During the following year Richie suffered a heart attack, which resulted in his stopping smoking. He also began to receive awards (the first Kawakita Foundation Award was given to him), and he traveled. In 1983 he went on a world tour with Mizushima, who was having second thoughts about his marriage, though he had become a father. Richie’s journals continued to be composed not so much as a daily record of occurrences as a reaction to those things that he wanted to preserve—for example, the meeting with Marguerite Yourcenar below, a longer account than that which he published in The Honorable Visitors.

16 october 1982. Dinner with Marguerite Yourcenar. She is with her companion, Jerry Wilson, sitting there in her coat and scarf in the big, cold downstairs room at the French Embassy Residence. The scarf, of loosely woven wool, is the same color as her intensely blue eyes. It is these extraordinary eyes, which though now hooded with age, give this elderly woman the look of youth. They and the mind behind them, which is, as I discovered, as agile, inquiring, amused as that of an adolescent girl.

We talk of her work, she with complete detachment. “I am translating a play by Jimmy Baldwin. He is a good friend,” she says in her accented English. I mention her earlier translations of Negro spirituals. “Oh, yes, and that is not all. Now I am beginning to translate blues and soul. I am interested in this, and amusing it is to try to translate precisely.” Here she gives her young companion a glance that was both an affirmation and an acknowledgement, and I realize that he is interested in blacks.

She smiles. A strong, round face, wrinkled as a winter apple. A peasant face, Breton, Flemish, like the faces of Brueghel. Nothing of the aristocrat in her appearance. Firm, round body. But the youthfulness of her expression, the adolescent clarity of her eyes, they are from something earlier: an illuminated book of hours, Aucassin and Nicolette.

I ask about work not yet translated, and happen to mention La Nouvelle Eurydice. “Oh, no, not that. What a bad book. You see I had had some success with Alexis, my first book. So I thought that the second should be larger, grander. It was a great mistake. It will not be translated, nor brought back into print.” I ask if there are other of her own works that she thought badly of. “Only one. My little book on Pindar. So bad, so inflated.” What then is her favorite, if she has one. She thinks and then says, “It is difficult, but I do think probably The Abyss.” From then we speak of her biography. “I am supposed to be writing the third and last volume. But here in Japan of course, I am not working at all.” When would it end? “Oh, around 1930 just after I started to write. After the death of my father.”

When she speaks of death I notice now, and later when she speaks of the death of her companion, Grace Frick, that she looks through and past me. Those extraordinary eyes, distant. Later, following what train of thought I do not know, she again speaks of death. “I shall not kill myself. Not like Hadrian. Oh, he did not kill himself, to be sure. But he often thought of it.” Again her eyes sought the distance. Had she too thought of it? This I do not ask.

With Edwin Reischauer, Isamu Noguchi. Hakone, 1982.

I take them to dinner at the Chugoku Honten, which can be trusted to feed you well. Since neither she nor her companion eats red meat, we have abalone, sweet and sour fish, Peking style chicken, and green vegetables in cream, ending with fresh litchi and drinking Chinese wine the while.

Jerry Wilson is around thirty. Open, American face with reddish hair cut very short, a small gold ring in one pierced ear. His French is fluent, with a heavy American accent. Where did they meet I ask. “Well, let me see, it was several years ago. He came with a television team that was doing something with me and we discovered that we had much in common.” Period.

He sometimes lives with her and always travels with her. Last year they went to Egypt together and now are on this Asiatic tour. The conversation turns to Mishima, about whom she has written a book, and then to homosexuality.

They had been to the Kabuki and had heard that there was a place where the young onnagata gather to relax. I tell them that there might be such a place, but that it is unvisitable. Instead there are, of course, onnagata-like places where I could take them, places where the young men are more feminine than any female. This, she said, she would like to see, and so in several weeks this is where I shall take them.

Much as I want to know more about Madame Yourcenar’s long interest in homosexuality (“Alexis,” Hadrian, Cavafy, Baldwin, and Mishima), I ask no more. She had been described to me as taking the interest of a “scholarly amateur” in the subject, and so it seems to be. Her interest is detached and exists for itself, offering no further information about herself. It is an interest, I would imagine, rather like Colette’s. And for many of the same reasons.

I ask her if I could ask her a very personal question, and she smiled and said that of course I could. So I ask a question I have long wanted to. What were her influences; who had formed her; what had she read that had made her style? She thinks and then says, “You must understand that when I was young I read everything. I read until there was no more to read. I devoured. And I retained. Therefore the influence upon me, a very strong one, is the influence of everyone. This is not a satisfactory reply I know, but it is the only one I am capable of making. Shakespeare, Pindar, Basho, all the novelists—everyone made me.” Pressed, she said, “Maybe most the Greek poets. Maybe it was them I most loved. That being so, maybe it was they who most formed me.”

We then talk of other things. I ask her if her admission into the Academie Française was time-consuming. Mr. Wilson laughs. “No,” he says, “she never goes.” She turns to me and smiles. “It is, you see, a club for elderly gentlemen and so I felt I ought not attend and they feel, I should think, relieved that I do not.” I ask if they pay her anything. “Not a penny. To be sure, the more assiduous” (she appears to regard the word and smiles, as though it is one new to her), “become caretakers in old houses or curators of collections and thus get an apartment free, but otherwise there are no material rewards.” “Only spiritual ones,” says Wilson and they both smile.

After jasmine tea, we leave. She turns and I help her into her wool coat. From the rear she is a shapeless old peasant woman. She turns and I give her her handbag and she thanks me with a glance from those marvelous eyes. She is now a proud, sure, serene adolescent.

18 october 1982. At the conference Isamu Noguchi, for the first time since I have known him, talked about himself. To be sure, he usually talks about his opinions, beliefs, etc., usually at length. But here he spoke of what it felt like to be him—Japanese ancestry, born an American, back to Japan before the war, back to America, his work, then back to Japan after the war, then back and forth, back and forth. He spoke about what he discovered in Japan and in himself, talked about stone and rock.

Noguchi himself has become rock-like. He is veined and seamed and sits very still. As his outside has grown this patina, so his inside, his opinions, views, have softened, mellowed. It used to be that Noguchi’s ideas were the most adamantine thing about him. Abrasive. You could cut yourself on them. Not now. The rock speaks softly.

Later, the long day over, we have coffee and talk of the Stravinsky/ Balanchine Orpheus, for which he did costumes and sets. He complains that in doing everything over for its revival he had to make everything larger. It was designed for the small City Center and not the large Lincoln Center. “It is really a chamber work. That is how I saw it, too, with my little rocks. Now those little rocks are enormous so that they will be visible in all that space. A great mistake. Scale is one of the most important of all things and we violated our scale. No. I violated it. Balanchine and Stravinsky kept things the same. Mine was the part that had to give. I regret it.”

19 october 1982. Lunch with Edwin Reischauer. He talks about the Great Kanto Earthquake, which he remembers. Wasn’t in Tokyo but in Karuizawa. Nonetheless, the shock was so great that it knocked over chimneys and killed one person there—crushed under a roof.

What he remembers well is the massacre of the Koreans, which began at once, only hours after the earthquake. They, the minority, were being held responsible, not for the earthquake, but for the terror and despair of the Japanese themselves. Ridiculous charges: poisoning wells and the like.

He remembers a child, a girl, deaf, and consequently unable to speak. The crowd confronted her. She could not tell them that she was Japanese. They tore her to pieces. Whether she was Japanese or not is not the point, of course. A child was murdered.

Reischauer simply tells the story. He makes no apology, makes no attempt to account for what happened. Takes for granted that this is what the Japanese do—or did. Does not say so. No moral reflections at all. He knows his people very well. He knows and he accepts. So do I.

25 october 1982. A curious dream. I was at a party at someone’s house. The style was art deco and I knew that it had been made in the 1930s. Also, as I gradually became aware, this was the 1930s. The others were all men and we were sitting around drinking. I was speaking with Ravel. It took me some time to recognize this because he looked nothing like his pictures.

I also realized that I knew what was going to happen and he did not. It became very important to determine precisely in what year all this was occurring so that I would know how much time he had left. But he was charmingly vague. Pleased that I knew so much about his work, that I loved L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (“We must be the only ones, no one else knows of it”). Finally, I learned that it was about 1934 and I realized that the charming man in front of me would be dead in three years.

So I told him about his last composition. He was very interested since he had not yet started to write it. I told him about the film Gaumont was making on Don Quixote and the music they would commission. “For Panzera,” said Ravel. “No, Chaliapin,” said I. “Oh, dear,” said Ravel. “That’s all right,” I said warmly, “You will not win the commission. Ibert will. But your work, called Don Quichotte et Dulcinée , will become much the more famous.” “Well,” said Ravel, “that’s something at any rate.” I did not tell him about the auto accident, the brain damage, the inability to compose, the operation, and the death.

Or perhaps I did. I was feeling the awful pathos of knowing what was going to happen, the inability to stop it, the touching innocence of the victim. Dreams mean something we are told. What does my role as messenger from the future mean? Anything?—Or is the brain at sleep really an idle computer amusing itself by punching at random?

28 october 1982. Dinner with Marguerite Yourcenar and Jerry Wilson, all of us taken out by Eric Klestadt—to eat at the very elegant Kicho, then for coffee at the equally elegant Nishi no Ki.

Madame Yourcenar at one point speaks of herself. Her mother, who died when she was young, was Flemish. Her father, who died in the 1930s, was able to read her first book, Alexis, in manuscript. He was a great reader. Books were all over the house and Madame Yourcenar began reading very early.

