at once. “I was perfectly sober.” He has had balance problems before, and since his hip operation he is sometimes given to falling. “I fell against the wall.” “Is that the wall near your home mentioned by Mori Ogai in Wild Geese?” I wanted to know. “The very same.” “Well, you showed a fine literary sense then,” I said, at which he smiled wanly.

Once seated with a bottle of beer, however, troubles were forgotten and we had a good talk. We discussed our affection for Gwen; we spoke of the decline in the quality of the Tokyo strip parlors, and paid brief but sincere tribute to our “Janet.”

Then I admitted that I had given up Jane [Austen]. “It is like the moon,” I explained. “It has been trodden upon by someone from Wapakoneta, Ohio.” He was impressively restrained at this and said, “Well, so goes the world. About the moon, however, I know just how you feel.”

16 april 1996. To a party being given Beate Gordon upon publication of her memoir. She was here during the war, and after it was, despite her youth, entrusted with putting the part about women into the postwar constitution because she was one of the few foreigners who understood Japanese. I knew her during the Occupation—a smart, slender, steady girl—and we have seen each other sometimes over the intervening half-century.

“And you stayed and I didn’t,” she said with that friendly directness that has always been hers. “And you know,” she continued in the measured tone, which also was always hers, something a bit sententious but always for one’s own good, “it is still a very good place to be. People tell me how changed it is, that they are leaving, and this too I can understand, but, still . . . How do you find it?”

I say that the whole world has changed but has retained its proportions. Japan, though reduced, is still best, at least for people like me.

She had been to see Empress Michiko that afternoon and wanted to compare impressions with me. Not much to compare. She had had the Empress all to herself with only a single lady-in-waiting, whom she already knew. Not a chamberlain in sight. Consequently Michiko was apparently much more herself, looked Beate in the eye as she spoke, laughed a lot, and had a good time.

“You only got half an hour, but I got an hour and a half,” she said in her winningly arch way. “And at the end, she took me right to the foyer, right to the door, as a hostess ought.”

8 may 1996. The Tokyo Broadcasting System has decided to cancel a news show because it had privately shown the finished program to the Aum people, who then went out and killed the lawyer who appeared on it. This had frightened TBS into not airing that program at all. The now-cancelled news show has nothing to do with the cancelled anti-Aum show, but it was felt something must be done, some gesture or other to placate public opinion. Public opinion will be placated. Justice by analogy.

The problem is not that Japanese behave this way. All people behave this way. The problem is that Japanese so often get away with it, are so rarely called to account. A symbolic placation appears and is accepted. As to why it happened in the first place it is, again, not because Japanese are prone to doing things like this. Everyone is. But few Japanese are prone to speaking up and denouncing. The reason is that they are afraid to. And the reason they are afraid is that such an individual would receive no support and much intimidation. He would also lose his job.

Yet more and more brave individuals are speaking out against this system, and losing jobs and friends and family in the process. They are truly brave, for the system is truly formidable.

10 may 1996. In the evening, in Ueno, I see two young girls loitering in front of the local porno, the Star-za. They are wearing the tartan skirts, dark sweaters, and thick ankle socks of a private school. I ask them if they like porno and they—one pretty, one not—say they don’t. Then I ask if they are waiting for kozukai, spending money. This they say they are. How much? I ask. Go-man yen—that is, nearly five hundred dollars.

“For the both of you?” I ask. They nod. Still, it is a bit expensive, I say. “No,” says the pretty one, “usually that is what just one high-school girl gets. You get two for the price of one.”

At that point we were joined by a large and savvy Bengali, whom I often meet hanging around the place. “No short time,” he says. “You spend the night. We go to my house.” The girls confer and then the plain one says, “No penetration though.”

“No penetration!” cries the Bengali. “What am I paying for?”

“Look,” says the pretty one, “we have to get married sometime, we got to watch ourselves.”

“What I get for my fifty thousand yen then?”

The pretty one smiles and delicately flicks her tongue.

“Oh,” he says. Then he indicates me: “Better take him then, he likes to do that.”

“Actually,” I say, “this place around here is mainly homo.”

“Homo!” cries the pretty one, then turns to her plain friend, “You picked the wrong place again.” Then, “He’s cute,” politely indicating me. I smile and show my long, pink, foreign tongue, and they both laugh like the little girls they are.

We are then further joined by a well-dressed younger Japanese who is carrying a briefcase and following our conversation with interest. Also, a passing cop on the beat. The Bengali disappears as though by magic and I with a nod pass into the porno. When I look out again, the street is empty. I don’t know what happened.

11 may 1996. I think about prostitution and wonder why anyone thinks it wrong. If the other person does not want to sell, well, maybe. But if she or he does, what’s the problem? Yet these girls would be held up to shame in the hypocritical press, and my commerce will doubtless be so seen by an equally hypocritical posterity.

I feel about prostitution as Flaubert did. Let me quote the passage: “It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded robes have always excited some deep, ascetic corner of my soul. The idea of prostitution is a meeting place of so many elements—lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold—that to peer into it deeply makes one reel. One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love.”

12 may 1996. In the evening I take my tape of Oshima’s Ai no Korida [In the Realm of the Senses] over to Gwen’s. She has a house full of people and serves Thai curry before we begin. I had not seen the film uncut since London well over ten years ago, and I am again moved by it.

It is so sad, and so honest. It properly equates love with fucking and fucking with love. Nakedness always gives you a choice: the chance to feel sexy or to feel sorry—you want to take on the unclothed body or you realize that we are all fragile, unprotected bipeds. Fucking too can inflame or douse. Oshima’s great accomplishment is that it acknowledges sex as power, shows it in detail, and then exposes it in all of its hopelessness. Though his asocial lovers devote their lives to it, really try; he demonstrates that it is not enough—that nothing is enough.

Afterward I wonder why it was ever considered pornographic, that it could never turn one on. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Gwen, obviously much moved.

13 may 1996. I was talking with the taxi driver and he looked out of the window as we drove through Ueno Park and said, “You see that green? That’s a real spring green. In the summer it will turn a lot darker—last year it got almost black—and that fresh feeling will be all gone. But this is the shade I really like, spring green.” I looked out of the window and admired the light, fresh color. And I also admired the driver for liking it and I wondered in how many other countries I could have had this conversation with a taxi driver.

16 may 1996. Cold for May. I walk through the park to the station and notice that the north wind is blowing the leaves, turning them over. A lopsided haiku (four lines, five syllables each) occurs. I ought to save it, put in these pages a few months from now in its proper place, just as did the poets of yore. But I won’t. Here it is:

North winds turn the leaves.What had been JulyBecomes March again:Southern spring green.

23 may 1996. Alex [Kerr] came over. I decided to make him accomplice to my desertion of a god. This deity, some kind of ur-Shinto folk god, has been sitting in his box ever since Frank cleaned house and gave him to me. He is hideous—a black hump, a small, narrow face, pursed mouth, and tiny eyes. Since I am superstitious I did not want simply to put him out with the garbage. So I decided to find him a new home and settled upon that little island, already filled with Shinto stones, off from the Benten Shrine in Shinobazu Pond. This is where stands that fine phallic stone, last of old Edo, before which I have performed many a rite. Not recently, however. All this year the gate to the island has been padlocked—too many young lovers, too many voyeurs. Today, in the late afternoon, however, we managed to crawl along the fence and get into the place. At the base of the phallic stone we reverently placed my ugly little deity, now among his own kind. As we climbed back over the fence I saw him grimacing happily into the setting sun.

1 june 1996. The Dai-Ichi Bank does not collapse. Instead, it merges. Two sick banks get together and make a healthy bank. It is called by a new name, Mizuho. This is typical. Nothing ever fails in Japan. It merely changes its name. You can even sometimes use the old one and simply add shin (new). Recently a popular actor accidentally ran over a child. Feeling dreadful about it, he shaved his head and changed his given name.

8 june 1996. A discussion, arranged by the people reviving my films, all taped and recorded. Two young directors were invited to come and talk with me—their unlikely names were Furusawa Binbun and Sono Shion. They were bright and funny and serious.

View from Richie’s balcony. donald richie

We talked about the sixties, which is to them something like the Gay Nineties used to be to me. Underground films, wow, what could they have been like? I tried to tell them what it was like thirty years ago when young people were trying to find out what the truth was, and were devising various ways to express or reflect it.

I told them about the excitement of a new Terayama play, or a Hani movie, or a Hijikata dance. I told them about Kara Juro and the antics of the Zero Jikken. They wagged their heads and wished they could have been alive then—an age of heroes.

I tell them that art is dissident—it undermines the status quo. That anything celebratory is not art. Art is by its nature critical. That is its moral dimension. This I believe. Back then Japan had a number of dissidents, those who disagreed, and who spoke out. Not now though. With a new generation bred not to think we only have that great accord of which Society is so fond. And yet without the dialectic of a social culture and a counter-culture there is no art, underground or otherwise. Now official art is all there is. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, are all social products. They have been subsumed into the social/financial structure of the country. Not just Japan either. The triumph of consensus.

They are respectful, are mindful that I am elder, but at the same time they are frank and honest. “I read your books,” said Sono, “but I only thought I’d like to meet you when I learned you’d made a film about this guy who wants to jack off and his cat gets in the way. What a great idea.”

10 june 1996. I finally again finish Kumagai, after ten years of work on it. It has changed much. Originally it was a movie, a Liebestod about love and death, but that got a bit too perfumed even for me and so it turned into whatever I thought an anti-roman was, with pages of description and nothing much happening (the Battle of Ichinotani section still has part of this in it), and then slowly it became a fake diary of its hero, and then the hero himself turned fake and it turned out he did not kill Atsumori, the only reason the man is remembered at all. The book became his own feelings about this and his consenting, finally, to become his reputation.

Now what to do with it. I wish I had an agent—I could just send it off to him or her. But I can’t. No agent has ever accepted me. You’d think they would. I’m now famous enough. But there are problems. First, I am perceived as about Japan, now a deeply irrelevant subject. Second, I am already placed—I am about film. What am I doing writing novels and the like? Publishers are New York folks who want a big, fast kill, and I am not that kind of author.

11 june 1996. Rainy day. I awake from a dream of being lost in India, wallet gone. So I look into the gloom of morning and consider.

Life is a palindrome. As we entered, so we backward depart. I have now reached the correspondence of puberty. My juices are drying up and shortly the last drop will reflect the first spurt. Then I will continue on through the mirror image of being twelve, eight—then the legs will go and I will once more have trouble with stairways, and then I will crawl, and then I will lie down and squirm, and then I will end in something like that dark bed from which I came.

So one must prepare. I live in a third floor walk-up. The stairs now leave the heart pounding and will soon leave the lungs gasping. Just as I know I can now never see Tibet, so I learn that I must find a place with an elevator.

12 june 1996. Coming home through the park I see that two of the homeless have found brooms and are carefully sweeping the plaza, the steps down to the water, and the paths. They are not paid for this. It is voluntary labor. Why, I wonder. Perhaps if they police their place the cops will let them stay undisturbed—but the cops do anyway. No, I think it is because working is all they know, and their enforced idleness is a terrible punishment for them. So they find brooms and in the middle of the night sweep. If they were given buckets and brushes they would scrub.

18 june 1996. Lunch at my house with [Numata] Makiyo. He is going to help me apartment hunt. My lease is coming up in a month or so, and I know that sooner or later I must move.

We do not find much and then, passing the large apartment building at the southern end of Ueno Park, opposite Shinobazu Pond, I jokingly say that I have wanted to live there for ten years now. He looks and says, “There’s an apartment listed, want to look?” We are taken to the eighth floor, let in, and there it is, from the balcony all of Shinobazu and Ueno hanging there before me like a mandala, with Benten right in the middle. “You got tears in your eyes,” said Makiyo. And so I did.

“Well, if you feel that way, we got to get it for you,” he said, and we went down and he went to work. Lots of proof of solvency needed, but I have that, and my official standing here, and my c.v., in two languages. The rent is a bit more than I am now spending, but I can afford it, for a time at any rate.

I am very excited by this move. All of the bother of moving is forgotten in my joy that I will be able to live the rest of my life in front of such beauty, just outside the window. As with a forthcoming journey, I am already there. I sit here, but I have already left.

21 june 1996. I read that Kenzaburo Oe has said that the Japanese abroad, or in commerce with non-Japanese, tend to present self not as an individual but as “a Japanese.” He criticizes this presentation of an agreed-upon set of characteristics, a simulacrum offered as the real thing. And while it is true that other peoples do this (“as an American, I want to say that . . .”), they do so more openly (politicians, preachers), and they do not always get away with it. Presenting self as American (or English or French or German) does not enjoy social approval. The reason is that one thus denies the individual. In Japan, however, one has been taught to deny the individual for over four hundred years. Consequently presentation of self as mere nationality is so rarely criticized that Oe’s observation makes headlines.

As I read this I was listening to the NHK FM morning classical program. It is Beethoven’s Leonore no. 3, Sinding’s “Rustle of Spring,” Webern’s Bagatelles, Poldini’s “Waltzing Doll,” and the Brahms Requiem. I do not question the indigestible mixture—this is standard Japanese programming: all things foreign are equal. What I now notice, reflected from Oe’s words, is that classical music is tokenized. There is an aquarium of works, which is kept in good order (including new and exotic varieties, such as Webern) and thus protects the listener from the unruly waves of Western music. This mismatch of a concert I am listening to consists of items taken from this tank. There are national sub-tanks as well. In the American the fish are: MacDowell piano pieces, Billy the Kid, The Grand Canyon Suite, Scott Joplin, West Side Story, and selected bits of Leroy Anderson. Nothing else. I have never heard a note of Elliot Carter on NHK.

1 july 96. Moving. My belongings lie about me. Most of the pictures I have already taken to the new place. The books are out of the shelves and lie on the floor. I feel like the hermit crab, all naked, looking for another shell.

How much the illusion of self is created by the domestic environment one constructs. One knows this only when it is dismantled. Then, all of my disciplines break down. My orderly days come apart, my hours, unaccounted for, slop over. I get sleepy in the morning and my various compulsions just give up.