“What did your father do?” “Nothing at all. Nothing.” “But how did you live.” “Land, tenant farming.” “Did that devolve down on you?” “On neither myself nor my older half brother. My father lived gloriously. He lived right through it.”

Jerry tells me she is seventy-nine. That, I think, is quite old, but years are apparently light upon her. She speaks of catching cold easily. “Fortunately, I caught my cold in the most beautiful place—Matsushima.” And Jerry says that sometimes she forgets. Which she probably does, but part of the fond way in which he says this has to do with their relationship as much as with her forgetfulness.

She is fortunate she has him. He is devoted. Always ready with the wraps. Helping her, smoothing the way. They have that mutual look that certain married couples have. What is hers is his, his, hers, the look seems to say. They both turn to answer the same question.

During the conversation I learn that she is claustrophobic and once had a bad attack of asthma in the Paris metro. I describe my being caught in the same metro and experiencing the pangs of the same affliction. We smile and nod. Something in common.

She is very interested in Eric and his background: German Jew, fled, came to Japan. She also knows how to be the perfect guest. I admire this. Adaptability. I would imagine that she has a long experience as guest, being gracious with host. I do not know how she would be as hostess. Perhaps not so good. I can imagine her becoming tired of her guests very easily.

But now it is midnight, time to move on to the transvestite bar, which will have to serve as the place where the onnagata meet.

5 december 1982. Invited to dinner by Madame Yourcenar and Jerry, just the three of us, at the Takanawa—sole for her, abalone for him, steak for me.

I watch her and Jerry together. It is like grandmother and grandson. It is also not like that at all. They are as much themselves with each other as though they have been married for years. At the same time, however, he is also there for her convenience. (In the bar for pre-dinner drinks, Madame went ahead. Usually it is he. This time he followed her, large among the little tables, and said, with a smile, “Where she goes, I follow.” Said this with affection and good will.) At other times she is as permissive as a mother. Jerry did not like the Noh and, carried away, he turned it into a little act. He also, without knowing, turned himself into the very image of his Arkansas mother not liking the Noh. He used words (“land’s sake”) appropriate for her. This unconscious imitation apparently pleased Madame. She also offered further reasons for finding the Noh boring. But since she had not actually found it so, this was done with some playfulness, yet with no hidden acknowledgment to me that we were at this point seeing through Jerry. On the contrary, it was like a mother reveling in her child’s foolishness.

Later, talk about Mishima. Madame astonished me with the pronouncement that his wife could not have much loved him, since she survived him. I asked if she were indeed that romantic, that she thought a great love could not survive a death. “Oh, yes,” she said, cheerfully, “I’m just that romantic.”

“But, you,” I said, “survived and lived to write Les Feux.” She looked at me as though trying to guess how much I knew. Since I knew nothing, this did not take long. She said, “Yes, it was a difficult time but it could not compare.” Consequently, I learned nothing about this particular crisis of the soul she had undergone, and of which I had only vaguely heard.

She wondered if Mishima’s wife knew, then said, “Of course she did but she did not want to believe, did not want to know.” Said that sometimes the person himself did not want to know. Mentioned Henry James as an example. I told her I had heard that Leon Edel had kept back letters from James to Hugh Walpole that proved what the biographer did not want to believe. “Yes,” agreed Madame, “because otherwise much of James’s The Pupil, would not be understandable. Madame Mishima, like Edel, was merely trying to hide, not wanting to admit.”

Not wanting to admit was also treated as just as normal, as was the homosexual impulse itself, however. Everything is normal in Madame Yourcenar’s world; hence everything is understandable. It is not that she is Olympian, as has been said, but that she is so absolutely accepting.

She did, however, find Japan the most difficult country she had ever been in. The simplest things defeated them. They went out to buy pencils and returned, defeated, no pencils. I wondered how this could be and then realized that her world is entirely one of language and she has no language for this country. Some kind of converse, this is what she expects, and this is what she misses here. Not that it is not here. It is that it is not open to her. No Japanese language, and the Japanese themselves not often making the intuitive leap one finds admirable in Mediterranean countries. Blank incomprehension or evasion is what she is met with. This intrigues and puzzles. Of a consequence the two of them go mainly to the theater. Jerry simply “adores” the Kabuki and so this is what they have seen. Some forty hours of Kabuki since arrival—both because of interest and because it is, oddly, a place of refuge from Japan itself for them.

Looking at her I was suddenly struck by a resemblance I did not before see in her similarity to Colette. Not that they are both women, not that they are both androgynous, but rather their interest in detail, their fascination in how something is done, their acceptance of the natural world and their celebration of it—a combination of interest and awe. I watched her eating her sole with interest and concern, watched the way she savored a chopstickful, crumbling it with her lips.

What was it in this gesture? Something I have seen in Flemish paintings. Then a phrase, not a particularly good one but a descriptive one occurred: She is a patrician peasant. The lips are those in Brueghel, the eyes are those in the Livre des Heures. Feet squat on the ground she soars to an enormous height, her eyes (those eyes—she shares them with Simone Signoret) looking into the far distance. Is that the reason for her charm?—that she manages to encompass a dichotomy, closes it, and consequently appears so whole.

The evening was over. She picked up the tiny pot of living plumeria I brought her, and held it as though warming it in her rough hands. She was not tired, but she would be. I took my leave. She and Jerry looked after me as I departed, the two of them there, a woman who likes strange and beautiful sons and had none, a young man who likes old and wise mothers and had none.

10 december 1982. I learn today that Herschel [Webb] is dead. And my first thought is that this is impossible because he was so young. But then I remembered that that was thirty-five years ago. Afterward he went to teach at Columbia and became a scholar and a full professor. I was here; he there, and we rarely met. And now he is dead. I had heard that, as I remembered, he retained his taste for martinis but I did not know to what extent until now. The Herschel I remember, though, was not a teacher; he was more like a student, an endlessly inventive one. And as I remembered him today I heard from somewhere the opening bassoon solo from Sacre and Herschel singing along, “Oh, baby, see the moon . . .”

12 december 1982. I go to Kamakura. I sit in the train and look out of the window as Herschel and I had thirty-five years ago when we went down to spend the weekend at Dr. Suzuki’s house. But I will get off at Kita-Kamakura today only to take a taxi to the museum.

Today is the last day of the Italian show and it has three Morandis I want to see again. One is particularly fine, all made of a single color, a reddish gray, against which the objects stand, their own contours often of the same color so that line becomes invisible. A work from 1928 to 1929, done with the paint oily, lots of brush marks, all invisible from three feet back.

Walking down from the Hachiman I notice a small print shop into which I had not gone for years. Go in. A small pile of original prints, all of them overpriced. And then, at the bottom, a beautiful Toyokuni. A tattooed man being ferried across a river on the shoulders of porters. Obviously just the middle section of a triptych, but quite splendid nonetheless. Done mainly in blue and red. Red for the tattoos, blue for the rest, with that Delft-like shading from very light to very dark. I admire, put it regretfully to one side, then notice the price. It is only fifty dollars. Upon asking why I am told that, though a first impression, it has watermarks on one side and, being part of a three-unit panel, is not complete. I do not argue—a Toyokuni this superior belongs in a museum. Nonetheless, it is now here in my house.

Suddenly I remember a dream I had last night. It was a continuation of something that really happened two years ago. What really happened was that Francis Coppola called me up, was in a bar across the street, come on over. There was Toru Takemitsu, a good friend, and Richard Brautigan, whom I had been avoiding. He knew this, had been told, and so now refused to shake hands, glowered, then turned to Coppola, and with that whine of his said, “But, Francis, you know you are making masterpieces, you know that, don’t you, man?” I talked with Francis and Toru and then went home. Wondered after just why I had been called out. Because they were all drunk? Or was Francis staging one of his scenes? Never found out, but that was what happened. Now the event had a continuation in my dream last night. Continuation: I punch Brautigan and lay him out.

13 december 1982. Did not sleep well last night. Do not sleep well unless I am alone or with someone I know well. Did not know well the soundly sleeping Hisashi, having only met him an hour before as he was dozing in a Steve McQueen all-nighter. Sturdy, rural, from Tohoku, twenty, in for a Saturday night in the city, not caring at all what happened to him so long as something did. Now, satisfied with his new experience, he sleeps with the audible sighs of farm youth everywhere.

In the morning he admires my paintings. Talks about their space (kukan), knows what he is talking about. Most Japanese know about art, and all can draw maps and carry tunes—and dance. He shows me some of the steps for the local Tohoku matsuri, thumping big-footed in his underwear. It is as though we have known each other for years—the gift for instant intimacy that the rural young still have. Later, went to have breakfast at the Park where I taught him the intricacies of eggs benedict.

7 january 1983. Sogetsu-ryu ikebana, the Hilton, the Pearl Room—chandeliers made of ropes of pearls—big party, mostly women, most in kimono, much display of good manners, lots of food including seven different kinds of cake, and lots of money spent, but then Sogetsu has it—the most affluent of all the flower-arrangement schools, thousands of pupils all over the world, and leading all the rest when it comes to paying taxes.

Iemoto Teshigahara Hiroshi, now grand in hakama, white-maned and patriarchal, makes the opening speech. And I remember when he was still a schoolboy, wanting to make movies, and getting to—the money coming from old Sofu, his dad, who had founded the lucrative school. Then Sofu died and Hiroshi’s elder sister took over, but then she died and (Japanese arts schools having lineage, just like royalty) the position of iemoto devolved upon Hiroshi. He hated it, knew nothing about flowers, but the pressure of the school was stronger.