In the new place I will build this new home, where everything has a place and is in it. Things will get thrown out; things will get dusted or washed. And I can really see, feel, my belongings. Oh, that book (on my shelves for fifteen years), I must read it. Oh, that beautiful little bronze (on my desk for an equal time), I must put it where I can see it. Soon, however, I will again settle into the grateful cradle of habit.

8 july 1996. A party for Sato Tadao upon the completion of his four-volume Japanese film history. There was Hidari Sachiko. She has aged elegantly, and tends to be grand. Looking at a somehow different-appearing Kurisaki Midori, she said, “She has had something done to her face. One of those things where they make new holes for the ears and pull everything up.” I mention that the director of her latest film is there. “Where, where, I must snub him. He understood nothing about me. Nothing.”

Oshima’s wife [Koyama Akiko] is there with news that her husband is now in a wheelchair and is genki, if you can be that in a wheelchair. That he is going to be all right. The director of Violated Angels, Wakamatsu Koji, is there, now even more gray, even more affable. Since his old films were at the Haiyuza last week and my old ones are there this week, we talk of the brave days of 1965.

Adachi Masao’s films are also being shown. He was a friend of the Red Army members, got implicated, left the country and has now for the last thirty years been in the Near East, unable to return. I remember him as a short, serious, handsome, bright actor (he was the police inspector in Oshima’s Death by Hanging) and filmmaker. “He’s gone all white,” says Wakamatsu. I ask what he does there. Film? “Oh, no, well he works at what he can get. He speaks perfect Arabic now. Never got married.” Does he want to come back? “It wouldn’t do him any good. He never can. And he never did anything bad, you know.” Wakamatsu goes all that distance, Damascus twice a year, just to see his old friend.

With Karel van Wolferen, Edward Seidensticker, Tim Young, Gwen Robinson, Stephen Shaw, William Miller, Eithne Jones, 1996.

Obayashi Nobuhiko is the master of ceremonies and snares me into making a speech. I say whatever comes into my head, talk about the singular fact that one can trust Sato as a film critic, something rare in Japan; you always know he is speaking for himself and not for his old sensei, nor for some film company, nor for his country. No one listens—not to me, or to any of the other speakers. Once eating begins the ears are stopped. Me too. I always put away large quantities of lobster and caviar and uni and roast beef and lamb and don’t hear a word from anyone.

18 july 1996. Makiyo brought his wife and daughter over and I cooked. We had coq au vin and salad and ripe Camembert and a big chocolate cake for dessert. The little girl is three—very pretty, lively, and her father dotes on her. It is like being with a man very much in love with his dinner partner. His wife is more measured—after all, she is the one who must take care of the child.

Makiyo was himself like a child when I first met him fifteen years ago, but a very self-sufficient one. He had had to learn to be. [Numata Makiyo’s story is given in Public People, Private People.] Friendly and open, he nonetheless hid his emotions and I never knew what he felt. Now, however, with his daughter, the feelings shine. He is in love.

Later we walk, just across the street, to the festival going on around Shino­bazu. People in summer yukata looking at the plants for sale, at the watered stones shining in the dark, at the bell bugs and armored beetles for sale. The little girl and I decorate two pieces of bisque and have them baked, and then I give her the one that I made—a plate with black branches and small green fruit.

Before they left, Makiyo turned back and then reappeared with an enormous lantern plant, orange and green, for my new apartment.

24 july 1996. Gwen hosts a party for her eminent oldsters. There is Karel van Wolferen, eminent author, Edward Seidensticker, eminent translator, William Miller, eminent publisher, Stephen Shaw, eminent editor—and eminent me.

Fine food, lots to drink. The latter much softened up the party. Owlish Ed wandered in late, had gotten lost. “And I finally thought, if it isn’t this place then it isn’t anywhere, but it was.” Stephen said, “Japan is doing quite badly at the Atlanta Olympics. Does one dare confess it makes one happy? Is one agreed with?” William said, “It doesn’t make me happy at all, you beast.” And Ed said, “It makes me happy, very, very happy.” To which William replied, “I love Japan, and I don’t care who knows it.” To which Ed made reply, “Well, I don’t and I don’t care who knows it.”

But before either could become too tiresome Gwen took away our plates, which had contained sea urchin penne, and brought in the bubbling Irish stew. Then Karel decided to treat us to the Dutch national anthem, in Dutch, following which Eithne [Jones] was forced to sing the Irish national anthem in Gaelic. Ed tried the German national anthem in German but forgot the words. “The words are not important anyway, the melody is sublime. That is because it’s by Haydn. He wrote it for Austria but the Germans unkindly appropriated it.” William decided we should make up anthems for those countries that did not have them, and attempted one for Zimbabwe but was shouted down.

Gwen looked at the ceiling and Eithne brought calm by reciting her Irish nun joke. The one where the head nun asked the novice her plans once out of the convent and fainted because she understood “Protestant” for “prostitute.”

Here the conversation broke into small groups. Karel and Ed talked about Haydn, William and Eithne about Galway, and Stephen and I about our hearts. “Does it hurt right now?” he asked. No, it did not, I told him. “Mine does. It hurts right now.” I pointed out that he had drunk almost a whole bottle himself and that this perhaps caused it. “Not at all, advanced medical opinion has it that alcohol, particularly wine, is good for the heart.” I doubted that but William chimed in that he had read the same article, and finished his own bottle to prove it. Ed did not think so. He thought whiskey much better for the heart—though our hostess had wisely prepared none—and so they wrangled.

Gwen brought peace with a big ice cream cake and, since every last one of us loves a sweet, silence prevailed as we crunched and munched. I began talking with Tim [Young], who compensated for being left out (we were originally all Gwen’s friends) by being a fine host and showing me big photos, which he had downloaded from the Tokyo University machine. One showed a just-exploded star, halo still intact. “That is what our sun will do,” he told me, “but not right now. It is halfway through its life now. It is middle-aged.”

“Who, who?” asked Ed. Then, “We’re all middle-aged, every last one of us.” William, five years younger, looked at him, “You are a somewhat mature middle-aged.”

Tim showed me the other photo, something like tadpoles swimming, wakes behind them. It was a close-up of the halo of the other picture. “Each one of these is much larger than our solar system, maybe even our universe. But the funny thing is that they are flying backward. You see that tail, like a comet? Well, that is the front of the object.” I say that this means a change in our physics and he, an astrophysicist, nods.

After the cake, the cheese and the fresh cherries. (Ed: “Oh, what a treat to get real American cherries, the Japanese variety are pallid, tasteless, and outrageously expensive.”) We all began examining our watches, wondered at the lateness of the hour, and one by one wandered out into the street.

11 august 1996. Sunday morning, very early. Yesterday I fell asleep at five in the afternoon and woke refreshed and ready for a new day at three-thirty in the morning. Since Shinobazu is now my front yard, I—never having seen it at this hour—decide to take a walk.

Dressed, I walk out into the still, cool dark and cross the street. The park is a negative of its daytime self—black water, gray closed lotus, dark trees among which a few white figures wander. One of them a late okama, the dyed one in the pants suit who is too shy to call out to possible customers. There are a few late young, coupled and huddled, waiting for the morning trains. But most of them are roused and ragged men—the homeless.

There are hundreds in the park, some still sleeping on the benches or on cardboard on the ground. So many, all lying about in abandoned attitudes. The roused ones wash at the drinking fountain and then I see a few have found brooms and already begun the day’s work.

I walk to Ueno Station, the familiar street all now different, shutters down over all the shops. Even the electric cuckoo, leading the blind over the crossing, is silent. At the station I ask the two cops on duty when the station opens. Four, they say. Is there no all-night coffee shop, I wonder? Oh, no, they say, surprised at the question, perhaps implying that a well-run society like this, no one at all on the streets at this early hour, would never need such.

Back in the park the sky has lightened and the black trees have turned gray. In the pond, glowing a faint pink, the closed lotus, surrounded by dark leaves. Above, the first crows cross, and soon their calls will grow to that morning cacophony that sometimes awakens me at five or six. Seeing and hearing them now is like attending the rehearsal of a performance I know well.

The pink lotuses glow and I turn to look at the closest. And there, this being Japan, are two photographers, lens extended, waiting to catch the moment of opening. We all wait and at just four-thirty I hear a plop, like a stroke on a finger drum, followed by the click of the shutter, and then—hanging for an instant in the air while the crows caw flying against the slowly lightening sky—the sweet and watery smell of the water lily.

15 august 1996. The end of World War II, fifty-one years ago today. I was on my way to China in a Liberty ship, happy it was over but unhappy that now I would to return to Ohio, since my country no longer needed to be defended against the foe. And now, fifty years later, I am in my tower, happy in the land of the former enemy, looking at the expanse of lotus below, pink as a funeral in the sunset.

A typhoon is on the way and I decide to descend and walk along the shore, enjoying the south wind. The sun has now gone and the sky is already that deep blue of autumn, against which sail enormous clouds so white that their reflected light makes it more morning than night.

The kingfisher is still there, motionless, right by the rail, waiting for fish, occasionally darting and showing a sliver of silver minnow before it swallows. In the daytime he sometimes attracts a small crowd, and I can see them below me, circled there, like curious town folk in Hokusai prints. Now, however, I am alone with the bird and then he too flies off.

Alone under the luminous sky, I think about my recent tic, which has a life of its own, then wonder if Debussy’s portrait of Little Tic included the tic, then remember that Claude-Achille was a kleptomaniac and all his friends hid their silver when he came; then I thought of how something this common could somehow give rise to something so rare as the Saint Sebastian music, which made me think of Guido’s painting, which made me think of Mishima, and thence to voluntary death.

With Gwen Robinson, 1996.

I decided that I will not fight against the dying light. Only an egocentric like Dylan Thomas would do that. Even Stravinsky, who set the lyric and who was all ego himself, was too aware to fight against the dying light. We have an allotted time, and to hang around is as unseemly as staying on at the party even after the weary hostess has twice looked her watch and mentioned a heavy day tomorrow. The only problem is arranging the exit.

And I thought of the minnow. A flash of silver, a small movement—and then all gone. That is really all it is. A tiny spasm—man and minnow alike. Easeful death, another phrase from the poets. And I think of Jimmy [Merrill], bravely opening the closet and stepping into the eternal dark. And I think of Madame Yourcenar staring at the blackness with open eyes.

20 august 1996. I look at myself. In Japan I have lived my life in a state of consciousness. I look at everything, register it, and often judge it. I am aware of people on the street, the cracks in the pavement. Here too I have judgmental thoughts, but these are really for the purpose of shifting and sorting, putting things into categories, comparing.

I would have it no other way since, if extremes are to be considered, it is better than a life of unconsciousness, of blank eyes, deaf ears, dead brain. At the same time, I would sometimes like to relax this habitual and vigilant regard, would long to sink into oblivion, into the unself-conscious.

7 september 1996. I look from my window and see that a small crowd has again gathered on the paved plaza in front of the southern reach of the pond. The kingfisher has again come and is fishing.

A large, handsome bird, he perches by the rail and intently searches the water for small fish. When he discovers one, there is a lizard-like stretch of the neck and a flash of silver in the beak as the fish goes down.

Various people watch, the late afternoon light casting their shadows black in back of them. Young couples giggle and pass on, salaried men clutch their briefcases and briefly stare, a housewife or two wave their parasols at the bird, and the many homeless who have nothing else to do come to watch.

To one of these the bird has become important. He is a mustached, heavy, middle-aged man in shorts who has appropriated the creature. He arrives with a bag of crusts and these he drops into the water in front of the bird to attract the fish. I can see him gesticulating as he explains. If I were near enough I could hear him expound.

The bird has become his occupation, since he has no other. Whenever it appears, so does he. As it sits, still as a snake, he moves about, tossing crusts, commenting upon its habits, explaining. A number of people listen for a time. They are learning something.

Then, for no reason, the kingfisher flies to the signboard that says not to fall in, and after it has surveyed the lotus for a while it takes flight. The mustached man, with no sign of disappointment, rather with the air of a man who has finished his work for the day, closes his bag of crumbs and likewise departs.

10 september 1996. I come back late from teaching my course at Temple University, and find the back streets of Ueno awash with beautiful young women, all in the epaulets and monograms, brocades and miniskirts that signify the mizushobai service industry of the downtown. Usually the sight is hidden away in bars and clubs named You and Etoile and Hope, and costs an amount of money. Money is now not to be had, however, and so they have come outside, like exotic insects from under their rocks, and—much ill at ease in their indoor finery—stand in the open night air, hand out leaflets, and cajole.

With Sam Jameson, Edward Seidensticker, Karel van Wolferen, Eithne Jones, 1996.

They are joined by the homeless who are bedding down for the night, on cardboard in front of banks, or curled up in the little niche by the porno. A piquant combination: long tanned legs next to dirty shoes and sockless feet; much-brushed hair, stained fashionable mahogany or deep maple side by side with dirty, lank, infested strands; the smell of Chanel mingling with that of the rotgut that the homeless take to put themselves to sleep.

19 september 1996. Gwen and I go and see Ed, propped up in bed, covered with a blue blanket, getting solvent for the blood clots that have formed in the knee and are keeping him hospitalized. “These damn Japanese beds,” were among his first words. “In America you just push a button, but here in the land of the Twenty-first Century, oh, no, you have to get out of bed and crank yourself up or down.” I suggest he call a nurse. “Oh, I do, I do.” I then say that, yes, and she comes and she smiles and she happily cranks his bed up or down and that I doubt this would invariably occur in the Land of the Free. We then go on and talk about his mysterious collapse in Sasebo and how long he must stay in hospital—two weeks.

Afterward Gwen and I go and have coffee. It being an old-fashioned place, we are then given tea. It is old-fashioned tea as well. Konbucha. “It tastes like cunt,” I say. “I would not know,” says Gwen, “but it smells like me if I’m not careful.” “But it tastes good,” I mollify. “Yes, some men quite like it. I have heard that some girls have been encouraged not to douche. It builds up.” “Well,” I counter, “some people like cock cheese.” “Like feta, I have heard,” she observes, then, “Always wanted to ask, how does it get made?” “Same way as cunt tea,” I explain. “It is a real cheese too, fermented, everything.” “One could toast it perhaps.” “Perhaps, but it might be uncomfortable.”