That was three years ago. Now he has become what was wanted—the head of the school. He handles himself well, has been a great success. The ladies love him. He speaks in respectful tones of his father while his mother, her hair now a light violet, sits and beams.

He has done a perhaps typical but nonetheless I suppose admirable thing. Since he could not change his circumstances, he changed himself. Knows all about flowers and the other materials (cellophane, plastic, egg-crates) avant-garde Sogetsu makes use of, left off his tweeds and suedes, and is now usually in kimono.

At the same time I wonder just how much this cost the director of Woman in the Dunes. My Western self says that he sold out. But my Eastern self wonders if what he did does not indicate a higher wisdom. We are so prone to think any accommodation a surrender. Hiroshi has chosen continuation. If the cost has been great, he seems—standing there, leonine, grand, a master—already to have discounted it.

7 june 1983. Rereading The Immoralist. First read it nearly forty years ago. Sitting in Hibiya Park, as Michel sat in the park at Biskra. How old was I then—twenty-four? Proper age for reading this book. I am no longer at the proper age but I am curious. This book much influenced me. What is it like now; what am I like now?

How little I remembered of it. Almost nothing. And how I had colored what I had remembered. One’s memory of a book is never accurate. It is a memory of the impression the book made. The impression now is much different. Michel I once found admirable. Now I find him pathological. Not in his immorality, of course. Rather, in his symptoms.

I suppose it is because I recognize them. I am impressed now rather by the truthfulness of Gide’s observations about his travels with his wife, the compensatory neuroticism of the husband. The urge to rush from one place to the other, as though a new goal will be somehow better because it is new. I recognize this, having experienced it twenty years ago with my own new wife.

Do I now experience this because Michel so influenced me forty years ago? I wonder. Probably not. I was attracted to Michel because I was of the temperament to experience what he did. It was thus not Michel’s rebellion that attracted me, but his feeling of guilt. This I seem to have recognized.

It is this that leads one to feel so responsible for another, to use them for this purpose, then to dislike them for it, and then to feel guilty for the dislike. How vulgar—because it has nothing to do with them. It has only to do with self.

And perhaps that is the true immorality of Michel—of all of us. This use of others for one’s own dramatic purposes. As though one would not exist otherwise.

And I sense the chill that comes when one suspects nonexistence—the flight that follows, the rationalizations, and the panic terror. Gide, however, makes very little of this. Did he know what he was describing? Perhaps not. To him, Michel is still a hero.

8 june 1983. Lunch with Richard Brautigan, one that came about in a curious fashion. I had seen him at a Parco opening and went up and asked why he had refused to shake my hand when he was here before. He was confused, remembered, said it was all a misunderstanding, as it indeed must have been; then last week he sent me a letter, very small writing on hotel stationery: “It is always very pleasant to clear up misunderstandings and I admire your courage to come up to me when last we met to talk it over and have it done with.” Then he asked me to have a drink with him, and that turned into lunch.

Denim and corduroy, granny glasses, wispy red hair, uneven red mustache. Bright blue eyes, the moustache concealing an affable mouth. The aging hippy persona is there but is mostly due to the clothes: the studied appearance of the unlearned, does not know foreign languages, careful mispronunciations. Part of it is a pose, I think: the American anti-intellectual, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad. But not all.

He talks about himself, which is perhaps to be expected, given our manner of meeting. He is not precisely attempting to justify himself, but is giving me a lot of information. Among the things spoken of is how different the public persona, created by “the media,” is from the real self.

Speaks of Norman Mailer, apparently a close friend. Finds him generous, sweet, understanding, warm—all things different indeed from the public persona. From there we speak of ways in which the persona may be used. It is of use in getting people to go to bed with you. In fact, fame-fucking is a known result.

He has had much experience. Further, he prefers his partners young. His persona is very reassuring. He is filled with earth-wisdom and, as one of the original hippies, is by definition kind and understanding, things that female children, males as well, find attractive. He is at present with a young girl, “young enough to be my daughter.”

We drink sangria, growing more mellow with each sip, and eat an excellent Spanish bouillabaisse. We talk about Francis, we mention the very bar where we first met and where the affront occurred. But we do not speak of it, being much too well bred to do so. I find his air of the faux-naïf very refreshing but I still do not know how faux it is. Perhaps it isn’t. What he finds in me I don’t know—we speak little about me.

17 june 1983. Dinner with Paul Schrader, in Tokyo for the Mishima movie that he will direct. Talks about difficulties with Mishima Yoko and her efforts to make her dead husband into something more fitting. We talk about Yukio. “That is undoubtedly him. And that is just what I can’t put into the movie, damn it. Not that we can’t, you know. We have not signed anything away. We want to make our kind of movie, not hers.”

I say that Mishima himself would probably have sided with Paul; that he would not, I think, have approved of the amount of censorship that Yoko is exercising. He was enough of an exhibitionist to want to project a little of the truth at least—to tantalize his audience, if nothing else.

Paul still has his engaging stutter, still has his charm, his bent smile, the sudden crinkling of the eyes. These he somehow kept in Hollywood. Or maybe has them back now that he is here. Talks of how he is going to structure his film: Mishima in real life, then Mishima as a boy, then Mishima as one of the characters in his various novels. These three will have a kind of conversation, and somehow in the interchange he hopes that something like the real author will appear—and that Yoko will not notice.

He is going to have his production man over; it is going to be all studio; it will be completely professional, all designed. I do not say that this is not the proper work for a Bresson scholar. But Paul never became Bresson and I suppose there is no reason why he should have. One need not become what one admires.

With Mifune Toshiro, 1983. donald richie

I see that Paul bites his nails now. Why do I find this engaging? Sign of weakness? No, a sign of something else, something more human. Paul pre­sents such a reasoned and optimistic self that one welcomes something as human and doubtful as nail biting. Cutting him down to size? No, I don’t think so. Rather, something one recognizes, sees as authentic.

18 june 1983. Lunch with Francis [Coppola]. He is here to convince Mishima Yoko that a film on her late husband is a good idea—that the writer, director, and he himself, all are working for the proper picture. The difference lies in the interpretation. She wants the whitened sepulcher she has been daubing away at these last years. They want a commercial film that tells a bit of the truth. Consequently Francis is properly cynical, or as cynical as he ever gets.

“Is it true,” he wonders aloud, “that a director is only as good as his last few films? Is it really like a ball game? Three strikes and you’re out?” From anyone else, given Francis’ recent experiences, this would certainly sound like irony. But when he asks this, his eyes gentle, his large and infantile mouth questioning, one detects no cynicism. Just the kind of wonder that such a thing might, perhaps, after all, be possible.

Francis is very childlike. Having put on weight again, he is like a fat little boy, and he has all the gentleness and sudden wildness that one associates with youngsters. A bearded baby, he is given to quick enthusiasms, flights of fancy, and a kind of weighty wit—irresistible because, like a child, Francis does not take himself seriously.

All of his recent bad luck, so much of it brought down by himself, seems not to have affected him. As though it happened to a person named Francis Coppola, someone sitting right there, but not actually, somehow, the same.

He talks about a South American place he has bought—El Getaway, he calls it. It is really very convenient. “Only a couple of hours from Miami in your plane, got its own airstrip, and it has lakes and waterfalls and the ancient ruins right there on the property. The sea? Oh, it’s close. In a plane we can get there in a couple of minutes, about fifteen of them. Otherwise, it is days of hacking the jungle, of course. We could build this landing strip on the beach. Probably will.”

Probably will. He is like a little boy, living entirely in his imagination with the difference, the great difference, that what Francis imagines always comes true. Both the good and the bad. He will get his airstrip and his planes. But he also got a great disaster, his studio—all because of his imaginatively walking too near the edge.

Hope—that is what it is. And with hope, certainty. Success, failure, but some certainty. And if the latter, then it, too, has its uses. Francis may be up or may be down, but Francis survives. He survives as a child survives. He believes—irony yes, cynicism no. He believes in Francis but, more important, he believes in the world, and still finds it quite wonderful.

8 august 1983. Taken to dinner by Mifune Toshiro at an elegant Akasaka ryotei—fancy food, geisha dances, lively girls to sit beside you and pour. The occasion was the entertainment of Nancy Dowd and John Dark who are here to do her film, R&R, and I had suggested Mifune Productions and introduced Toshiro. Hence my being included.

Mifune is older, has lost some of his hair. His shape has changed but his eyes are the same. And his smile—that wonderful smile, seen so little in the films: charming, genuine, disarming.

The smile is little seen because it does not fit his solemn machismo screen persona. It does not suit it because it is boyish. And it is the boyishness of Mifune, now well over sixty, which so charms. That and his almost adolescent-seeming self-deprecation. Whether this is genuine or not, I do not know. But I do see that he makes very little use of it. He has nothing to gain from it but more charm, and he is already exuding that. No, I think Mifune has an enchantingly poor opinion of himself.

Certainly the pattern of his life is that of a man who doubts himself. The period with Kurosawa in which he allowed himself to be molded, then the number of failures which followed: as director, as husband, as businessman, and even as actor, since left to himself he plays roles like that in Shogun. Mifune always strikes me as ready for failure but attempting, gamely, to avoid it.

He is charming at the party. Nancy is quite swept away, not only with him, but also with her first glimpse at high-powered Japanese entertaining—the food, the drink, and the concern. The kimonoed young lady and I have a perfectly proper conversation about underwear, what is worn under the kimono. She wears no panties, as is common nowadays. It ruins the line of the kimono. So she does not—except, she reminds me, once a month, then smiles charmingly. Mifune, it turns out always wore something like BVD’s under everything, armor and all. The geisha dancer wears only a sheath of cloth under her kimono. Hers is red because she is an entertainer. The other girls’ were pink or, if older, white. Nancy rolls her eyes deliriously when I translate all of this.