Finishing our repast we repaired to the street and linked arms and she said, “It is so good to talk with you. I know of no one else from whom I learn so much.”

20 september 1996. The level of public manners continues to fall in this once most polite of all lands. For example, the portable phone. People walking, driving, standing on corners, laughing, grimacing, shouting into their fists. “Just go away!” someone behind me shouts. “Get out! Never want to see you again!” Startled, I turn, but he is merely using the telephone.

Voices are now much louder and eating in public is epidemic. Not just the young, but also everyone now trails crumbs and mustard drippings from whatever fast food they are consuming.

Coming from where I do, I cannot criticize this, so I merely notice the difference. It is large. Still, public politeness was often based on fear of what others would think. It was, by definition, craven. So, mustard droppings and all, I am glad to see more personality. Except that now it is all the same personality—loud, brazen, and banal. There is nothing personal in the new persona. Before everyone was polite in the same way, now they are all impolite in the same way.

25 september 1996. Paul [McCarthy], Gwen, and I go and see Ed—now much better, clots dissolved, and waiting in his new green pajamas for the rehabilitation man. Ed is anxious to get back to Hawaii. “I should not say this,” and he makes a shocked face and puts two fingers to his lips, “but I trust American doctors so much more.” I say that I would more trust a Japanese surgeon, but that I would more trust an American diagnostician. “Exactly,” says Ed, as though I had agreed with him.

In the evening I walk around and inspect the damage done by furious Violet—that was the now-vanished typhoon’s name. Now that the Americans have become convinced that fearful catastrophes are not invariably female, the next one will perhaps be named Vulcan.

A number of willow trees have had large parts torn off. Willow must be a soft wood. The cherries have fared better and the maples came out of it best of all. No one has come to clean up the damage, however. The dead willow clumps are like so many enormous heads of wilted cabbage. Probably there is a day for damage repair and they are waiting for the event.

Amid all this appropriately flailing willow, a madwoman. Barefooted, she stands in red slacks and a long green kimono-like coat, as she curses, apparently, the elements. When anyone gets close to her she begins to shriek in such a manner that very few come near. I too observe her from a distance. She is obviously homeless—dirty, no shoes, but did the madness unhouse her or was she rendered mad by loss of dwelling?

I hear the voice of sentimental posterity—why didn’t you do anything? Well, what should I have done? Gotten shrieked at? I have given hamburgers and rice balls to lots of the homeless and have talked with many and sent several off to the employment agency and given money to others. But this woman both moved and frightened me. I did not go near her.

10 october 1996. A holiday, one of the prewar imperial ones now turned democratic. My cold is bad and I spend Green and Healthy Day in bed reading the manuscript of Karel’s new book on what is wrong with Japan. What is wrong is that the citizens are still—post-Tokugawa though they be—too cowed to do much, even vote. His description is lucid and logical and, since it is intended for translation for a Japanese audience, will—I hope—make its mark.

11 october 1996. A party for Ed’s release—held in a drinking establishment near Karel’s place in Mukojima. Here he comes, triumphant on his cane, leaning on the arm of Maki, Herb Passin’s long-time girlfriend. Once sat down, he pulls up his trouser to show us his elegant service-weight stocking and the neat blue cast. We are all anxious to see what he orders after the long drought, and are all relieved that it is beer and beer alone.

Lots to eat, however—eggplant in miso and chicken wings and pork and vegetables—and the talk is about Japan, of course, but Ed utters nary a word on this subject except to agree with everyone. I do not know how it ends, however, after the beer has taken its toll. I am feeling lousy with my cold and leave early.

14 october 1996. I look about me—in the park for example. Now that it is colder many poor homeless women have emerged. They sit all day by the pond and talk, keeping each other company, but they are homeless, and their shoes have holes. Also, in this cold, begging. A woman kneeling outside the Ueno Hirokoji subway stop with an empty soft drink can, its top open for coins in front of her. A man lying on his back suddenly raises one hand, makes the sign for money—thumb and forefinger forming a hole—then raises the other in Buddhist benediction.

And by Ueno station, something somehow tragic. A very old woman in rags kneeling, leaning forward. She is so bare that her dugs hang in the winter air. And I thought of her young, when this would have been immodest, and she would have blushed and hid. Now it is not immodest, it is monstrous. Equally monstrous, no one does anything to help her. Just as monstrous, neither do I.

23 october 1996. The election is over and once again the Japanese people have chosen. Preferring stability to reform and predictability to improvement, they have agreed once more to let back in the Liberal Democratic Party, which is nothing like either of its adjectives suggests. Having escaped it two years ago, they welcome it back, forgetting all the scandals, all the graft, and all the incompetence.

It returned for two reasons. One is a new electoral formula that favors the reelection of incumbents. Two (says Tada Minoru, commentator) is that voters were influenced by public opinion polls that indicated that the LDP was likely to win. As for big winner, Hashimoto Ryutaro, Prime Minister, he said, “The reform proposals are too radical to be taken seriously.”

There may be a third reason as well. Few voted. Thinking people, a minority here as elsewhere, feel that the bureaucratic machine is in charge anyway whoever wins, and it will see that nothing changes. Non-thinking people, in their frivolous, selfish, eijanaika mood, are not interested. They are too taken up with playing with their Nintendo machines, with karaoke, with their manga, and their Walkmen. These creations of the Education Ministry are the ideal citizens for a governing bureaucracy.

22 november 1996. Journal much neglected, Bali looming—soon Dae-Yung and I will be there. Travel, the continual sighting of the new—it has many advantages. Among them is that it saves self from self. I am not myself when I am somewhere else. I do not have to feel my familiar inner geography when I have the lay of the world to gaze upon. I remember Carlos Freer telling me that Madame Yourcenar, after Jerry’s death, was frantic to travel. She kept suggesting places but she was over eighty and could not travel alone, though she did not want to be any longer with herself.

10 december 1996. Lunch with Gwen at the Press Club where we were later joined by Karel [van Wolferen] who was on his way to see [ex–Prime Minister] Nakasone. He was going to ask him what he thinks of the recent breaking of the taboo about criticizing the Constitution. I told him how Eisenhower asked about this American-inspired document back in the 1950s: “What, you still got that worthless piece of paper around?” Karel pointed out of the window at the palace lying below us. “So long as we have him we are going to have taboos. They’re a pain in the neck. They get in the way.” I tell him that royalty cannot exist without taboos. “Just what I mean,” he said.

Gwen brought up the subject of fetishism, not in regards to the royals but because we had been having a discussion about it. I said loose talk about politics was all right, but if we were to discuss something as important as fetishism we would have to define our terms. I then defined them: Fetishism is what erotically occurs when the part is taken for the whole. Karel’s, says Gwen, is that pleasant little line just under the buttock where it smilingly joins the thigh. Her own was “bottoms, men’s bottoms.” Then they asked mine and I had to say: “Everything.” But this they would not accept. “If you fetishize everything you do not distinguish the part from the whole and we cannot accept this. It is a tautology.”

11 december 1996. Fumio came over to read me the translation of my Honorable Visitors, since I cannot read it myself. Over the years he has come to know the precise level of my Japanese. He knows what I am apt not to understand, reads a difficult passage and at once puts it into simpler language. I ask him if a portion includes the fact that it is ironic. No, he does not think so. This I will talk to the translator about. Not all languages are capable of the same things. This translation does not (cannot) render the nuances of my account of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Khill in Japan. All my meaning is between the lines. In the same fashion, Japanese poetry is too filled with connotations and meanings unwritten to be successfully translated.

15 december 1996. I wander around and look at the girls in their Frankenstein boots and their elephant socks, and the boys under their variously colored thatch—blue is popular right now. I also listen to people talking on their cellular phones.

These focus all attention in the ears rather than, as is customary on the street, in the eyes. The users do not realize that they are spilling their lives into the ears of the passersby, and if they did they would not care.

I loiter near to hear what they are saying. They pay no attention. Besides, if they do notice, they see merely a foreigner, and foreigners are famous for not knowing the language. So I feel like Siegfried in the forest—understanding the language of the birds.

But this promiscuous telephoning can be dangerous. Last night’s news told of a man using his phone on the platform as the express rushed by. He was so intent on what he was saying that he walked too close to the hurtling train, was drawn into it and sucked onto the tracks, where he made his final connection.

16 december 1996. I go shopping at Ameyokocho, only a block from where I live, stretching for a long distance on either side of the tracks south of Ueno. It is indeed like a bazaar. I can see why all the Middle Easterners prefer it: right on the street, no doors or windows to bother with. Little caves, hundreds of them, filled with bargains, shopkeepers hovering. Wandering to the other side, I find a whole district I knew nothing about. It is given over to jewels—diamonds set in gold, silver, and—so it said—platinum.

I also find another store. This one is selling army surplus—from the East German Army. The prices are very low—a thick, woolen East German soldier’s overcoat for the equivalent of five dollars. Nonetheless, few people were buying. The East German Army would look odd on the streets of Tokyo. There is one man, however, who has bought himself a whole outfit. He stands in front of a mirror—uniform, hat, coat, and boots. He looks the picture of an East German soldier, except that he still also looks like one of Tokyo’s homeless—now a warm homeless though he is. I toy with a fur hat, but the East Germany Army insignia will not pull off and so I do not buy it.

18 december 1996. I walk the windy streets of Shibuya, a territory completely given over to the young. Here they come in their hordes, driven by fashion. Let me describe them lest this motley show be lost forever.

Younger high school girls wear their plaid skirts and sweaters and their elephant socks, loose, baggy, white, which they say make their legs look thinner and often have to be held up with a kind of glue that is especially made and sold over the counter. They still sometimes wear old-fashioned braids, but their manners have been attuned to the times. Among themselves they use male language, mistaking this for a kind of emancipation.

Older girls often wear very short skirts coupled with built-up boots, which reach the knee and thus offer an expanse of thigh. With this, a long overcoat unbuttoned so that the thighs may flash. Long hair dyed (chestnut, maple, mahogany) or streaked with peroxide or henna, and brown pancake make-up with silvered lipstick complete the ensemble.

It has a name. It is called kogaru—derived apparently from kokosei garu (high school girl), though the layered cut, the trimmed eyebrows, and the lipstick emulate the image of the older popular singer, Amuro Namie. Some of the girls show their navels in the summer, and often sport a ring in it.

Piercing is seen mainly in the boys. Those in high school wear eyebrow studs or lip studs as well as earrings. This with jeans (now firmly at the waist, since the groin-look is out of fashion), boots with thick soles, and lots of rings. Boys in Shibuya are more decorated than the girls are.

Along with this a new vocabulary. Saiko and saitei for best and worst are out. In is choberiba for very bad and choberigu for very good. I do not know the derivation of these. Another new word is makudurama, which can mean anything from a big sports event to a big rock concert to a big TV spectacular. Continuing into the new year is a teenage passion for purikura, photo stickers made in three minutes, showing you and your friend wearing funny hats, grinning, and making the V-sign, with which you can decorate your school locker or your letters, if you send any.

Back in Ueno, only twenty minutes on the subway, is another world. Here the young are more scarce and are not overly given to body piercing or wearing work clothes as a fashion indicator. Here such clothing is seen on the working young, but mainly on people older and poorer. Much less shopping going on. In the station, lines of old men—indigent, homeless, sitting on the pavement. I pass two in noisy conversation. One drunkenly tells the other, “I don’t have a penny (Issen mo nai no yo),” yet he must have had at least several to get this drunk.

During the fiftieth year of writing his journals, Richie, now seventy-three, is occasionally distracted by medical problems, but the clinical details of his illness are also there for their own sake; he chronicles old age much as others keep track of adolescence or the middle years. With two of the books on which he worked longest (Kuma­gai and A Divided View) still unpublished, Richie spent his time writing essays and taking notes for a book on Tokyo, and for this journal.

6 january 1997. Everyone’s first day back at work after the usual orgy of holidays—or at least the first day of attendance to indicate that work has begun. No one actually does any work. Everyone is going from office to office to give greetings and to mention work to come and their desire to be remembered in further enterprises.

Lots of bowing—people in the street, bending over for each other. I am bowed at, too, and bow back. This occurs at the International House, where I go to check the Bulletin before publication. The office staff bows. I stand up and bow. We tell each other that the New Year has begun (Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu) and that this year too we wish to be kindly remembered (Kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai itashimasu).

Such occurs wherever one is known, however slightly. In the evening I drop into the porn theater (where they have a new policy—reduced priced tickets for the aged), and am so greeted by the women who work there taking tickets. Underpaid, worn down, having to spend their holiday in this dank place, they observe the custom and asked to be kindly remembered because the law of ritual is stronger than they are.

Once inside the darkened theater I see it is more full than usual and that the patrons are bunched at the back. Then I see why. Two long-haired young girls, maybe seventeen, all dressed up in long coats, are standing there surrounded by men in raincoats. Everyone is looking at the screen and paying careful attention to no one else.

They could stand thus all night, no one making a move, each so afraid of rebuff. I, for whom the rebuff holds no terrors, go and talk to the girls. They giggle and eventually inform me that they are from Saitama (very rural), in town for a day, and thought they ought to see the sights. I asked what they think of the local offering. “Very educational,” says one as the woman on the screen writhes, orifices full.

The other men, emboldened, move closer, and so we three step into the lobby where the girls smoke and ask where I am from and giggle and I, having already seen this particular picture, tell them that an educational bit was coming up. The lady got to screw the gentleman. How, they want to know. “With a dildo,” I tell them. “Oh,” they say, then, “Where?” “In the ass,” I say. “Oh,” they say.

Two of the men join us and we have a conversation until the ticket-taking women herd us back in. There we stand in a silent puddle, me firmly beside the prettiest one, the men stationed around us. But nothing happens. Nothing ever does. We could have stood all night and nothing would have happened. Eventually the girls tire of the spectacle, and with many an attractive smile and waggish wave they leave—back to Saitama, wiser.

One of the hovering men smiles and shakes his head. I say I thought at first they were enjo kosei—high school girls out for money. Oh, no, he knew from the first. Just a couple of kids having a good time in the big city. Then, in that spirit of disinterested learning one so often finds here, he enlightens me as to the literal meaning of the term. Enjo kosei translates as “assistance-oriented relationship.”

12 january 1997. I read that an authority on psychology, one Tomita Takashi, has ascertained that the “territory area” of the Japanese is just forty-five centimeters, rather small compared to other nationalities. But so crowded are we in the cities that we have to make do. Thus, says Sensei, people send out signals that they are no threat, that they are behaving themselves. I wonder if I do that. Probably. I know I always dive for the neutral corner seat, if one is available, or at least the end of a row.

Another authority, this one named Saito Isamu, tells me that everyone does. We can, he says, let down our guard in this position, or at least only have to defend half of what we would were we in the middle. Dr. Saito goes on to tell me that men peeing always finish faster if the urinals on either side are taken. If there are no people, they dawdle. The most popular urinal is the one on the end. But do people idly dawdle? I have seen only dawdling with intent.

16 january 1997. Out with two women, both Americans, one blonde, one brunette, and after dinner we were wondering where to have coffee and I suggested the Shiro. But the fact that we were three might be a problem.

I asked one of the elderly and dignified transvestites who wait in the street and let themselves out to gentlemen who wish to go down those dank stairs but cannot without an at least nominal female.

“Oh, no,” he said, “you can’t get in with two women. Only allowed one. You ought to send them in as a pair and then take me along with you as another one.”

Not wishing that, we all trouped down the dank stairs, where the waiter in charge said it was perfectly all right so long as we each ordered a cup of their pricey brew.

This agreed to, we penetrated the potted foliage and saw a gentleman in the distance being fellated. He saw us too, and positioned himself the better to show the ladies his small but rigid, spit-slicked prick. I pointed out this detail and many another to my interested wards, and we roamed about, cups in hand.

There was a man who had his date laid back like a cello, and was manipulating her with one hand. Sitting in rear was one of the men from outside, maturely pert in a cloche and fox fur. “How come you got in with two girls?” he said. “It’s against the law.” I told him everything was against the law, including himself.

A young couple came in. Both were good looking and, it turned out, well built. Her breasts once uncovered were beautiful and his member, pants once down to the knees, was ample. As she skillfully blew him I complimented him on his size. “Thank you,” he said modestly. I then ran my hand over his bare bottom, at which point the member went limp and he sat down.

“He is such a party pooper,” said the blonde of me. “Does it all the time.” Thus admonished, I regarded the couple from a safer distance and watched his date skillfully repair my damage. When he was back in his stride I leaned over the back of their booth and said it was only fair that he practice cunnilingus upon her. He readily agreed and pulled down her panty hose. He was very skillful and reminded me of the octopus in the Hokusai print.

In the meantime my wards had also found something to look at. The two men right in front of them had their hands on their dates and were showing off their manual techniques. When they realized that they had an appreciative audience they scooted about to give the girls a better view.

“The younger one is more flashy,” said one, “but the older one is much the better. He is a real master craftsman.” “Like a traditional carpenter,” said the other. “Yes, notice the concern, the care . . .”

We then talked about desire and wondered why it was that photographs could be pornographic (that is, exciting) but that this—the real thing—was, somehow, not. I suggested it was because it was not sordid, and mentioned that I did not find color porn exciting but got worked up over black and white. They did not know what to make of this, but one said that the real thing (like here) lacked the safe endistancing of the photo.

This led to talk of voyeurism, since we were practicing it, and exhibitionism, since the others were. I suggested that such oblique participation made an act the more authentic. It was like being a witness—in the religious sense, a witness to god. This I said was perhaps why one was not turned on.

“Who’s not turned on?” they asked, eyes glued to the moving hands. I said that it was typical of the nature of the appeal that they would get turned on, if so they were, but merely by manipulation and not by the full fact of frontal sex.

Where, where? They wanted to know. I indicated the young couple’s booth where she was on her back, legs in the air, and he was on top, trim butt bobbing. The girls spared it a glance but soon went back to the sliding, gliding, fingers—thus proving my point.

The master craftsman turned around, smiled, and said that it was getting late so that they would have to leave. They came all the way from Saitama. Twice a month. He thanked us and we thanked him. Then I paid for our expensive coffee and we too left.

17 january 1997. Observing me, an acquaintance says, in mock disbelief: “You’re still at it.” He is referring to my continuing search. His assumption is that once a certain age is reached the search stops. At seventy-two I am well over whatever that age is supposed to be, and am thus something of anomaly. Conventional wisdom has it that in the wisdom of one’s years, one ceases to desire the object of the search.

But conventional wisdom is only that—conventional. It is never wise and indeed is often wrong. Existence is too vast for its petty confines, intended as these are for reassurance. Maybe in some age when humans, like animals, were urged mainly by their glands, interest ceased when glands stopped working. Not now. Glands are no longer even the half of it. Humans have complicated and enriched their existence. The search is internalized, psychologized, made central to this existence. Whether this is wise or not, it is what occurs.

And, it permits a kind of dialogue where there was hitherto none. It is a way to answer back to the demands of biology. The body says slow down, slack off, get ready to die. And the human spirit says fuck it. The search goes on because it is vital; it is life itself. To stop searching is to die. I admire the kind of mono no aware that permits acquiescence, but at the same time I resent such biological tyranny. In this sense I think that Kamo no Chomei (go along with life’s little stream) and Dylan Thomas (go not willing into that cold night) are both right. I am right too.

25 january 1997. To Karel’s for dinner. We talked mainly about food—talked so little about politics that Karel mentioned that we weren’t. Long discussion about broccoli. Karel applauded President Bush for excoriating the unappetizing vegetable. I wondered at the wisdom of this, coming as it did from a leader who threw up at the banquet locally thrown in his honor. “Yes,” reminded Eithne [Jones], “but he had the decency to warn people.” American though that was, I pursued: he still spattered the Prime Minister’s shoes.

Following this was a discussion as to where broccoli came from. Karel was certain it was that home of many abominations, America. Others thought differently. The proper volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica informed us: The Mediterranean was home to the unpopular vegetable.

The only political talk involved a remark I made disparaging patriotism. “No, no, we cannot have that,” said Karel. “There is a difference: Patriotism is good; it is nationalism that is bad.” I asked the difference. This was not forthcoming, but he added that it was good to support your country. I asked why, never having done so, and seeing little reason for attempting now.

31 january 1997. With Arturo [Silva] to the opening of the new photographic exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art. He is still thinking about the Festschrift for me. [This eventually became The Donald Richie Reader.] To this end, he has compiled a list of questions: Why did I get married; how do I reconcile the “emotionality of the journals with the cool person you present yourself as?” And then my “self-negating, voracious sexual appetite?” and, “Why did you never come out?”

This is going to be a strange kind of Festschrift. But, though I naturally think of Kinbote [the editor in Nabokov’s Pale Fire], such questions might be interesting to try to answer. I will attempt the last one: Why did I never come out?—Let me count the ways.

First, because it never occurred to me to do so. Why should I so limit myself—and only for the sake of security within the ranks? True, I grew up when such disclosure would have been damaging, and it would not be that now. But I can also see almost no advantages. Just that of having refused plurality and the possibility of the pale comforts of a single-minded security—life finally rendered simple and sure amid the questionable charms of solidarity.

Second, an existential objection: When you name anything, you limit it; you slam the door on becoming and insist upon being. If a person comes out, he proclaims his belief that he is only one thing, has never been and could not ever be another. This is creepy.

Third, a political objection. A person who comes out chooses to predicate himself on his sexuality. And only on his sexuality. Whether he so intends or not, he has made a political statement. He is Homosexual; the world is not. And it is the world he has chosen to address by coming out. He has turned sexual preference into political preference. By insisting upon difference, he has condoned division.

But you are not socially responsible, says the critic. Of course not, I answer. Would a socially responsible person have chosen to spend his life outside his own society? I am not thinking of making life better for future queers, I say. I do not believe that life gets better for anyone. I believe it gets worse, and that in an increasingly overcrowded world more and more groups will splinter and battle, and what social comfort is left will be crowded out. Reforms are based on faith.

So, as I ponder why I never “came out,” I realize how limited the question is. To come out means to have gone in and I never did. I have always been out—that is, have hidden nothing. The thing is, I have never advocated it, and it is concern at this that creates questions such as: “Why did you never come out?”

13 february 1997. I look from my window—a bright, cold day. In the distance, above the myriad concrete blocks of Tokyo, lie the blue folds of the Chichibu Mountains and beyond them a silver sliver, the snow on the distant Japan Alps. Nearer, the single finger of the Ikebukuro Sunshine Building, assorted business office spires I do not recognize, and, over the pond, the enormously ugly ex-Hotel Cosima. Having gone broke, it is now the Tokyo Sofitel.

Across the pond too, itself now brown and slate blue, the Benten temple, all white and red, with a green octagonal roof of its own. Passing by it, small figures, some walking, some on bikes, all bundled up. Two small bridges, the ducks brown smudges, the gulls white flying dots. Nearer, on this shore, the promenade.

There, by the water, sitting in the patch of sunlight, surrounded by shadows of tall buildings including my own, sit the old women. Every day from early morning, they come out in their coats and kerchiefs and spend the day. Unlike the ladies of the night they are not working—and they are all real women.

They have no work. And they have nowhere else to go. They sit and smoke. In warmer weather they were visited by equally aimless old men. At first I thought they were aged hookers. But, they are not; they are homeless. Every day they have nowhere to go and so they come and sit companionably in the sun. I don’t know where they go when it rains.

Lowering my gaze, I see on the other side of the toilet, hidden among the bushes, the old man who is there every day. He sits on a stone, bent almost double, and stays for hours. He too has no home. He does not move. The sun has long crept past him, but still he sits on his cardboard square. Blue cap, green coat. Hours he sits, face hidden in his upturned collar. He is dying.

Lower yet is the street. I bend over my balcony, and below me are cars and people walking. The world continuing.

16 february 1997. Doing proof on the [Lafcadio] Hearn book I am again struck that he, unlike [James Curtis] Hepburn, never learned Japanese, and yet that it is he rather than Hepburn who is credited with being the foreigner who most “understands” the place. Even if one uses the word in the Japanese sense (“understands” means “agrees with”), however, Hearn did not understand, nor did he attempt to. He attempted to describe, which is something quite different. Would knowing the language have gotten in the way? Possibly. Barthes would have thought so.

And then I think of myself, here fifty years to Hearn’s fifteen, but almost equally illiterate. Very odd—and both of us utterly dependent upon language (our own) for our living. I cannot say that Barthes’ beliefs apply to me. Though I distrust casual words, I still believe that the proper combination can preserve reality.

Why did I never learn to read and write? (I speak tolerably well—to be in Japan and not understand what is said to one would be intolerable.) But why, when I am otherwise so industrious, so lazy in learning the written tongue?

Ed [Seidensticker] (who knows the written tongue as do few others) thinks my ignorance a good thing. “I admire you, Donald,” he once said. “You never learned to read. Believe me, if you had, you would not stay in this country for five minutes.” Would, I wondered, the depths of mendacity displayed on the printed page drive me from my chosen land? Perhaps. Ignorance is also bliss.

I am not saying that I am better off illiterate, but that I can still manage, illiterate though I be. And, unlike Lafcadio Hearn, I do not attempt to hide this defect.

23 february 1997. It is now a year since Takemitsu died, and this afternoon his widow held a commemorative party at the Sogetsu Kaikan. Invited were people who had been close to him, people with whom he had lived and worked. Some music was played, and Kishida Kyoko read a poem he had written for her ten years before. A few speeches, the most interesting from his outspoken daughter, who said that there had been a lot of talk about the medication rather than the disease having killed Toru. She did not think so; the reason being that her father had worked closely with his doctors, had interested himself in his disease. Diseases actually, for in addition to cancer he had something call kogenbyo. (I have just looked up the word; the dictionary has nothing, probably I misheard it.) He knew what medication he was getting. Though this does not bar death by medicine, it makes it less likely.

The food we were served too had to do with the illness. As he lay in hospital, Toru could not eat. So he wrote imaginary menus for himself, and it was one of these we were served, food he would have wanted. There was deep-fried haddock and golden-brown glazed chicken, spaghetti with squid, fried rice with duck, and some odd items—boiled cabbage with shaved katsuobushi. Since he did not get around to the pudding there were no desserts.

Oshima [Nagisa] was there, the first time I had seen him since his stroke. He was in a wheelchair but looked fit given what he has gone through. He took my hand with both of his, and his grip was strong. So was his smile, no sign of the lopsided grimace of the paralytic—like Eric. He created this all himself—has been in training for almost a year.

Ooka Makoto told me that this kind of exercise is very difficult. There is nothing to hold onto. It is like exercising in free fall. He himself knows about it. He had a stroke some years back. But much lighter, he said, nothing like Oshima’s. Still, the battle to control the body, to retrain it, was not only difficult, it also seemed impossible. Had to start up once again—every day.

We talked about the Toru boom, the fact that you cannot turn on the radio without hearing something of his. I wonder if that is a good thing, such exposure. Ozawa Seiji says absolutely not, first because Toru would not have wanted it, second because they usually play his various pop arrangements and only them, and third because a listener backlash is bound to occur. He laughed, “Look what happened to Mozart.”

I also heard from Non-chan [Nogami Teruyo] that Kurosawa is in a bad way. Broke his leg. Is now in bed. Sees no one, interested in nothing. We talk about Mifune. He perhaps, unlike Kurosawa, does not know what is happening to him. I learned that his wife took the child, upon whom he doted, and left when his Alzheimer’s became apparent. At the same time, his first wife returned to take care of him, which was very traditional of her.

All this temporal talk was relieved by [Kanaseki] Kuniko who, though as bereaved as anyone, Hisao having died only eight months ago, said, “Well, so what? I think about it. And I think of my going next. And I think, why not? I’ve had a good time. I’ve had a good run for the money.” And she smiled, that wide, happy smile of acceptance, which I so much admire in those strong enough to have it.

4 march 1997. Spring slowly approaches, each day a little warmer, though still chilly. I take a stroll in the park and pause to look at the ground near Benten’s island temple. It is rich, something pregnant.