Mifune is much at home in this milieu. I have long thought that he might be a bit prudish. Perhaps he is. Here, however, such talk is not considered anything but proper. It has the right light touch. One is not interested and not uninterested, and this is proper. Mifune has learned to be very good at this. And he never goes too far.

Then he makes a speech, a charming one. I am the peg on which he hangs it: our long acquaintanceship, and now my introducing these splendid people. His poor attempts at entertainment and, he hopes, their understanding. . . .

Actually, Mifune Productions would very much like the business and promises to do well. But not a word of that. Fortunately John and Nancy already know how Japan works, and they are now capable of appreciating nuances and subtleties that would have left them blind in London and L.A. Then John makes just the proper speech, almost committing himself, but not quite. Then Nancy talks, properly, to the point. Then I, as is my role, bow and thank and indicate that the happy evening is over.

How well the Japanese do this. The sordid necessaries of heavy financial encounters turn butterfly-like during these light and so personal-seeming encounters. And the sincerity is quite there—so far as it goes. It is this that so completely undoes the West.

I wonder how many parties like this Mifune has a week. More than a few, I would imagine. If he tires of them there is no indication. There he is, boyish as always, smiling as broadly as he did decades ago. Only occasionally, when he thinks no one is looking, or when he forgets, does the smile relax; he will look someplace, the corner of the room perhaps, and there is the inward gaze of a man looking into himself, seeing nothing outside. Of what is he thinking then, I wonder. Of himself? Of life?

Then, with that smile he turns, sake bottle in hand, to pour you another drink, to clown his way through a story, to listen with absolute intentness to whatever it is that you are saying.

Mifune the good guy, the straight arrow. It is all real, it is all there. It is all on the surface, too. Is there anything more than surface? Well, that is not a question profitably to be asked in Japan, where the ostensible is always the real, where there is nothing more.

And yet. Inside are the bandit, the samurai, the shogun, the gambler, the shoe magnate, and Red Beard himself. How can so consummate an actor be only this? But there I have my answer. By being this, he is a consummate actor.

14 august 1983. The Fukagawa Tomioka Hachiman Festival, held every three years: an enormously long procession of omikoshi, the large cross-beamed floats carried on the shoulders of the participants, in the center the ornate house of the god, bells, the golden phoenix atop. Fifty of these floats, each supported by a hundred near-naked men—fifty under the beams chanting and dancing, the other fifty waiting to take their turn, dancing alongside. Each float is from a different section of Fukagawa, and so the half-kimonos, originally worn but shortly discarded, carry the quarter’s name and its mon of a distinctive color. In fifty years, Fukagawa, completely destroyed by firebombs in 1945, has been rebuilt. Fifty floats, each with at least a hundred men—five thousand, and five times that number lining the streets, watching.

A spectacular festival—its size, the number of people involved, that it is so uninhibited, and that so much flesh is so casually displayed. Also, that it is held in the heat of summer, on a day traditionally the hottest. Hence the shed clothing, the sweat, the reddened, sun-tinged flesh.

Hence also the water. It has for hundreds of years been customary for the houses along the way to have buckets of water, or hoses, or water pumps—all ready for the passing shoulder-carried, hundred-legged floats. Streams of water curl into the air, water flung hangs before it descends. From all sides, all at once, continually—water descending. The nearly naked men are drenched.

Most are wearing only a tucked-in loincloth. Their drenched hair begins to steam in the sun; water runs down arms and legs, puddles, and evaporates. The humidity around the floats rises as the water turns to steam. The loincloths, white cotton, turn transparent as the water courses. The god appears.

Fertility is what this festival, like most, is about. The jostled god in his dark little box atop the float is a fertility god, and he thinks only of pro­creation and the things that allow it: heat, water, and movement.

The men wear their nakedness as though it were a costume. No one jokes or laughs, and no one stares as the loincloths turn transparent and the jostling dance continues.

This spectacle is deeply erotic because it is not concerned with actualities, but with possibilities. Like the blossom hidden in the bud, eroticism lies always in the future. These small and visible gods are not, after all, standing erect. They are merely there, made visible by the magic of the festival—fertility promised.

With rhythmic shouts, one float after another sways down between the lines of spectators. The procession takes two hours to pass. Two hours of naked thighs and barely masked loins, pounding buttocks, strained shoulders, and faces turned skyward, chanting the rhythmic cry of the matsuri. A spectacle—something from Japan’s past, and something with us yet.

27 august 1983. Tonight I went again to Sumida Park. There is a grove on a hill, a still lake, paths that wind and rejoin. It is dark; a few street lamps cast pools and the stars are bright beyond the tracery of leaves.

The dark park, night—and I again relive my oldest dream. It occurred, several times it now seems, over half a century later. I was very young—six maybe. A park, perhaps, or a woods, and it was dark, late, and I was there alone. And from the shadows walked a man. I remember the man’s strong face, half in the shadow, and the soft touch of his hard hand. And the look he gave me in the half-light, loving, protective, when he told me not to fear, that he would take care of me. I turned in my dream and buried my face, and his chest was hard against my cheek. Then I woke up.

But did I? Here I am again in the dark in a park, and I am now near sixty. The intervening years have seen many dark parks and, living my dream, many hard men. Each I have pressed my head against.

I am looking for the original, for the man in the dream, you will say. Well, yes. But when you have found him hundreds of times and still go on looking, for what then are you searching? If you have not found him by now, you never will. Or, conversely, if you find him every day, you may be certain that he does exist only in dreams.

What was it he said? Yes, that he would take care of me, look after me, that I would no longer be alone. Though I am sixty now, no longer six, they—he—are still the same age, twenty-something. They, the inhabitants of the dream, have not aged—the same strong face, the same hard hands.

Sometimes I, an adult, have turned these strong men again into boys, and it is I who have looked after them, taken care of them. But in the dark I am again the child, and it is they who are adult. What could it all mean? Anything? Nothing? No, if only because things cause other things, there is probably a meaning—but it is not one with which I am concerned as I watch the shadows in the darkened park.

Each new man—he is the answer. It is he whom I first saw over half a century now past. It never is, to be sure, but I am always there waiting. I surmise my reason. I am entertaining—yes, that is the word—entertaining hope. Something that affirming, that health-giving. I stand in the dark, calm, assured, faithful, hoping.

25 november 1983. Dinner with Paul Schrader and Mary Beth Hurt. He is having some difficulties. Yoko, Mishima’s widow, has had second thoughts now that she has signed the contract and taken the money. For some time she has been cleaning up after her husband—suppressing his film Yukoku, [Patriotism], cutting off his ex-friends, denying things—in order to make him into the man she thinks he ought to have been. Now she sees that Paul wants to make a film about Mishima as he was. Very tempestuous luncheon the other day—tears, I understand.

The main problem is Mishima’s homosexuality. She, who should know it best, is now denying it. Paul wants to include a part of it since he could not well leave it out. Tears, because their daughter somehow got hold of a copy of the script and was instantly devastated. The reason was not the strength of the script, but that the daughter had been uneducated as to just what her father was like. A slight reference in script to a gay bar. Stunned daughter. The son several years ago read the masturbation scene in his father’s Confessions of a Mask. Trauma. Was Dad really like that?

I doubt this is true. Impossible to tell how much accuracy remains in all this, because it comes strained through the mother’s rendition, then Francis’s, then Paul’s. Also, because Yoko is so playing her role. Still, it is probably true that she has kept the kids in ignorance. Part of her plan—perhaps part of her revenge as well. I remember her as a neglected bride. She had to live with the monster. It is now that she has her way, and in so doing chooses to geld him.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Yoko particularly did not want Paul to see me. I know too much. Also, I am not on her side because I have been known to criticize the illustrious and now sainted author. Last time I saw her she smiled and said that I was just not to be trusted. That is perfectly true. But I knew Mishima as well, and I want to have no part in what she is doing to him now that he is helplessly dead.

2 march 1984. The opening of the Isamu Noguchi show at the Sogetsu Kaikan, in the indoor terraced stone garden that he himself designed for the building. Isamu there, brown, leathery, now nearly eighty, dressed in his Santa Fe best—big silver turquoise-studded belt. Though Japanese, he is very American, having been educated there, having lived there most of his life. He looks like Georgia O’Keefe now.

He has also gone into multiples—which is very American of him. The new work (hot-dipped galvanized steel) comes in editions, of eighteen or twenty-six. At the show was one of each, all twenty-six of them. One is encouraged to buy, or will be. The prices are not listed at the opening, however. Soft sell.

The pieces themselves are very Noguchi. They look as if made of silver cardboard, and fit into each other—their various parts have slits, like packing cases. The forms are “free,” kidney-shaped. A slight flavor of the Orpheus props. I cannot imagine anyone wanting one.

Here in the antiseptic Sogetsu interior—done by Tange, all of whose interiors are like the insides of iceboxes with the lights left on—they seem unimpressive. Perhaps in a garden, a real one, they would fare better.

But then Isamu has always talked better art than he made. He is inspiring to listen to, particularly when he starts on Japanese garden aesthetics. But then from all this comes the work, which is sort of preschool. And now we have these multi-copy prefab kindergarten objects.