The shallowness of Japan’s geological history is seen in the richness of its soil. Here in these relatively recent islands, the earth has never been much walked on. It is still itself.

I remember India, where the earth has been trod upon for millennia, so used by feet that it is as though baked, a smooth, claylike surface offering nothing to plants—turning back to stone. Not here. In Japan there is still renewal.

Walking on, circling the temple, crossing the bridges, taking the path leading around the lake, I think of renewal and that brings to mind the shrines of Ise. They are renewed every twenty years and are consequently always as they were. This has been going on since the seventh century (with one major interruption of over a hundred years when no one could afford to rebuild), and the last was in 1993, replacing the structures finished in 1973, which took the place of those built in 1953.

That is where I came in. I remember them because that 1953 was the year I returned to Japan and made my first visit there, and they were gleaming new, all white in the afternoon sun and still smelling of cypress. Then they grew old and gray and developed cracks and the reed roof turned to moss. After they were torn down the new structures were built (1973), but I do not remember those. The 1993 buildings, however, I saw a year or two later when Dae-Yung and I went to Ise. Still white, but no longer fragrant. Those in 2013 I will not see, but there is a strange kind of comfort in having accompanied the metamorphoses of Ise, and having observed—indeed, taken part in—this civilized reply to the demands of immortality.

5 march 1997. At Kitazawa in Kanda I see the Isherwood diaries. For this forty-dollar book I pay the equivalent of seventy dollars, the usual mark up here on foreign books. But I want to read it. I am looking for models of journal presentation, and his seems to have all the apparatus. Also, I want to examine the binding. I did not know that over a thousand pages could be so sturdily bound (this is only the first volume), and I was thinking mine might be too long.

Finally, I wanted to read Christopher on himself. It was from him that I learned the presentation of the discrete self—learned it through the Berlin Stories. In his diaries I can expect something more unbuttoned, and I may yet learn something. Presentation of self is a kind of seduction of the reader, and though I can do without Christopher’s soul searching, I am interested in his techniques.

I recognized him at once when we first met in 1957. We were so much alike. His admission of grave doubts about himself, his shrugging off of self, his half-appeal to one’s better senses—all of this constituted charm and was intended to lure you close. For what reason? To be seduced if he found you likely, to be made a part of the procession if he did not. And behind it all something very real, something large and kind and a bit sentimental. Since I am much that way myself, I backed off a bit, though I too was in love with Herr Ishyvoo of the Berlin pieces and wanted to be him.

So, I turned into him. The first-person narrator in The Inland Sea would have been different without the example of Goodbye to Berlin. At the same time, though we saw something of each other over the years, we did not become close. I felt professional toward him. I had learned so much. So I asked his permission and dedicated Tokyo Nights to him. Now I am with him again reading these journals. How well he has captured his own tone. How painful the striving to be sincere, how apparent the failure.

7 march 1997. To the bank: my investments are up for renewal. The efficient Ms. Yamaguchi tries to make sense of it all for me. And indeed it is not complicated, but whenever I am faced with large numbers I go blank, do not comprehend. My bank account is not that large, and so my failing has to do with something else.

This I began noticing when I was a child. Simply put, I cannot comprehend money, particularly when it is mine. I remember Lincoln [Kirstein] being all thumbs when it came to counting the bills. My head is like his fingers. It is something I willed early—not to interest myself in what interested my father most. I did not consider that he had to be interested, he had me and my sister to support. I simply and selfishly turned against it. Now I am paying for it. I write down all the sums because, though I carry in my memory all of the Köchel numbers of Mozart’s pieces, I cannot remember how much money I have invested, and where.

8 march 1997. Karel [van Wolferen] over for lunch. He had given me his new article to read, a piece about Japan’s failure to come to terms with wartime facts, and the reasons for it. The rightist press refers to the masochistic leftist press (what there is left of it), and says enough of this. It is true that the left has tried to make political hay out of war crimes, as it has of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A result is that these atrocities are used as political ploys, and then the rightists say enough of this masochistic wallowing, when it is not that at all—it is political expediency.

I suggest that Karel make clearer that when the Japanese use masohisimu they do not mean our clinical masochism, and when the word is used in conjunction with comfort women and military brothels an odd image is formed. Also I think he ought temper his attack on Oe Kenzaburo, whom he holds aloft as a sniveling, self-proclaimed victim. But then Karel believes a nation ought to have an army, but not use it. When I tell him that this is a contradiction in terms, he shakes his head.

We go on to the horrid state of the Japanese young. They have no one to talk back to because no one is there. He wants to use their slavery to fashion as an indication of how controlled they are. After all, the hippy gear of thirty years ago was real counter-culture. But it now becomes fancy dress—punk and grunge fashion statements. Still, fashion statements are a kind of control, too.

13 march 1997. Took Peter [Kubelka] around. He is interested in how the past lives on, so I took him to Yanaka. In the various small shops where we went he found a rustic basket from Iwate. “Oh, this I must have. It is five thousand years old.” I said I doubted this. “No, really. This is how they made them—all over. Neolithic. Look. And still in use.” Then I took him to Kappabashi, where he looked at modern kitchenware and tried to guess what certain unfamiliar instruments were for. He asked their names and wrote them down in his notebook. He also bought a bamboo grater.

Food is another interest. He liked his toriwasa and wanted the recipe. (Blanch chicken breasts, mix with wasabi and trefoil [mitsuba], sprinkle with strips of seaweed, and serve.) At Ameyokocho we spent an hour looking at edibles and asking the names of each, all of which went into the notebook. “Is that an eel too? If so, then, kindly ask what its name is. Yes, unagi, but what kind of unagi?”

At the getamoniya in Asakusa the notebook got a real workout. So did Peter when he discovered he could eat there. He ordered one pit viper, and one portion each of baby bees, pickled locust, and boiled silkworms. We watched as the owner cut off the head of the snake and then put it on the counter where it bit the surface for a time. The blood was drained into a shot glass and grape juice added. “Grape juice?” wondered Peter. “Surely that is not Japanese. Surely it is an importation.”

He liked the marinated bees and the boiled silkworms. I tried one of the latter. It tasted, strangely, like mothballs. Did not like the bees. Too sweet. The rest of the snake was deep fried, bones and all, and served with cabbage and lemon. I tried a piece. Tough, no special taste.

“Not eating such things,” said Peter, “is just imagination. Things like this are highly edible. Protein.” My own imagination prevented my trying the locust, all legs and eyes, but I admired Peter for eating everything in his relentless pursuit of knowledge. To write everything down, to remember, to think and to savor—this is living.

The real treat, however, came in the matsuriya where he wanted to buy a hyoshigi, those pieces of wood that when clapped make a splendid stroke of sound. He bought two sets, shaman rattles, a musical rasp, two bells, and a small drum—paying the large bill with his credit card.

“What a fine day,” he said with that round, friendly, accepting smile. “Thank you so much. Ah, my lovely basket, I must look at it again.” And there on the street he unpacked his bag and admired his purchase.

14 march 1997. Reading in the Isherwood diaries. Should one use one’s diaries as vehicle for quandary? Christopher does this a lot, so does Gide—and others too . . . Rousseau. One should use journals for doubt, but as for muddle, I think not. It smells of hedging one’s bets. For example, this domestic dilemma of Isherwood’s.

“It is absolutely essential that this state of affairs” (living with the awful Bill Caskey) “shall stop.” The question is how. Either he leaves Caskey or he doesn’t. “Leaving Caskey—quite aside from being terribly painful—wouldn’t really solve anything. Unless there were someone else to go to—which there isn’t. . . . Therefore, we have to stay together.”

It does not occur to him to live alone. He does not see that he is impossible to live with, does not understand that being alone does not mean being lonely. Since his pattern is to fight with his roommates, then to suffer, I am left to gather that it is the suffering that is necessary.

18 march 1997. Cold, raining, and in the great tan pond below me are five slashes of white, like brush strokes—five heron fishing on this rainy day. They stay there the whole morning, occasionally taking a step or turning a head. And there, in the drizzle below me, sits the old man in the hat who seems to have grown there, like moss.

1 may 1997. Chris [Blasdel] takes me out to dinner—at the Nakano Tunisian restaurant. Afterward we have coffee at the Fugetsudo and talk about life after death. His idea is Rudolph Steiner’s—that the physical body vanishes but others linger. The “astral body” lasts as long as do flowers on the bier, which is why they put flowers there. Others last longer. After that, everybody repairs to the stockpile and then gets recycled.

I tell him his idea is somewhat like that of Nils [Kreidner], now over for the last time before leaving to go back to school in Germany. We had talked about life after death. I said there is none: it is like turning off the light. He said there is, kind of. Not heaven and hell, of course. These are real, but we make them for ourselves, everyday, right here. No, we transmigrate, but the number of souls is finite. Eventually everybody gets to be everyone else . . . eventually. This is original—I have never heard this theory before.

As for my light bulb—instant nonexistence—even the most superstitious Japanese would agree. I wonder if this might not be because the individual is so much less stressed here, and hence so much less valued.

4 may 1997. Since I am now writing my introduction to the translation of Asakusa Kurenaidan, I once more go there, to Asakusa, to see if I can find any trace of what I once felt. Fifty years ago it was still alive, this great entertainment district. The merry-go-round was still there, and the movie theaters, the yose, even some remnants of the park. No longer. It has been gentrified, something which can occur only in a dead neighborhood. There is an amount of created nostalgia—statue of Enoken the Asakusa comedian, a new office building called the Denkikan, named after the first movie theater. The old theatrical district, the Rokko, is now gone. There is a sauna bath by that name and a new futuristic structure (Za Rokko), which houses cheesy little boutiques and fast junk food places. The only thing alive about the place is the Japan Racing Center, an enormous complex for people to go and place bets on distant horse races. The place is more insipid than depressing. I wander for an hour, but it is no longer Asakusa so I leave.

3 may 1997. Chizuko [Korn] here, alone, for a visit. I admire the way that she has adapted to life in New York—and life with Frank—neither at all easy. The carefully coiffed Chizuko, elegantly and expensively dressed, wafting the aroma of mizushobai, is gone. In place, a pleasant woman of fifty or so wearing a cotton shirt and granny glasses, with lots of big, loose, undyed hair. She is her age, has accepted it, and is perfectly natural with it.

We talk about their life in New York, just the two of them, with a few friends—like my ex-wife, Mary. She talks naturally about his children (against whom she was dagger-drawn when here), she even willingly talks about the dead Marian. Maybe it is having to take care of the eighty-three-year-old Frank that has made her so herself.

5 may 1997. Boys’ Day, now called Children‘s Day (though girls are allowed to keep Girls’ Day on March 3), the last of that chain of holidays optimistically dubbed Golden Week. Today people, exhausted by their idleness, confronted by masses of leisure choices, idle around the pond awaiting welcome work.

Bang-bang, loud, impatient, someone at the door, something that almost never happens in this well-guarded apartment. It is the police, a single, spectacled man with a large clipboard. He is checking the neighborhood he tells me. And I am—he peers at his papers—Mr. Donald. I explain that that is my first name and he makes an erasure. He then gives his speech. He is here to help me. I live alone it appears. (I have long learned that the cops know much more about me than I think they do—and the same for everyone else in the archipelago.) So if, for example, I one day find myself unable to move (he looks into my lined face) I need only call this number (handed over) and either he, Officer Kato, or one of his aides will come to rescue me. Then with a smart salute and a bow he is gone.

I hold my piece of paper with my lifeline telephone number on it and smile. How fortunate I am to live in this country, how very lucky I am to have come here forever, how grateful I am for this present on Boys’ Day.

11 may 1997. To be political is to be engaged in administration, having an organized polity, taking a side in politics. Those who do have a stake in any outcome are attempting to create what they want. Disinterested politics is impossible. If one is political for gain it means one has faith in one’s strength; if one is political for “the people,” or any other such concept, one has faith in the object.

So many reasons for me to despise politics. It is self-serving; it is desire masquerading as good; at its worst it is rape, at its best it is seduction. Odd, since I do not resist any of this in its physical aspect (well, yes, rape), why do I so resist it in its ideological form? Why do I even think resistance possible? Politics is everything. I am playing politics even though I think I am not—pushing my agenda.

With such thoughts do I occupy my Sunday stroll. In Ueno Station I see coming toward me a limping, frowning old man. Then recognition—it is Edward Seidensticker. We stop. “What are you doing?” he asks. “My postprandial,” I say. “A likely story,” says he, smiling broadly. “And yourself?” “Back from Maebara. Had to talk on a poet. Woke up at five this morning to think about what I could possibly say.” “What did you possibly say?” “God knows.” “Want to have a coffee?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I am tired. I am going home.” Upon parting he added, daringly, “Good hunting.” “Tut-tut,” say I, waving a finger. “Postprandial.”

13 may 1997. At dinner Ed tells me that sumo is slipping. For the first time in a decade, seats have this week failed to sell out. Indeed, some four hundred, an unheard-of number, are left unsold. He ascribes this to a rule that people in the same stable cannot fight each other, and all the strong ones are now in one stable. I ascribe it to the essential idiocy of sumo. “But it has been popular until now,” he says. “ ‘You cannot fool all of the people all of the time,’ ” I quote.

Then he kindly helps me with my introduction to Asakusa Kurenaidan, the book I have been working on for fifty years now. I am beginning to believe that, at last, my half-century-old promise to Kawabata will be honored. “Of course,” says Ed, “you got all of your information from me.” I agree and add, “That is why in my letter I was wondering how to handle this matter.” “What letter?” “The letter I enclosed with the manuscript.” “There was no letter.” “There was.” “Well,” he said, “it is but a small matter—still when one has done scholarly work, one would wish for at least some recognition.” “That, Ed, is just what I said in my letter.” “What letter?” Etc. . . .

Later on we speak of death and dissolution. He tells me that when a person dies, his or her sphincter relaxes and he or she shits him or herself. I tell him that all men die with erections, such being the meaning of stiff. This reminds me of the conte drôle of Balzac, where the old maid plucks the corpse of the freshly hung thief from the scaffold and so avails herself that he regains consciousness.

We are into our desserts at this point and agree that it is a droll conte indeed.

15 may 1997. I take a long walk and, as I have for half a century, revel in the city, in Tokyo, the largest of all cities. When I am in the country I am enchanted for an hour or so, but then become uneasy. In a small town I walk the few streets and then begin to feel closed in upon. But in a city there are always further reaches, places one has never seen, those one never will.

I remember Baudelaire walking with spleenish content the streets of Paris. He said that the pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy. So it is. He said it was because the multiplication of number. I, agree, adding that it is because of the multiplicity of seeming opportunity. In a city anything can happen, in the country little, and in the grave nothing.

19 may 1997. Am reading the admirable Umberto Saba: “A poem is an erection; a novel is a birth.”

22 may 1997. Ran into Ed and we went and had a drink at an izakaya, the kind of place I almost never go—first because I don’t drink and second because I feel I am ruining the atmosphere (very Japanese) for everyone else. Ed drinks, however, and ruining atmospheres was never a concern of his. Rightly so. They ruin ours (all that smoking) much more than we with our foreignness ruin theirs.

We talked about food dislikes. He does not like unagi, my favorite. And I do not like natto, his favorite. So he orders natto wrapped in shiso leaf and deep-fried and, sure enough, it is delicious. We both agree about oden. I cannot abide it. He holds his nose when he eats it.

Then in a kindly and concerned manner he asks me about money. Do I have enough? This I take as friendship, because how many people would risk misunderstanding to so inquire. No, he does not want any nor does he intend to give me any. Like a true friend, he worries about my future. I reassure him as best I can.

25 may 1997. A review of my Public People, Private People says that, “. . . the present reader may feel a little envious of Richie for getting to meet people of a kind that no longer exist in an era that will never come back.” Is that true? About the era, of course, but about the people? Yet it was certainly easier to meet people back then. And not just because foreigners were perhaps helpful. Japanese acquaintances tell me that they now have the same problem. Strangers are not so open to experience as they were. Also, solitary people are rare now, though they were once common. People come either pairs or groups now—or, if single, they are accompanied and preoccupied with their cell phones. In all events they come self-sufficient. They do not need anyone. Now the only way to meet people in Japan is the same as everywhere else. Be introduced. One can no longer profitably cruise for acquaintance (nor for anything else), and this is certainly a change from the good old days.

And yet—walking in Ameyokocho I see a palanquin coming toward me, an ornate, phoenix-crowned, and very heavy float carried by a number of men and some women, all gotten up in some kind of Edo costume, the men showing their bare torsos, the hayashi of the drums and flute keeping everyone in step. The Ueno summer festival, or part of it.

Walking past it I notice that one of the men, loin-clothed, with an incongruous permanent wave, is looking at me. I look in return and he smiles, and with a free hand waves. It is my barber. Behind his chair at the shop he is the last word in modern: the perm, the dispatch, the cool way of today’s youth, the radio blaring American rock, and the shelves stocked with contemporary mousses. Yet here he is—a friendly young man straight from Edo.

26 may 1997. Am reading some modern “gay” diaries. They share a remarkable degree of disingenuousness. I suppose I share it as well, or else I would not so much mind it. But I have another reason for disliking it. And this is that those who write in this hypocritical manner are always pleading guilty to the lesser crime. Is this something that afflicts the tribe? My impatience is caused by my not wanting to be a tribe, but an individual.

Maybe this is the reason I so dislike the term “gay”—it has tribal connotations. It means, as we are often told, an alternate “lifestyle,” which is plainly familial. Gays do this, gays do that, they also shop at gay stores and employ gay lawyers; there is, I understand, a chain of gay undertakers—a profitable line. The term so stresses the collective that it can only reinforce a stereotype. This is why I would prefer a pejorative, like “queer.” Here the stereotype is much less focused because no one wants to focus it.

A useful distinction is made by Robert Aldrich [in The Seduction of the Mediterranean, 1993]. He says that there are old and new models of homosexuality: The old was an aesthetic model, but the 1970s gay model promoted hedonism rather than intellectualism. The earlier idealized and spiritualized; the new put a premium on physical expression and espoused a happy promiscuity.

The old destinations were Rome and Venice, Capri and Sicily, the new ones San Francisco and New York, or the gay ghettos of any large city. The old was proudly elitist and rather apologetic; the new view is militantly political, sometimes radical, espousing the idea that gay is good, exalting gay pride, and an egalitarian demand for the right to be different. Another difference: the older style, mine, was attached to the world as it is, the straight world. The new style turns in upon itself and invents a world that has few links with the real one.

In this way it is a bit like Japan, also an exclusive club, also a commercial venture with its own Japanese services for Japanese only. Why do I like one (Japan) and have difficulty tolerating the other (Gayville)?

28 may 1997. Reading Boswell. On 1 April, 1776, having heard of a pretty, fair girl on call, “. . . I sent for her and enjoyed her, and . . . a kind of license I have had . . . I thought this should be the last act of this fit of debauchery.” The ellipses are not his; they are those of his anonymous censors who sliced up the journal. He had had the bravery to put things in. I will too, and will here put in something I was going to leave out.

Tonight I was walking in Sumida Park and a tobishoku [scaffolding workman], still in his work uniform, spoke to me. He was in his late twenties or so, and had a pleasant manner. As we talked he said he had once had a foreign friend, met him several times, right here in this park. “Bet you played around (yappari itazura shita),” I said. He nodded and held up two fingers. “Twice?” “No, he gave me two thousand yen.” “That’s a coincidence,” I said, “I have two thousand yen right here in my pocket.” He smiled and asked, “You want to do it?” I said I sure did and we retired. He took his time but seemed to enjoy it.

Afterward I asked where he was from. From Miyazaki, in Kyushu. Then he asked where I was from. I said Canada, as I often do. He turned and looked at me. “My foreign friend from before was from Canada.”

We looked more closely at each other. “How long ago was it?” I asked. “Eight years ago.” “Was he wearing bifocals, like me?” “No.” “I started wearing them five years ago,” I said.

We sat on a bench and tried to remember. Couldn’t. Then he asked if I knew how he knew it was eight years ago. He said it was because just after that that he went to “school.” School, I wondered? This is what they call jail, he explained. What was he in for, I wondered?

“I killed a man. I didn’t mean to. I was drunk. He was drunk too and he kept picking on me, and I had this knife and I took it and wanted to frighten him and hit him in the leg with it. Hey, that hurt, he said. It is supposed to, I said. Then, I don’t know why, I stabbed him in the chest. I took him to the hospital. He died on the way. They gave me eight years.”

After that we sat on the bench and watched darkness settle in for the night, love having somehow once again joined death.

31 may 1997. On the way home I bought a Big Mac Juicy Double Burger and sat in the park to consume it. As I did so I was aware of being looked at. Glancing around I could see no one, and then noticed near me an inhabited cardboard box. In it was a man regarding me. He did nothing but look, did not lick his lips or hold out his hand. The homeless here never beg; they simply sit and slowly die. So I handed him my Big Mac Juicy Double Burger, one bite taken out of it, and he took it and retired into his box.

And I suddenly remembered fifty years ago, in front of the Ginza Hattori Building, now Wako, then the PX, making an identical gesture with a bitten hot dog. I was then twenty-something and he was about five. Now I am seventy something and he is in his fifties. Nothing has changed, except everything.

1 june 1997. To Fumio’s bar, the Zakone. He is having a week-long twentieth anniversary party, which opens tonight. The place is full—just like two decades ago. He gets out a new guest book so that I can be the first to sign it, then I am found a seat and given something to eat and drink. The place looks the same, still the same silver pinstripe wallpaper we chose to make it look bigger, still the same round bar he wanted so that everyone could see everyone. On the door and on the place mats—and now on the telephone card he gives to each who comes to the event—the drawing of people lying about in just any which way (zakone ni) that I drew twenty years ago.

But we are much changed. An older crowd now. Some, like me, having difficulty with the four-floor walk-up. And Fumio, now heavier, grayer—but inside just the same.

4 june 1997. Something seen fifty years ago and then missing for forty, are people squatting. This is the Asian position for resting—sitting on the heels. In postwar Japan, however, the posture became provincial, and dressed up women could no longer do it in high heels. Yet, it never entirely died out. One saw it in the country and in the country-like sections of the city—Asakusa or Ueno.

But now it is back, and the squatters are young people. There they squat in their nose rings, their low-slung pants, and their dyed hair. This, the traditional Tokugawa position for rest, has become the young’s position for hanging out.

6 june 1997. Late, going home, I pass a group of squatting high schoolers. One of the boys, obviously seeking to impress the girls, says that foreigners are funny (okashii no yo). The sight of me has prompted the remark and he is, like everyone else, unaware that some foreigners speak Japanese. It is thus not a provocative remark, but an observation he might have made of a passing dog, in reference to dogs in general.

I am not offended by the remark (it is scarcely personal), but I am interested that the remark was made at all. He made it because he wanted to assert their feeling of being in a group. By defining those outside this group as funny, he strengthened their group feeling of not being funny. This made everyone feel good. And for so long as a feel-good grouping is necessary, we will have xenophobia, racism, and all the rest. The only solution is to dissolve the pleasures of groupery.

Had I become angry, felt slighted, outraged, etc., I would have become as culpable as they, for I would have brought my own feelings of group (as a foreigner) to strive against theirs.

7 june 1997. At International House Mr. [Tatsuya] Tanami told me that at the Japan Society recently they were speaking of intellectual exchange—country to country. Then they realized that there were no Japanese they could exchange, because there are no intellectuals.

We tried to decide why and agreed that there are none, because to be an intellectual you must espouse your own independence and your own probity, unswayed by political affiliations. This is an impossibility everywhere, true. There ought not to be Catholic or Communist intellectuals, yet it is said that they exist. If so, however, then they might be, like Sartre, intellectuals first, Communists second.

In Japan, however, everyone is, whether they like it or not, Japanese first. Intellectuals, like everyone else here, are spokesmen for their political (Japanese) identification. Even if they are anti-establishment, or what passes for dissident here, they are still oriented by their nationality and its demands.

Until there are real individuals, there can be no real intellectuals.

Those given to an exercise of the intellect, inclined toward abstract thinking about aesthetic or philosophical subjects, seem to thrive best when words are not used: painters, composers, and filmmakers. Mr. Tanami and I try to think of a proper Japanese intellectual. He can come up only with a dissident manga artist.

14 june 1997. I hear that the old Weatherby plot, house now gone, holds a brand-new parking lot. The Japanese-style garden has thus been razed; the beautiful sarusuberi tree has been carted off or destroyed. I know why—the land will now be a place for autos until a certain time and then, in a different tax bracket, the land will accommodate, finally, the desired, massive new building.

3 july 1997. I learn that Meredith [Weatherby] has died. He left Japan well over a decade ago, took his friend, Mizuno Fumio, with him, and then dropped all of his friends. Last Friday he was eating and something went the wrong way, and by the time he reached the hospital he was dead.

I owe him much. He taught me how to write; he first published me. At the same time, he later neglected me as he finally neglected everyone, and so I neglected him. At the same time, I wonder that I should have so little feeling for the death of a man with whom I lived, who in many ways formed me, and who was for a time generous with me.

But I do not feel culpable. Meredith so changed. From a man who loved good writing, who liked stylistic experiment, who gave me Arabia Deserta, who encouraged and then published my Companions of the Holiday, even though (or because) it was about him and his household, he turned into a person who turned on the TV in the morning and left it on until late at night, who stopped reading Japanese, then stopped speaking Japanese, to whom everything was too much trouble, eventually even living here, finally living at all.

4 july 1997. Both of us dressed up, Seidensticker Sensei and I accompanied each other to the American Embassy. They had two seatings (though no one sat down), and no ambassador as yet. I discovered the green tea and the food, and Ed discovered the gin and the tonic.

I am doing a panel on Japanese literature for International House, and the idea is that the best translator talks about his specialty. Donald Keene I will ask to do Mishima, and Ed I will ask to do Kafu or, if he wants, Kawabata, and Howard [Hibbett] I will ask to do Tanizaki and . . .

“I want to do Tanizaki,” said Ed. “I did him first, and I do think best.”

“But if you do Tanizaki, then Howard will have no one to talk about.”

“So?”

7 july 1997. I went to see Hani Susumu, whose retrospective I want to do at Telluride next year. His films have never received their critical due, and that it was he who created the nouvelle vague Japonaise has been forgotten, though he is now locally very popular as the creator of African animal TV shows. We speak of this.

“You remember, when we were young and I was working at Iwanami, doing pictures like Children Who Draw. What I admired, no, loved in those children was their innocence, their enthusiasm, their vigor, and their naturalness. Well, we do not find children like that anymore. We haven’t for decades now. And that is why I turned to animals—to try to find the same thing. And I have.

“It’s society’s fault. I do not admire people, though I admire many persons. But I don’t like what society does to persons. It perverts them. Yet, I don’t want to attack society. I am not that kind of person. What I would like to do is to ignore it. Or, better, show something else. This is what I have done in my pictures—all of them, including the animal ones.

His wife, Kimiko, helps him, accompanies him. When she is out of the room he says, “There was another reason. When I was divorcing Sachiko [Hidari, Kimiko’s sister], I wanted to cause my wife the least possible trouble—and there was, you remember, a big uproar in the press—and so I just left. I went to Africa and I discovered the animals, and myself.”

22 july 1997. I read about the bonobo ape, which behaves in a way curiously familiar to me. Whenever it runs into difficulties—experiences stress as it were—it starts to rub its genitals, and those of anyone else around. The behavior is so unselective, so gregarious, that reproduction cannot be its aim. Its aim is successfully using sex as a substitute for aggression.

Looking at myself and making a comparison with the ape, I wonder if I am so filled with aggressions that I too am attempting to use sex as substitute. That is, when I am successful and can find the kind of sex I find appropriate.

When I cannot, however, as in this changing demography, and when I do not redefine what is appropriate, then aggression turns against me. I do not work; I do not really socialize; I take it out on the weaker, and experience that immovable-object, irresistible-force syndrome that is neurosis if I can cope with it, and psychosis if I cannot.