Isamu very much in his element at the party. Lots of famous people. Teshi­gara Hiroshi, lion-maned and sleek, melts into the background discreetly taking pictures, determined that this is Isamu’s show and he will not, absolutely will not intrude. That clown Okamoto Taro, whom some perhaps still regard as an artist, here but subdued—though certainly not from modesty and a desire to defer to Isamu. Maybe he is still feeling the death of Miro, the man from whom he took his style. Kamekura the designer, some TV and screen folk, and a few favored foreigners. Not the beautiful people—they go to Issey Miyake’s—but the in-people. And there are no models, though there are two white American shakuhachi players.

12 august 1984. With Eric to the last performance of the final annual obon exhibition of Japanese folk festivals, held at the grounds of the Meiji Shrine. About ten thousand attended and five thousand, it seemed, performed.

Other countries may show their festivals en masse like this—I remember a Moroccan festiva in Marrakesh, and a Yugoslavian showing at Dubrovnik of dances from all its provinces—but only in Japan would these be uncommercialized, by amateurs, by people from the provinces themselves. And only, I think, in Japan, with such vigor and enthusiasm.

Things I remember from this final evening: The platform in the center suddenly invaded by dozens of young men in breechclouts waving enormous ship’s flags, followed by a hundred or so young women in fishing wear, surrounded then by others in sea-blue kimono, and the drums and flutes and bells and voices doing the wonderful Tairyo Bushi. Then, at the last verse, those circling about suddenly produce long strips of blue cloth that are waved to simulate the sea.

The Kyogen Monkey-Skin Quiver, Nomura Troupe. Last row center: Lincoln Kirstein, Meredith Weatherby, Richie. nomura mansaku

Eight enormous floats from Shikoku, each fifty feet in height, held aloft and moved about by masses of young men from the island’s provinces. A mock fight, like galleons on a sea of people, and an obeisance to the audience, like a herd of trained elephants.

A huge illuminated portable shrine from Akita that, held aloft by dozens beneath, floated like an apparition across the crowds, the lights inside illuminating every tracery.

Fireworks, enormous ones, from Hyogo, each held by a young man, a row of them clasping these roman candles like kegs. The fire sprayed past their faces and drowned them in a burning rain. They stood there, rows of them, like fiery caryatids.

A giant lion from Kobe: The head fifteen feet high, the cloth body manipulated by one hundred fifty men inside with long poles, pulled by a hundred more outside—a lion circus tent.

The Nebuta from Aomori: First a phalanx of dozens of drums, held in threes and pounded at the same time. Then a group of dancers, all girls. Then the big drums, on wheels, each hammered by five strong men. Then young men in loincloths, leaping and capering. Then the mighty illuminated float, fifty feet high, a hundred across, illuminated from the inside—a giant samurai, sword aloft. And following this, the people from Aomori all dancing and leaping. All of this began at five-thirty as the sun was setting, and ended at nine-thirty as the full moon was rising. A marvelous spectacle, and the last. It now simply costs too much. The committee has had to give it up.

13 august 1984. Thinking of visual spectacles today, the great ones I have seen. To be sure the Grand Canyon and Ryoanji are both visual spectacles and I have seen them both, but that is not what I mean. I mean man-made ones. Let me see:

When the curtain opened on the first night of Tudor’s Romeo and Juliet and the Met audience saw the Berman set against that great blue cyclorama, that gasp of surprise and pleasure. Then Sir Thomas Beecham raised his baton and the Delius began.

In the Kabuki Ibaraki, a charming little dance for the page, all nautical references (pulling the oars, riding the waves) with the precision of nineteenth-century clockwork. Then, three comic dancers in the interlude—Edo street trash in the middle of fifteenth-century Kyoto. In the coda a wonderfully dance-like turn on the samisen, and the gliding exit of the three, legs up high, feet slapping, real high-stepping in a perfect parody of charm.

When the curtain of the second part of the first visit of the Beijing Circus to Tokyo (in the early sixties) went up and revealed a second curtain made entirely of jugglers standing on shoulders, filling the proscenium—all the hands and some of the legs juggling something.

A performance of the Nomura family of the Kyogen Utsu­bozaru (The Monkey-Skin Quiver), in which the monkey was played by a small child and the ensemble was of a perfection to draw tears.

The Great Black Current Tank at the Okinawa Exposition, where on either side, towering glass walls held the entire black current, simulated, with all of the fish, real, that are in it: shoals of tuna, fleets of dolphin, and armadas of whales, all circling, the ocean towering above.

A performance of Hagoromo in Kanazawa, home of Noh, where the heavenly princess was a masked ninety-year-old man, whose every movement, every gesture, was that of a young, virginal, heavenly creature.

In the movies, lots: like the flight of the arrows in Henry V and its inspiration, the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky; the close-ups of the animals in Au hazard, Balthazar; Falconetti’s face in Jeanne; the first glimpse backward over the length of Skull Island where we can see the distant great gate in King Kong.

Again a gap in the journals, this one four years—apparently no journals were compiled during this time. Much else, however, was written: Viewing Film, A Taste of Japan, Tokyo Nights, Introducing Tokyo, and Public People, Private People.

16 may 1988. Met Shulamith [Rubinfein] and Ed [Seidensticker] in front of the statue of Saigo at Ueno, and we went and ate blanched chicken toriwasa and pheasant donburi—though this was probably chicken as well. We are three legs of our four-legged Jane Austen Society (the fourth leg, Sheelagh [Cluny] is always now in London or Canada). After, we walked down Ame­yo­kocho and Shulemith innocently asks what this place name means.

“It means ‘Sweet American,’ that’s what it means,” said Ed. “Ame is the contraction and it is homonymous with ame, the candy. The idea is that the Americans gave candy away after the war.” “Oh, how sweet,” said Shulamith with that girlish giggle she sometimes has. “Not at all,” said Ed. “It is not a proper term. It is derogatory. It is like our calling them Jap for them to call us Ame.”

This leads to other things and at the end of the meal we have not talked much about Jane. Later, over coffee, I wonder (to myself) just which of the characters we have come to resemble: Ed is Mr. Woodhouse with teeth; I fancy myself the witty and heartless Mr. Bennett; Shulamith, well, someone very nice—maybe Elizabeth, grown older and minus Darcy; Sheelagh is Fanny’s brother—hardly ever here.

23 may 1988. Reading Raymond Carver. Never had before. Liking him but suspicious of this. The stories are so laconic that I suspect formula. Have not, however, actually detected any. Certainly, I admire the brevity. As always, successful art inspires. I too want to write such stories, and think of a theme.

A man has a happy relationship based, on his part, on a natural passivity, and this continues on until another person starts a relationship with him. Passivity continues to the exclusion of the first person. Am obviously thinking of me and the sergeant [Kiyota Kazuaki]. A naturally boyish youngest son’s passivity allowed for a relationship that was not natural to him. Yet he drew from it things that sustained him—regard and knowledge. But then he was married, something his passivity also allowed—an arranged marriage that others wanted. And she is perfectly good, his wife. And his passivity extends. He neglects me. Despite knowledge missing, he takes the easy path, stays home. So what I had congratulated myself on discovering, his passivity, becomes at the end something unwelcome. Told this way it doesn’t seem much of a story, but the shape is nice. I turn it this way and that, admiring its symmetry. I think, however, I will have the story told by a woman. Will make the homo into non-marriage, make the non-homo into marriage. Can allow myself a bit of sentiment that way. [It became the short story “Arrangements.”]

25 may 1988. Itami Juzo, famous director son of a famous director father. “Cut!” shouts Itami into his lapel mike, after the eighth take of the final scene of the second part of A Taxing Woman [Marusa no Onna]. He is wearing his black Chinese shirt, his slippers, his red scarf, his black fedora—emblems as necessary to image as is the constant cigarette, the continual cups of coffee, the hard candy he nibbles during shooting.

The script assistant confirms that this final scene consisted of six rehearsals and eight takes. “The first,” says Itami, “was probably all right but I wanted to take one more to make sure and ended up doing eight. But that last one was all right too, I think.” She agrees.

“Wasn’t very economical though, was it?” he asks. Then, to me, “Money, money. So I work fast. This picture only took me fifty-four days. You save a lot of money that way.”

Making money, that’s one reason for making films. And saving money. “That’s the reason I star my wife in all my films. Want all the profits to stay in the family.”

With Itami Juzo (in hat), 1988. newsweek

Making money is important. After all, Itami had had to mortgage everything he owned to make his first picture, The Funeral. He said, “I read that I would even have mortgaged my wife, had the banks wanted her.”

The picture was successful, however, made money, and so he decided to become a full-time director. He hadn’t always wanted to, however. He’d been an industrial illustrator, an essayist, a translator, a talk-show host, and an actor. It was only when he turned fifty that he became a director—like his father.

Itami Mansaku was one of Japan’s most respected prewar directors, an innovative man who helped turn the Japanese period film into the humanistic expression that it for a short period became. In this he inspired an entire generation of postwar directors—Kurosawa Akira, Kobayashi Masaki, Uchida Tomu. He universalized the specifically Japanese, and in doing so he created films that were art.

He died when his son, Juzo, was thirteen. Left fatherless, raised by a mother of whom he later said “had no ability to bring up children,” he moved from one profession to another. “I think I am about twenty years behind my generation,” he somewhere wrote.

Becoming a director like his father brought him up to date. Though well known as an essayist and an actor, he was suddenly the film maker who had revived the movies in Japan. One of the first things he did with his newly earned money was to restore one of his father’s films, the 1936 Kakita Akanashi.

Then he began consolidating his profession—making plans, making money. You had to make the audience want to come to the theater if you were going to show a profit. Making gentle fun of them, as in The Funeral and Tampopo, was one way.

This is because, as he explained, the viewer needs a surrogate; just as a child needs someone from outside the family to fully mature. What it needs is someone to dispute the family view and show another opinion.

He crunches a piece of hard candy. And this time, he says, in reference to the film he is now completing, the tax people don’t get the money. This is because the hero, the wily leader of one of Japan’s many new religions, has had all his illegal gold cast into Buddhist altar implements. The final scene shows him in his crypt, taunting the impotent tax officials.

“And all in just fifty-four days,” he says. He can work so fast because of his system. While other directors are roaming the set and peering through the viewfinder, Itami sits quietly in the director’s chair and looks into a television monitor, giving instructions through his lapel mike. This way, he says, he stays out of everyone’s way and still, since the television camera looks directly through the camera’s lens, can see everything the cameraman can. Handy, too, on a small set.

I peer inside. The gold-filled crypt is very small. The camera hung inside can be rotated. Inside too were the two actors—the hero and his pregnant girlfriend, and the cameraman—outside was the director. The scene on the small monitor was properly claustrophobic as the same actions were performed eight times.

Mikuni Rentaro, the head of the cult, had gleefully whipped off the covers, laughing maniacally, and displayed the gold. The pregnant girlfriend had reacted. Four times he flubbed his lines and once the camera ran out of film.

Itami did not lose his temper, nor even raise his voice. He crunched more candy. Smiling he turned me and said, “Stress.” The reference was to when we had worked together on the English subtitles for The Funeral and he had first learned the meaning of the word—from me.

He had questioned every line of my work. And though he knows English, I know it better. “Now here you wrote ‘for,’ ” he said, “but that is a preposition and prepositions are tricky. Wouldn’t it be better if you had written ‘to’? That’s another preposition.” All of this was in Japanese since, no matter how well he might think he knows English, he never uses it with a foreigner. The reference to stress was my outraged reaction to this.

The scripter shook her head. She thought he was referring to himself, and Itami was never stressed. Not at all like Kurosawa, or that monument to impatience, Mizoguchi Kenji. Nor much like his father.

26 september 1988. Rain, more, again. This month has had one day of sunshine. The rest range from sprinkles to downpours. The Japanese, always prone to speak of the weather, usually with approval, are perturbed—and suspicious. Did we do this? We, with our exhausts, our chemicals, our hair spray? This, coupled with the discomfort. Walls sweating in the subway, niter in the passages, hot wet winds. We perspire under our umbrellas, and moths fly out of the closet. I find cockroaches in my sitting room. Usually only a few in the kitchen. A lady on the subway begins to complain even to me, “. . . and the backs fell, positively fell, right off my books.” “And my piano is coming unglued,” said a wet lady across the way. It is sure catastrophe when strangers start speaking to each other.

28 september 1988. I always work on my own things in the morning, labor at making a living in the afternoon, and meet people or play in the evening. Day after day after day. Never get tired of it because each day is different, though the timings are about the same. Awake at seven, coffee, newspaper. Then shower and at work at desk by nine or before: right now it is the Oxford book on Japanese film. By noon, tired of this and lunch, in or out. Then making a living. Go to International House or go to Sogetsu, or go see films to do subtitles for, or go to the library to research an article. This can go on to six. Then I meet my friends, or go about looking for new ones. Usually home by eleven. Always in bed by twelve. Today was no different from other days.

29 september 1988. Party. I am recognized. “Oh, aren’t you . . . ?” “Yes, I am and who are you?” “Oh, no . . .” and then, “I just heard your lecture . . .” or, “I saw your picture in the paper . . .” or, “I saw your photo on the book jacket . . .” Why do none of these encounters ever turn into anything? I am ready. If people know who I am and come up and talk, they already know something about me. I like fame if this is what it is.

But, I would not like it if it got as large and dangerous as I saw it with poor Mishima, who used to have to cross streets to avoid crowds, or Kuro­yanagi [Tetsuko], who gets quite nervous as people surround her on the street, smiling, well intentioned, but big, surrounding bodies nonetheless. I would not like that. But a few people here and there. . . .

Yet, they always leave me. I never leave them. I suppose they do not want to presume. I wish they would. We would have lots to talk about. Me.

1 october 1988. No, Japan has changed. What I thought never would—one of the reasons for spending my old age here—is gone, never to return. This is the possibility of meeting a stranger and making a friend. Right there, right then. Forever. Oh, meeting strangers is possible enough. Indeed all friends are initially strangers. But it is no longer possible to enter into that sudden intimacy that was once so much a part of the charm. The reason is that the attitude toward me, toward any foreigner, has changed.

It is because we are not needed any more. No one has any use for us. They do not see trips abroad in our eyes. These trips are something they can themselves afford. And there are so many of us. We have become common. And since Japan is rich now and the other countries are not, they need not imitate us.

I am speaking of my regretting imperialism, I know. I ought to rejoice that Japan is no longer subject to it, but I do not want to. It was too much fun being treated as someone quite special. And one no longer is. A foreign friend in speaking of this says, “Why, we might as well be living at home.” I smile because it is amusing. Not he, he takes it seriously. Then looks for reasons. It is because he is getting old. Or it is because of fear of AIDS, which, of course, comes from foreign lands. But, it is not that. It is that the Japanese have outgrown us.

2 october 1988. Sunday, a soft rain, but cooler now. Shinjuku, the streets shining, reflected umbrellas: pink, mauve, chartreuse—people in for the day. Country Japanese are fond of untoward colors. I see a boy with geranium-colored trousers. Day-tripping workmen often wear purple cummerbunds. Against the gray rainy cityscape these subtle colors shine and shimmer.

At Isetan I watch the quiet crowds. How well dressed everyone is now. More, how stylish. Not just the spikes and slashes of the young. Everyone else displays a kind of good taste—solid materials, well cut—the kind of taste you see in the Edo street scenes of Hokusai. Solid, plain, well-cut kimonos. Splashes of color here and there. And, I notice, as in the Hokusai, no faces. Is this because Japanese in crowds have never have had any? No, it is because in crowds we all have a kind of “faceless” expression. The face is there but it is not expressed. This is something Hokusai knew. One sees Japanese faces only when people are alone or where they are somewhere where they know each other.

3 october 1988. A good long time now. He lies there in the center of the city, dying. Very old, very strong. Whoever would have thought that that skinny old man would be such a laster? And last he does, day after day—his doctors pumping blood into him as fast as it leaks out.

Hirohito has not a secret left. We not only know all about the rectal discharges, we even know their temperatures. An avid audience of about one hundred million people take in the enormous amount of information the media churns out—important TV broadcasts are interrupted to give us the latest non-news.

There are in addition hundreds who kneel in the drizzle in front of the gates of the Imperial Palace. They will probably catch their deaths themselves. And thousands who line up with umbrellas to sign the condolence books. I look at the line of colored umbrellas, which I see from the Press Club twenty floors high: a distant rainbow-tinted caterpillar in the drizzle.

There is some criticism of all this coverage. No private citizen, no other person, would be given it. And does this not mean some suspicious reversion to prewar thoughts? The Emperor is not a god. Why is he now treated as one? Right-wing militarism on its way back? Some think so. Leftist students are giving speeches at Ochanomizu Station. They warn of this. They do not want the right to overcome. They want the left to overcome.

I think the reason for this distasteful and massive public display of a single death is that for anyone over forty, the Emperor’s life is bound up with their own. One mourns for lost youth as well. Another is that many Japanese always do the same thing at the same time, and it is an unusual person who will stand out against one of these mass movements.

Yet there are many such unusual people now. Not one person to whom I talk about the dying Emperor thinks proper the massive attention paid. Nor is anyone, including many of my contemporaries, upset by the coming death. Many make jokes. However, my friends are not arch-traditionalists or else they would not be my friends, so this probably proves little.

It suits many purposes, this crisis. The Diet uses it as excuse not to work. Major companies use it as excuse to avoid doing things they do not want to. Chiyonofuji, traditional sumo star, cancels a party out of deference. Itsuki Hiroshi, singer, cancels a wedding—but he is of Korean ancestry and so probably thought it safer to. Lots of cancellations. No fireworks here, no garden party there. I talked with someone on the phone who wanted me to write an article, and I said yes, but then she said, “Well, we haven’t quite decided, there is this unfortunate Emperor thing.” So even magazines are thinking what to print. Nothing too inflammatory, nothing too frivolous, nothing too foreign.

Me, I think this kind of mindlessness is as deplorable as it is human. I dislike any kind of joining—the Catholic Church, the Soka Gakkai, the Communist Party, or kneeling and praying for HIH. In my ideal world no one would pledge allegiance to anything.

I also notice a certain attitude. People sigh a lot. It is as though the Emperor is showing a lack of tact, of good taste, in being so long about it. Nonetheless I dread the days after the death. Certainly full national mourning—all for this frail, limited, stubborn little man. On the other hand I too can get a cheap thrill out of it. The longest reign in recorded history is about to end.

4 october 1988. Walking down the street to International House—that annual odor. I remember the first time, many years ago. Since the street runs along a schoolyard I thought that bulging cesspools had overflowed, not stopping to consider that cesspools are long gone from central Tokyo. Then I noticed the squashed yellow splotches—crushed ginkgo nuts, and overhead a great yellow leafed ginkgo tree. I make a kind of haiku:

Oh the smell of shit. Ah, autumn is once more here.