25 july 1997. The Kawakita Prize ceremony, the fifteenth. This year it is Ima­mura Shohei, who now walks with a cane, unsmiling as always, unconcerned with all social niceties, and when he speaks he does so with the unconsidered candor of a farmer. At the same time, he is capable of capturing on film the most delicate of nuances, the most excruciating of social patterns. I remember his calling himself a farmer once. This was when he said, by way of comparison, that Oshima was a samurai.

Oshima not there, but [Tomiyama] Katsue and I talk about him. Still in his wheelchair. She says the trouble now is psychological—he will no longer try. His wife is in worse trouble—psychiatric.

With Okajima Hisashi I talk about the sorrows of the Film Center. With his superior, Mr. Oba (they always move to different rooms at parties), I talk about smoking. Which he still does. “Warui yatsu (Bad man),” I say. “Warui yatsu hodo yoku nomu (The bad smoke well),” says he.

29 august 1997. “We saw you yesterday,” I said to Ed. “And what was I doing when you spied upon me?” he asked, “And, who is we?” “You were wearing your orthopedic shoes and carrying your cane and off to goodness knows where. We saw you from my balcony. Gwen and myself.” “How often do you see her?” he wondered. “About once a week.” “Well,” he said, “that is much more often than I get to see her.”

We were lunching with Karel and Ed was an hour late, having broken his glasses, gone to the optometrist, and then taken a taxi, which took over half an hour to accomplish what the subway could have in ten minutes. He was consequently a bit surly.

“Now, now,” said Karel. “Now that you are here, let us least have a civilized conversation.” This he began by asking the state of Ed’s memoirs (“tolerable”) and my memoir block (“permanent”). “Oh,” said Ed, upon hearing this, “Why ever? It is so easy, and so interesting. I am already almost an adult.” “Almost,” I said.

We then talked about great memoirs. I said the finest was Nabokov’s [Speak, Memory] of which, oddly, neither of these cultivated men had heard, and the second was Sartre’s [The Words], which they had heard of but not read.

Gwen appeared from another table. “Oh, Ed, we saw you yesterday . . .” she began.

“I have heard all about it,” he said.

6 september 1997. I had the Hanis, Susumu and Kimiko, over for dinner. After dessert, Susumu tells me how much he loves Kimiko, how this love grows. All of this in front of her. He says he first met her when she was fifteen, and he was thirty, twice her age. Fifteen, a child, and he knew he loved her at once.

This is not like most Japanese conversations, but then Susumu is not like most Japanese. While warm and compassionate, he has no patience with empty etiquette—what you talk about and what you don’t. In this he is like his father, Hani Goro, who was famous for his shortness with the conventional and his warmth to others.

Reminded, I asked something I had always wanted to know: How did his father die? He looked up and then said, “I think he willed himself to. He decided he had had enough. He thought he would die, and so he did. He wasn’t sick, you know.” Then, “And how will you die?”

We talked heart for a bit, and then he reverted to Kimiko. “Fifteen, imagine. I wanted to be a child molester.” He did not mention the other taboo, the fact that the fifteen-year-old was his wife’s sister. That they did not talk about [Hidari] Sachiko meant, I thought, that I couldn’t.

But then I realized that I was behaving in a manner much more Japanese than they were, so I talked about her. Both were mildly interested, as though in some distant relative, while Kimiko sat there looking just like a younger Sachiko.

“But I did the right thing,” said Susumu smiling just as he used to smile when he was twenty. “I left Japan because of all the media harassing. And I discovered Africa. And Kimiko came with me. We discovered it together. I changed my life.”

9 september 1997. Lunch with Karel and Ed—our last for a time: Ed to Honolulu, Karel to Amsterdam, and me to New York in just two weeks. “This is our Last Supper,” said Ed solemnly. “Actually, our Last Lunch,” said Karel. I then wondered if Christ had had a Last Breakfast as well. We agreed it was probably something light—just coffee and toast.

When we got around to literature, Karel wondered what the great American novel was. Ed and I told him that it was Huckleberry Finn, botched though the ending is. Moby Dick was too pedantic. Ed suggested some James, “. . . but not late—middle.” Hemingway? wondered Karel. No Hemingway, we agreed.

Got around to Irish women. I hoping to goad Karel into marriage, but Ed thought we were talking about the president of Ireland, and so that got us nowhere. Then Ed announced that he had probably just been to the sumo for the last time. It was the pain of getting there—he and his bad legs, his cane, and all those stairs. “And I sat there and I thought, well, this is probably the last time I will sit here.” Small, sincere tears appeared, and I, in deference to his feelings, did not ask, as I usually do, what is so attractive in the sight of two fat men pushing each other around.

Dinner with Ed as well, this time in company with Howard Hibbet, John Nathan, and Kato Mikio of the International House, our host, and sponsor of the translators’ seminar over which I am to preside next spring. There was some talk of translation difficulties. One then occurred.

The waiter announced that the fish that night was kanpachi—and none of us, including him, knew the English name. This sent him upstairs for the dictionary while we waited hungry, and brought him eventually back with the desired entry—amberjack. After all of this, none of us ordered it.

10 september 1997. I see that an earthquake machine has been temporarily installed in front of Ueno Station. It consists of a kitchen (sink, gas ring, table, and chairs) set on a platform attached to a motor. The public is invited to enter (taking off shoes first) and sit on the chairs. The motor is turned on. The kitchen shakes. One is supposed to turn off the gas, then crouch under the table. This a number of people do, cheered on by a man in a panda suit.

11 september 1997. The Kudara Kannon stares back at me as she has so often. This time, from the front page of a newspaper. She is no longer at Horyuji. She is in Paris. Always stylish in that elongated fashion-mannikin kind of way, she now looks positively chic. Made in the seventh century and seeming her age, she nonetheless exudes that assurance and poise we associate with beauty. She could be a modern anorexic model with acne.

24 november 1997. It has begun once again—the rash of performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that so disfigure the year’s end in this country. There will be, it is estimated, two hundred renditions in Tokyo alone. Why? I wonder. One understands the Christmas invasion of the Messiah in England. After all they like oratorios and it is, after all, a Christian land. But why Beethoven’s difficult and vulgar score in a non-Christian country, which does not have the resources or the disposition to create proper performances.

Reasons are offered: It was first performed by a German POW band (a large one apparently) in 1918, and this began a trend. Another reason is that the end of the year is otherwise a time of financial depression—one needs an ode to joy. Another says it is a strategy to generate much-needed New Year’s cash, since all the family and friends of chorus members must buy tickets. Yet another says it is an excuse for large numbers of Japanese to get together without having to talk—a kind of a big karaoke.

3 december 1997. Walking, I notice a young man, fashionable, long brown-bleached hair, artificial tan, and an earring, stopping young girls and trying to start a conversation, often failing as they brush by him. Nonetheless, all smiles and confidence, he is always ready to begin again. What perseverance, I think, and all just to pick up a girl.

From today’s newspaper, however, I now learn what was going on: He was engaged in what such young men (hundreds, says the account) call “scouting.” They themselves are called “catchers.” Trying to talk girls into work in bars or massage parlors—in other words, pimping.

He gets a thousand yen an introduction plus a thousand yen an hour for his time. They work in teams of six, usually at stations or in the subway. Most can make about ¥150,00 a month. The girls make considerably more.

One of the scouts is quoted: “When you start your pitch never block her path; it puts her on guard. Instead, just walk alongside and gradually you reduce your speed, and then they’ll slow down too. If you get them to come to a complete stop, then you’ve got them.”

6 december 1997. Went with Stephen Barber and Catherine Lupton to see the Kudara Kannon, just now back from Paris and stopping a few days at the National Museum before returning to Horyuji.

There she was, all seven feet of her, standing slightly sway-backed, a pose perhaps fashionable in the Asuka period. One hand lightly swings an oil flask, and the other is bent at the elbow (a very art deco pose) with the hand held out more as though to receive than give. I decide she looks parisienne.

But she is like that, always changing as you yourself change. I first saw her when I was twenty-three and she had not been dusted for decades. The fine powdery finish made her look human. Then I went to see her whenever I went to Horyuji, and each time both she and I had changed. The dust gone, her skin condition got better and, as the fashions changed, her Korean hat came back into vogue.

23 december 1997. Yesterday Itami Juzo killed himself, jumped off his balcony. Or fell. I’ve been on that balcony; the ledge is very low. Maybe he was drunk and toppled. Or was pushed—this last is the contribution of one of the dailies. Lots of other attempts at accounting. There was this girl, or there was the fact that his later movies were not very successful, or there was the mob. I tend to favor the last. The local mafia was furious about a 1992 film he directed, Minbo no Onna [A Taxing Woman], cornered him in his apartment garage, and slashed his face. The movie says that yakuza never actually attack non-yakuza, but Itami’s experience proved it wrong. Did they drive him to dive off the balcony as well?

28 december 1997. Eithne [Jones] has a friend in the Imperial Household. Telling her about the speakers she is representing, she mentioned my name. “Oh, not that dreadful man,” said the friend. The reason was what I had written about the Emperor or Empress in Public People, Private People. Taken aback, Eithne wondered what in my sympathetic and feeling account could have been taken such exception to. Turns out it was not what I wrote about them, but what I implied about the Imperial Household. She asked if their Imperial Highnesses were equally upset. “Oh, we would never show anything like that to them,” was the retort. Eithne told me that the Household reads just everything and holds grudges for centuries.

Ah, there goes my decoration, my imperial kunsho. I was in line for one, and had even toyed with the idea of refusing it. It is all right to get awards from the Japan Foundation, but I do not want to be this much Japan’s creature, have never joined the chrysanthemum club, and do not want to. My ancient aversion to joining anything raises its hoary head. Now I will be relieved of the decision, since I will never be offered the choice. [Richie, to his astonishment, was awarded an imperial kunsho (medal of honor) in late 2004.]

30 december 1997. The end of the year—cold, raining. I look from my balcony high over Ueno Park and see that one of the homeless has built himself a cardboard house. As I look down, he emerges with a broom in his hand. He carefully sweeps away in the rain, cleaning up what is his front yard.

I remember another homeless man. This one lived under a bridge in Nihon­bashi. It is to him that I owe my present eminence, since it was he whom I interviewed for a story, which got me my first job at Stars and Stripes, which led to others, during which I learned how to write. That was fifty years ago, and he was about the age of the man sweeping away in the rain. What was his name? Kiyoshi—Kiyoshi something. He had been put under the bridge by the war. This man has been put in the park by the peace. I remain, above it all, high on my eighth floor, looking down, wondering.

Richie’s close friend, the journalist Gwen Robinson, in reading to this date, suggested that his entries were disproportionate—too much sex. It was not that Richie had had too much sex, but that what sex he had he wrote about, neglecting other aspects of his life. So, just as he had pruned the journals, putting things not directly pertaining to Japan in a separate annex, he now grouped together the entries about sex, some of them at least, and removed these from the main manuscript. This new entity he named after the Mori Ogai collection Vita Sexualis, and apparently based his decision—what to include, what not to—upon an observation of John Stevens, author of The Cosmic Embrace, that the erotic cherishes, celebrates, and elevates sex, but that pornography cheapens, degrades, and negates it; further, that erotic art presents the sexual experience in a bright, positive, and sympathetic manner, but that pornography relishes violence, violation, and perversion. Despite the fact that all of Richie’s promiscuous encounters seem to have been both bright and positive, he apparently wanted to make a distinction.

8 may 1998. Ed Seidensticker has written a new book and there is a party for it. The volume is called Lovable Japan, Less Lovable Japan, but the title is the only part in English, all the rest is in Japanese. Indeed, it is Ed dictating to Shirai Maki (Herb Passin’s friend), and her taking it down and then editing it. There is no manuscript and so I must guess as to what it is about. The Japanese title is more explicit—translated it would read: The Japan I Like/The Japan I Don’t Like.

Ed has dressed for the occasion and wears a tie filled with large question marks all over it. Though he told me that he thinks the publication a “grave error” and that he hates such gatherings, nonetheless, he seems to be enjoying himself. In an expansive mood, he tells me something he remembers Gene Langston’s saying to him: “You go up the hill or, if facing the other direction, you go down the hill.” He admires this.

The party is held at the Kojimachi residence of Kase Hideaki, a political figure who has put money into the new film version of the life of Tojo, an effort called Pride. The man from the London Times keeps talking in scandalized tones about our being there at all, but journalist Sam Jameson says that it is perfectly all right to be entertained in the homes of those of whom you disapprove—does it all the time.

Back in Ueno, I am stopped on the street by a young girl carrying an electric guitar and wearing just a slip, underwear, and a large childish hat—this being the fashion of the week. She asks me to go sing karaoke with her—asks in English. It will only cost me six thousand yen. Since this is one thousand less than I paid in order to attend Ed’s party, I am tempted.

“You like me?” she asks. I diplomatically tell her she is very pretty. OK, she says, let’s go. I tell her I am waiting for a friend. OK, he come, we all go. No, I say, not he, she. Her face falls. Oh, not OK then. But she gives instruction on how to get to this expensive bar for which she is shilling. I, waiting for no one, go home.

This is sign of the new poverty, grown considerably this year. Bar people are hard hit and throng the streets every night, showing off what charms they possess, and trying to entice the public. The homeless swarm, and there are lines at the garbage cans when the restaurants throw away their food for the day. Bankruptcies are daily, and suicides by disgraced Bank of Japan and Ministry of Finance underlings are weekly.

They always hang themselves, though why this is the method of choice I don’t know. Last month three such officials went together to the same hotel; each booked a room and each hung himself, using sections of the same rope—jointly purchased and cut into three identical lengths. They could have saved money if they had used but one room, but many people here like their togetherness separately.

9 may 1998. I go to Yokohama to see Kajima Shozo’s new exhibition of poems and sketches. He is there in gray monpei with a dove-colored obi and lemon-yellow straw zori. Long hair, beard, the very picture of a bunjin, one of those literati so much a part of old Japan. When I first knew him fifty years ago, he was young, round-faced, all eyes, and looking toward the West. Then he was translating Yeats and Sherwood Anderson; now he is writing his own tanka and brushing nihonga. “You are so Japanese now,” I say to him.