Why should the fruit smell of excrement? If it were spring and the blossoms smelled that way I could understand. It would attract the bugs and fertilize the tree. But in deep autumn there are no bugs about. And in the spring the smell of the blossoms is that of semen. What kind of tree is this?—semen in the spring, shit in the fall.

I remember the first time I was aware of the springtime smell. It was 1947 and I was in the courtyard of Engakuji in Kita-Kamakura, with Gene Langston, and we were spending the night at Dr. Suzuki’s guest house, and Gene suddenly stopped, his nostrils twitching: “Amazing—it smells just like semen.” And so it did.

5 october 1988. Someone—who, Balzac?—said a man’s character is to be disclosed by his library. Very well, let’s see. In mine: the complete Jane Austen in the Folger Edition; all three novels of Lewis Carroll; all the poetry and a biography of Cavafy; all the short works of Kafka but none of the novels; some Henri Michaux, including A Barbarian in Asia; Jules and Jim; everything of Nagai Kafu in English; lots of Colette; historical fiction of Ibuse; short works of Naoya Shiga; Cocteau, all of the novels; everything in English of Borges; Sartre’s biographical writings; Isherwood’s Berlin Stories; collected Auden; collected Dylan Thomas stories; complete novels of Henry Green; lots of Marguerite Yourcenar (everything in English); lots of Susan Sontag; complete poems and prose of Elizabeth Bishop; Sleepless Nights of Elizabeth Hardwick; everything of Jimmy Merrill, etc. And that is only the fiction-poetry part.

There is a section given over to books on Japan including all my reference works. And a whole stack of film books, including my own. Space is a problem. I have to get rid of things. Recently exiled the Bible and the complete Shakespeare—on the shelves for decades and never read. But not thrown out. I am too sentimental (and superstitious) for that. Both from my mother—one (the Bible), nearly half a century ago. I keep them on a shelf with other discards. Not the shelf in the entryway however. Those discards are for people to pick up and carry home.

16 october 1988. Sunday. To the Kabuki with Eric. Some modern trash, and two classical dances. One of them is Yasuna with Baiko. Though a “national treasure,” Baiko still looks like a lady searching for a golf ball. In the other, Sagimusume, Jakuemon, his face often under the knife, looks odd but then he is supposed to be someone half a bird. But the hoyden way he carries on is not nearly elegant enough for this dance.

The interesting play was Moritsuna Jinya, the single act surviving of a much, much longer work and now a “Kabuki classic.” As I watched its reprehensible story of a man quite cheerfully sacrificing his little boy, killing him because of loyalty to the lord, I was again struck by how wonderfully acted it all was. Takao as Moritsuna was immaculate. When he identified the (wrong) severed head he went through the canon of twelve emotions. And it was all there. It was like a great violinist. The violinist is only doing Paganini to be sure. And I realized that one of the most moving and touching things about Kabuki is that this talent is lovingly squandered on junk.

There is, however, a difference. Even Verdi and a clutch of fine singers cannot make one sympathize with poor Gilda. But at the Kabuki there were sniffles as the little boy spilled his guts and kept right on piping (children’s Kabuki lines are all on one note—like the oboe sounding its A, for hours) and took as long to die as Camille. But people believed, for a time at any rate. I didn’t, but I too was moved, though in a different way. This presentation of emotions (rather than the representation of them) was moving as a fine carpenter or master stone carver at work is moving. I am moved by the artistry of how the thing is done, not by the thing itself.

18 october 1988. Gave a talk at the Press Club. Talked about “Being a Foreigner” and was listened to by a hundred or so of different nationalities and a few races. Many Japanese. I have talked in public for so many years now that I can tell what people will take and what not, what they will laugh at, what they will shake their heads over, or nod at. And, finally, I know how to be evangelical. Christ lost a good witness when he lost me.

But do I believe any of what I say? I do at the time, I know that. It seems such a good idea. But in the early morning hours when I wake, wake with such doubts that it awakens me, then I do not believe any of it. My heart beats like something trying to get out, and I am certain of nothing. Yet just hours before, there I was, certain of everything.

19 october 1988. Sitting here all wired up. Electrodes various places on my chest, wires running into a tape recorder I must carry on a strap over my shoulder, complete with a special large switch on a separate wire that I must push to punctuate the tape when I “feel funny”—doctor’s term, chotto okashiku nareba. Have not felt funny once. Having the machine on has obviously inhibited the unruly organ. Actually, the only time it ever really acted up was five years ago, when it leaped for hours like a frantic fish—a frantic frozen fish, for my chest was as though filled with crushed ice. This I thought, is angina pectoris. And so it was—my first and so far last. Still, routine tests have located something okashii going on. Hence the wire-job. Had it five years ago and felt funny wearing it, everyone stared so. Now, half a decade of handbags, shoulder bags, earphones, and straps have intervened. I walk about today and no one notices, except an acquaintance at the porno where I had gone to stimulate the organ. And he says, “Hey, what a cute little tape walkman you got there. . . .”

From now on Richie no longer used his journals as sources for other works and became more interested in them for themselves. They began to have a purpose all of their own. One of the reasons was that he was himself experiencing life in a more intense way—time was passing; friends were dying. The evanescence of which he had often spoken was now apparent. He thus wanted more than ever to leave some account of what things (including himself) had been like. This led both to a closer observance of the world outside, and to a deeper, more frank investigation of himself and his motives.

12 may 1989. To see Bando Tamasaburo at the Embujo in an Ariyoshi adaptation, Furu Amerika ni Sode wa Nurasaji. It is Shinpa, but a comedy: Osono works in a Yokohama brothel: it is 1861 so the girls are divided between those for Japanese and those for foreigners, and one of the “Japanese” is claimed by a foreigner—so she kills herself. This at least is the story put out. People praised, anti-foreign ronin come to marvel; Osono becomes something of a priestess in this new cult but eventually goes too far and the entire edifice collapses.

Tamasaburo plays Osono in a cool, big sister manner, half tough mizushobai mama, half whore with a heart of gold. A performance, always hovering on the edge of camp, never falling over. Playing the cynical “priestess,” he is at his best, in complete control until he comically loses it and must then retreat into “femininity.” He knowingly impersonates that male invention and does it so well that he shows only those seams he wants to show.

Afterward I am taken backstage to call. He is in his mauve dressing gown, looking strangely Nell Gwyn—it is the decollete. All makeup off, he also has a scrubbed, very young look about him. “It isn’t really Shinpa, you know. I don’t think you’d like Shinpa—too weepy. This is a comedy.” Talking on about Shinpa, with which he alternates Kabuki, he spoke of Izumi Kyoka and wondered why the West was not more familiar with him. I said it was true, they only knew Taki no Shiraito thanks to Mizoguchi, and Demon Pond thanks to Tamasaburo. “Well, they ought to know more. Look, people know Tanizaki and Kawabata. Why not Izumi.” Why not indeed, we all wondered.

Tamasaburo is, like many actors, concerned to make an impression of seriousness. He wants to talk about ideas, as though to prove he is capable of them. At the same time it is impossible for him to hide a frivolous charm. This showed in a small contretemps at the beginning.

He had asked about my small role in Teshigahara’s film Rikyu, of which he had heard. Then, with no transition, asked, “First time?” I, not unnaturally, thought we were speaking about me. “And not very good,” I said. At which he gave a high, infectious laugh, and looked at me with apparent amusement. Then I realized that he meant was it my first time at Shinpa. Straightened out, the conversation continued but I had had a glimpse into the charm of an actor whose instant reaction was to disarm with laughter.

I sat on the fake Louis XVI petit point until the conversation stopped for a second and then, before it began again, stood up and thanked him. That is the way to behave in the green room. Otherwise the host becomes one’s captive. Then, for the first time, he became effeminate, the good hostess seeing off her guests. Life is made of such roles—most men are male at hello and their mothers at goodbye.

14 may 1989. Go to get a haircut. My barbershop, the Ogawa in Shinjuku’s “My City,” is expensive enough that it is grand. Boys in attendance to bring things and take them away at a gesture from the head barber. Barbers calling each other sensei, flourishing with hot towels, or in convergence over a difficult head of hair.

While my sensei snipped and combed and I faced the large mirror and watched the goings on behind me, I was reminded me of the Utamaro, an even more expensive bath cum brothel in Kawasaki in the old days. One was met there too and bowed at, and the girls were forever having conferences, and probably calling each other sensei.

It was most striking, this similarity, when the new customer was brought in. Here at the Ogawa there was the same subservient leading gesture, the same fuss getting the patron seated, the same airs and graces with towels and scents. And the same expression. The girls had no choice over whom they got, and one saw a wry smile or an almost invisible shrug. Looking in the mirror too, I now saw the same thing. A barber made a small moué while escorting in a thug with an unkempt punchi pama, that permanent wave so notoriously difficult and time-consuming to set.

16 may 1989. Dinner with Brad Leithauser. We talk about Elizabeth Bishop, under whom he studied, and Elizabeth Hardwicke, whom he knows and whom I would like to know. (“She sort of takes you over of an evening, you know, hands on shoulders. Once my mother was along, and so I had two of them and infantilized at once.”) And Robert Lowell. (“Knew him only when he was practicing to be old. ‘Could any of you young people help me find a taxi?’ sort of thing. And they told me what kind of commanding lion he had been and I could not put the two together.”)