“Oh,” he says, “but being ‘Japanese’ is very Japanese of me. First we look West, then we grow up and look East. Think of Tanizaki and his Bunraku, think of Kawabata and bonsai. We can’t help it. It is part of our national character.”

“I don’t believe in national character,” I said.

“You ought to. You are the most American person I have ever met.”

This is in English. We have never spoken anything else. When we first met I could speak no Japanese, and we called each other Sho and Don. We still do.

“Don,” he said. “You are my oldest friend. All the others are dead.”

We have gone to a coffee shop and begun to reminisce. He is just back from Australia. The reason he went was that half a year ago he met a woman in the train on the way back to the mountains where he lives. She was fifty-something and they were much taken with each other—went to his place and made love. Then she invited him to Brisbane and he is just back.

“At seventy-four you still get it up?”

“She made me. She was my first foreign woman. I was so surprised. And every night too.”

Then he went on to say that this nice foreign woman was not really the first foreigner. “Oh? Who was it?” I ask. Didn’t I know? Sho wondered. Holloway. Some fifty years ago. In the back of a jeep. Sho had been shocked. Not sufficiently to escape, however.

“Holloway never told me,” I said. Sho nodded, looking back half a century. “That was because it was not a success,” he said. “I had to let him know I didn’t want any more of it.”

We nodded over our coffee, then he asked, “Why didn’t you ever try anything like that with me back then? You did with others. I knew about it.” I told him that back then I made a distinction between head and heart, and that Sho and I were all head—poetry, literature. My heart was given over to those with whom I had less in common. Those who were into sports, for example.

“Oh, I can understand that,” he said.

Then we talked about whether he should marry the Australian. I advised him not to, since neither of them wanted this and also that this particular piece of paper, the marriage license, could ruin a relationship. “Besides,” I said, “you are thinking of it only as a kind of insurance. Neither of us has anyone to take care of us, and we’re both old, and anyone who might is already gone.”

He sipped his coffee and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. You see how American you are. No Japanese would have said that.”

And so we sat, quietly, happily, friends for fifty years, until he had to go back to the gallery and I had to go back to Tokyo.

12 may 1998. The International House found the funds, and tonight we opened the symposium on translation—experts on Japanese into English. I remind the audience of what Shelley said about translation (. . . it must again germinate from the seed or there is no flower . . .), and then introduce Edwin McClellan who talks on Soseki [Natsume] and Shiga [Naoya]. The speech is elegant, and the answers to later questions are filled with charm. (“I don’t know. Perhaps I just don’t like some authors,” he says.) Later at dinner I talk with his wife, Rachel, who is an expert on James Boswell. “Oh, yes,” she tells me, “there are whole passages of the Life of Johnson that have never been published. There are two volumes of a complete edition out, but it is rather stuck now. There will be no end.” Later yet, in the car going home, Ed Seidensticker says of the presentation, “Yes, charming, but I had expected more nuts and bolts. Mine is going to be more nuts than bolts.”

13 may 1998. Fumio came over to show me the pictures he took in India. There he was on the steps of the Ganges at Benares just opening his trousers. He then removed them and in his shorts descended until he was crouched in the holy river. Around him people were bathing and brushing their teeth, upstream they were burning corpses, and the bits left over floated past. Then he poured the water over his head and did seven salutations and felt, he told me, a great peace. His tour party, waiting in safety on the boat, were scandalized and prophesied illness. Nothing, however, happened. He remains healthy.

I admire this. He wanted something so badly he went and did it. He is now very glad he did, even brought back some of the water in a little brass vase. Brought me some too, but then, since he was bringing it to me in hospital, he threw it out and just gave me the thoroughly washed vase.

After the Korean vegetable dinner Fumio produced an envelope. It contains money, which he is giving me so that Dae-Yung and I can have a really good Kaga ryori meal when we go to the Noto Peninsula week after next.

28 august 1998. Things looking bad for Japan—politically paralyzed, economically in recession, edging its way closer to a depression. Money fleeing, jobs disappearing, poverty growing. Japan gross domestic product has fallen four percent this year and eight percent since 1989. Public and private sector debts are estimated at around fifteen trillion dollars, which in proportion to the GDP, is much larger than the American debt during the “Great Depression.”

I remember that. Canned tomatoes every day. Weevils in the flour. My grandfather appearing on Sundays with bags of groceries for the impoverished family. One early Christmas with no presents, as well—though that was later explained by my parents no longer speaking to each other and hence failing to prepare for the little lad’s holiday, each thinking the other had probably done something. I remember lines of unemployed and hands held out. Maybe I will go out as I came in, surrounded by other people’s poverty.

I am already. As I was walking back from the subway a wild-eyed, frantic old man busy running along the pavement and eyeing the people, fixed on me as likely quarry. Haro, haro, he croaked. Had I stopped he would then have somehow tried to communicate his need, thrown himself upon my foreign mercy. But I did not stop. Like everyone else I did not hear; I brushed by.

30 august 1998. Am reading a new book on Chekhov and find a surprising entry in an 1890 letter to his editor. He had met some Japanese women “. . . with big complicated hairdos, beautifully dressed. . . . When, out of curiosity, you use a Japanese . . . she shows an amazing skill in this business, so that it seemed to you that you do not actually use her but participate in a top-class horse-riding event.”

1 september 1998. A morning call from Tani [Hiroaki], wondering about my health. When I called him last year to say I was going into hospital he was a bit distant. In his business (construction) you have to be—politicians on one hand, gangsters on the other, both wanting money. Maybe he thought I wanted some, too. I did not, but I also did not call him again. He has been thinking it over, hence the call this morning—we have been friends for too long now to just drift apart.

Satisfied with my health, he spoke of other things. No, he does not need Viagra. He is only sixty-five and twice a week is quite possible. And who with? The youngest of his collection, though she is already thirty-nine. He must go out and shop for another. That is the problem. Once the purchase is made it is all right, but the acquiring of it takes time and energy. I tell him I know just what he means.

4 september 1998. Walking in a park, a familiar figure—Ed. He says, “As you are perhaps unaware, I often spend an evening in Asakusa.” I accompany him to the bus stop. On the way I see a young scaffolding worker to whom I had recently spoken. On his own in the park, he had also worked at a Shinjuku host bar. So I now ask him, “Going to climb higher or dive lower?” He smiles and says he will stay at sea level. Ed understands the words but not the context. “Well,” he says, “you certainly have a way with the wildlife.”

5 september 1998. Lunch with Gwen, here for a few days to close up the place where she and Tim lived. Says she sat at the kitchen table and cried. Had no idea she would take it so hard. I ask if it was love. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what love is. Some combination of respect and wild sex—if that’s love then this was it.” I say consoling things about eggs in baskets and the need to move on. But she, so admirable, has herself under control and is outlining what she plans: go to London for the job, then to a friend’s wedding, then back to Australia. She blows her nose and shakes her head. She is herself again.

6 september 1998. Tonight I learn that Kurosawa is dead. The Asahi calls up for a statement. I say what I believe. Then add that I most admired his bravery, his making The Bad Sleep Well. The girl interviewing me on the phone asks if I knew that when the Kurosawa Retrospective was held at the Chanter Theater a few years ago, the Toho film company vetoed its being included and so it wasn’t. I said I was not surprised, and as I was saying it I realized that there is now no one in all of Japan who would be brave enough to make The Bad Sleep Well. After I have hung up, I think about him lying there, in his house. That tall, big-boned, large-handed body that I never once saw in repose is now motionless.

23 september 1998. Back from the U.S.A.—taught once more how young Japan has kept me. Over there I am suddenly Urashima Taro, gray, ancient, friends and family dead—a Rip Van Winkle. I am old, damaged, withered, and all things have changed.

However, this is also cause for rejoicing as well. I am still young, at least while I am in here in Japan, sheltered from the great, racing wing of time.

Things change here too, though, and I can enjoy the metamorphosis, but since I only came in the middle of the performance, as it were, the change is not great and, in any event, Japan has always incorporated change into its structure, so there it is nothing to explain.

The country where I was born makes no such allowance. So I am there a child of the fifties instead of, as here, a part of the late nineties. And here people can see me, and there, being a ghost, I am invisible.

26 september 1998. How do you write after you know that what you are writing will be read after you are dead? Since you can no longer defend yourself, you begin early by protecting against any and all possible allegations. It is like planning the perfect suicide. You must think of just everything. Also, the need to make a pattern, any pattern, since it is the unpatterned that is to be avoided. And the drive for vindication, as if you had to prove your right to have lived. I think of all this while reading [Stephen] Spender’s journals, and I think of it after looking over this one of my own.

Adrienne [Mancia] has told me that I always want everyone to like me and that this is a defect. She’s right. If you want everyone to like you it means that you change yourself to fit everyone. You acquiesce, and this I certainly do. But only to a point. I will bend, but not break.

27 september 1998. But I am also a descriptive journalist, and this I think more highly of. I want to be the person who penned the best likeness. This is a possible ambition, because for the last half century I have been in the best position to do so. Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatized, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted. I am still complimented after fifty years on how well I use chopsticks, and so I become aware of using them—as I never am of using knife and fork, a feat upon which I have never once been complimented.

The person complimenting is, of course, being merely polite. The exclusivity he is implying does not occur to him. For him the word gaijin is neutral, a descriptive term—something we cannot claim for, say, “Jap,” but one which moves just as readily off the tongue. We may interpret racist overtones in gaijin, but that is our problem, not his. Knowing this, I am aware of all words. I know that okashii does not primarily mean “funny” (dictionary definition), and that if I use it about him I am saying that he is singular, odd, and—in Japanese parlance—limited. I know that omoshiroi does not only mean “interesting,” but can also imply the lightweight, the negligible, and the unimportant.

So, how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right—I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.

30 september 1998. Wandering in the park under the harvest moon, finding no harvest myself, I realize that I have become like those pandas that will eat only one kind of bamboo, a commodity that they have now eaten all up. Soon they will be extinct, done in by specialization. Concerned friends counsel me to the jungle-like swamps of the sauna, or the conversation pits of the bars, or the strict and narrow confines of the public conveniences, but this is not for me. Only the street, the corner, the park is authentic to me. Only that which is fortuitously found is real.

28 october 1998. Loud chanting: “Long poles, we have long poles, poles for just everything, bamboo, bamboo, bamboo.” This is an ancient street call, but now it is bellowed from a small truck with a big loudspeaker. And he is selling plastic poles at that.

29 october 1998. Walking back home through the park I meet one of the local transvestite prostitutes, the quiet one—round face, long hair, fat legs, the one with whom I usually pass remarks on the weather. I say that it looks like more rain and she turns to me, face serious and says: “I have cancer.” I stop and ask where. She names the hospital. “No,” I say, “where on your body.”

“Oh, my lungs, it’s my lungs.” And as she speaks I see that her normally placid eyes are now disturbed, a small twitch at the corner of one of them. “Just today,” she says, “just now, just got the test back, just have to tell someone. Sorry.”

I ask if she smokes. If she does I can tell her to stop and she may get better. But she doesn’t. “No, I drink too much,” she says. I then tell her what little I know about modern medicine, but neither of us are convinced. Advanced lung cancer is fatal. “It makes you frightened,” she says, standing there in her heels, her long hair held back with a ribbon, her eyes twitching.

17 november 1998. I ponder a new fashion: perilously high-soled shoes for young women. They teeter on something like six inches of superfluous shoe—boot, really. They lurch and spill on the pavement and in a group sound like a herd of elephants.

This footwear I compare to the high-soled geta of the Tokugawa oiran, the highest rank of entertainer/prostitute. They teetered on the pavements of the Yoshiwara and had grand parades where one could view them negotiating their way about—and still can in the Kabuki.

There and then, the reason was somewhat like that for foot binding in China. The women were expensive chattel, and were maimed in the same way that cows have ears nicked, brands imposed, and rings put through noses. The results were less instantly utilitarian, but the effect was the same: this is property.

Labor-intensive property, and hence the more valuable. The patron of an oiran must have felt like the owner of a thoroughbred. And from this came the allure. Rich Chinese merchants, having crippled women so they could not run away, soon learned to savor the various fragrances emitted from the unwashed, curled under, slowly putrefying feet.

But how does one read these equally crippling new Japanese boots? From the woman’s point of view the new fashion might be seen as enabling. Now she can be as tall as he, now she can have a military strut, if she doesn’t topple over. Now she can also attract a bit of foot fetishism, and—of course, the clincher—she is in the height of fashion.

Are these fetters chosen? Is it a new way to balance femininity (which is all imbalance, the need for a male shoulder on which to lean), with masculinity (taking charge of one’s life, forging ahead, jack-booted)? Men read it only as yet another new fashion, and none seem either to resent it or take advantage of it.

12 december 1998. Another word everyone has forgotten. I go to the Little Mermaid Bakery and ask for tomorokoshi pan [corn bread], as I have for dec­ades. The girl says she can’t speak English. I tell her it is Japanese. She says she never heard of it. I point to what I want. Oh, kon buredo, she says.

On the way home I hear that Yodogawa Nagaharu, the popular film appreciator, has died. Lots of nostalgic talk about him. He never saw a movie he didn’t like. Actually, in private, he was often critical, but never on television. No matter what, it was, oh, what a swell (sugoi) movie, wasn’t it swell though? I wonder how it feels to live such a mendacious public life. He probably felt nothing at all. He was a performer.

17 december 1998. When I look at others it seems I lead a much more conscious life. I am more aware, I notice more. Not that this is desirable. I notice to no point, to no end. It is difficult for me to be unconscious, just as it is difficult to go to sleep. This is nothing to brag about. It doesn’t mean whatever Socrates meant when he said that an unexamined life was a life not worth living. Being conscious does not mean that you examine anything. It just means that you’ve left the motor running. You can’t find the switch to turn it off, probably because your kind of consciousness is self-consciousness. I am always aware of self.

I wonder why I am not an addict of some kind. A druggie, or a drunk. I was recently called a sexaholic. Certainly I am as addicted to that as was ever boozer to bottle or gambler to game. It is like shopping, which can well become a substitute for living, something that preoccupies you and hides you from yourself. Other things work too, though not for me. Religion, fast driving, compulsive work. Or—and this does work for me—love.