Leithauser now lives in Iceland. When he was in Japan he went to the Oki Islands. He likes that elemental landscape. It shows in his poetry. Strong lines, and few. Like that poem about looking down from a plane on one course at a ship he had once taken on another. I tell him about Marguerite Yourcenar. We both like to talk about people. Something we share with James Merrill, who is a friend of both of ours and, indeed, the reason we have met. We talk about reviews. He talks about how the bad ones he gets are crushing. I wait for indication that he has read mine of his first novel. This does not come. I realize that he had not read it. Shall I tell him about it, send him a copy? Absolutely not. If he doesn’t know, that is good. And I know me. Now that I know him, I would not have written the way I did, even though the novel didn’t seem very good.

17 may 1989. Went to see Imamura’s Black Rain again. This time, knowing what would happen, remembering the power, I am relatively unswayed and can pay attention to the construction. Before, immersed in the story I did not realize just how many doors are opened and shut, just how many windows are peered through. The interior architecture encloses and delineates this film. As in Ozu, the fact that domestic architecture confines also serve to shape these people. How free is the great outside, the paddy—and the big fish jumping. Perhaps a symbol, but more a big happy fish. No doors and windows for him. And the sick girl forgets herself in wonder at this great jumping fish. This is what art is made of, I think—a concern for parallels and balance, enclosure and freedom—contrast, opposites, but not many. Just two or three, enough to make a container to hold the strongest of emotions.

18 may 1989. Lectured the Harvard students on Japanese film aesthetics at International House. As always (I do this every year), they trouped in looking positively post-atomic, with tangled hair and Arab slipovers and Chinese blankets. And as always, they shortly revealed themselves as open, intelligent, interested, and imaginative—perfect students, at least perfect for me. I felt every word was landing on ready loam.

Also, as always, I feel phony. Not in what I say, that is solid enough, but in the little affectations of a populist egalitarianism that I display. I find myself using the colloquial, making depreciative asides, and demolishing popular agreed-upon demolition sites. Either they are too young to detect this act of mine, or else they are too polite to mention it. On the other hand, if I did not do this what would I do?

20 may 1989. Took John Ashbery and his friend David Kermani to see the Edo Shiryokan. Noticed that Ashbery shuffled and, since I knew he drank, thought it might be drink. We passed a toilet and he wanted to use it. A block later another toilet, which he used. On the way back he asked me if I thought there might be a toilet somewhere. I said yes, up the street. Then David said that perhaps that gas station over there had one. They did. John used it and then, alone with his friend, I learned why.

Almost eight years ago Ashbery contracted some rare and strange infection that polluted, if that is the word, the spinal fluid. As the toxic levels rose, his legs became paralyzed, then his hands. The lungs were stilled, and next the heart. Unconscious, he was taken to a hospital and pronounced deceased. Turned over, an autopsy was begun. Thinking he was dead they took little care, but opened up his spine to have a look. Then it was noticed that he was alive. So he was sewed up and the doctor said he was living, but would always be a vegetable.

Yet, several weeks later he was sitting up, then eating, then talking, and now walking about on a Japan tour reading his poems. However, there has been an amount of neural damage. Hence the shuffle. He wears special pads in his trousers just in case, but has become adept and rarely needs them.

Walking along I look at him. That fine beaked profile, those large intelligent eyes. Back from the grave by, apparently, iron will power. I find this admirable. And his continuing with his life, his ignoring this, his getting on with his work.

23 may 1989. Awakened from sleep, three in the morning, by the cries of fire engines, as they rounded my corner and ran screaming into the maze of wooden houses that is Yanaka where I live. I raised the blind and looked out. There in the middle distance was a tree of flame, shooting into the air, capped with black swirling smoke.

Flowers of Edo, what such fires used to be called—a blossom of growing crimson on the deep gray of the nocturnal city. And I felt a deep dread at the awfulness of that devouring element. Far away as it was—it took me ten minutes to walk there the following morning—and safe as I was, still I felt the cold of an unreasoning fear.

In the morning I found where the fire had been. Just off the road, back in a warren. Four houses, each very close to the other. Just charred supports now, the whole front of one burned to a crisp, like a deformed face. Inside, one whole room exposed. And there was the bookcase. And all the books were carbonized.

Over it all the desolate smell of burned wood and wet ash. Puddles still on the ground from the firemen’s rain. These pretty wooden houses are the reason I live in Yanaka, old Edo, and I have often looked at them from my windows. But also I knew last night that I am somewhat safer living in this ugly, modern, tiled and more or less fireproof apartment.

26 may 1989. I go to see Gene Langston in the hospital. Still in a bad way. Hole in his throat, trouble breathing, unable to eat, bone-thin. Today, however, though still thin, still with hole, still on respirator, he is better I am told.

I try to imagine it. In a country hospital, on his back, unable to read, fighting every inch of the way—toward what? Not to health—simply fighting to reach some level where he may continue to live. He is alert (no brain damage from the time he was shut down for hours) and—sign of health, perhaps—extremely impatient. Since he is weak, he is brusque. Nurse came in with her invariable thermometer and for the first time in all our years together I saw Gene rude to the help. He ignored her.

How good that made me feel. As though health is burgeoning in him, making him selfish. He must offer all of his energy to simply getting one thing done now. He has no time for niceties. And he knows it and he does not apologize for it. Also he is finally being fed—a nose tube. And he does seem less thin than he was. He wants to renew his International House membership. He has made up his mind. He wants to live.

29 may 1989. Roppongi is taking itself seriously: it is all “now” with post-modern architecture (the buildings chromed, mirrored, looking like big cigarette lighters or enormous lipsticks) and mottoes: “High Town Roppongi” is the slogan embossed on the overhead at the crossing. The veneer stops short, looks tacky. A striving for Trad but Mod. Traditional is on the sign of the Red Lobster. Established in 1988, it says. Modern is everywhere else. Particularly the people. Lots of dark glasses on the boys, and wet-looking clothes and hanging-bangs haircuts. A touch of punk but not much—a few pink locks, a few Mohawks.

The foreigners are all models. Pale eyes, disdainful lips. Forever chattering with each other. Both sexes fashionably androgynous. Cow-like, they wander around in designer finery and get together and have bread fights in respectable restaurants. The cops are very heavy on the place (nascent drug scene). I remember when Roppongi was a crossing for streetcars and that was about it.

31 may 1989. International House lecture by Don Hardy. Lots of people including a tattoo sensei from Yokohama. (No disclosure after the talk: both were ready, but it did not work out that way, such things taking calculated spontaneity.) Lots of women. But then women are much more at ease with their bodies than men are. Men drive theirs like reluctant beasts. Women lie down with theirs.

Good talk, lots of slides. Later, private room at the Chinese restaurant where Frank [Korn] had taken us. Chizuko [Korn] had seen nothing like this, was frankly curious. Don stood by the remains of beef and oyster sauce with his shirt off, shorts pulled down, hand over privates, while we gazed at his Benten and Kannon. Both women (the other was Chris [Blasdel]’s wife, Mika) plainly wanted to touch, but did not. The call of the flesh is strong. That of painted flesh doubly so, because it is a double vision: the picture and the skin on which it lies. The eye is not enough for the tattoo.

5 june 1989. Met with Ed Seidensticker at the foot (feet?) of Saigo in Ueno. He was unwell and looked it. Bright red. It was the climb he said. Must sit down. After a while turned dead white. Then, slowly, he regained a more human coloring. I, always the busybody, began diagnosing—told him he was too fat, which is true but no one wants to hear that. I suggested exercise or less eating or (pause) drinking. This doubly unwished since he has such problems staying on the wagon. So we were, thanks to both of us, ready for a squabble.

He began on the Japanese, “these people,” guessing that I would not like him to do so. And so, feeling outspoken, I told him that he really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing. This initially drew silence—as it would. Then he turned to me and solemnly said, “We must never again speak of this if we are to remain friends.”

The expected attack came later when he had gotten over the jolt. “Actually, you know, Donald, you are the deluded one. You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.” By this time, however, the hurt was mastered and he was smiling. “Oh, dear,” he complained merrily, “we have nothing more to talk about.”

After the meal he wanted to go right home and did so. “But you know,” he said upon parting. “We do not really disagree. Not really really.” I at once agreed. And as we walked along he, encouraged, even had a few things to say about “these people” before we parted.

6 june 1989. Big JAL party at the Imperial. How old everyone looks. I see a man there every year, and each year he has so aged that this string of parties seems in retrospect Jaques’s ages of mankind—soon sans teeth, sans everything. Me too I suppose. I dress “young” however. My blue summer coat, navy Countess Mara shirt, pale blue spotted Hermes tie—a natty sight. Tom Chapman said, “My god, Donald, you look like something out of a fifties road company of Guys and Dolls.” This pleased me more than not.

Ed there. He turned to our acquaintances and said, “Oh, Donald says the most awful things about one. We are quarreling.” Then gave me a big smile.

25 june 1989. Dinner at the Korns’. [Marian Korn had died, 24 February 1987, and Frank had remarried.] Talk turns to underwear and the playboy from Hokkaido opposite me informs that in kendo neither underwear nor support of any sort is ever used. The swordsmen are nude and hanging under their indigo trappings. At further questions from Chizuko [Korn] it transpires that the kendoka achieves erection during the moment before strike. Playboy demonstrates (to a point) by raising his hands as though a sword, frowning, puffing out his cheeks. “Does this not get in the way of the match?” someone wonders. “No, not at all. The point of the sword and the point of the penis are in alignment.” “What happens then?” asked Tami, a very pretty girl whose profession I have not as yet ascertained. “Why,” says our informant, “at the moment of striking, the metaphorical blood streams from the enemy and the literal blood retreats from the engorged organ.” The men at table are inclined to take this as literally true and to find it somehow complimentary. The women on the other hand find it unlikely and scoff. Observes one, “With no underwear, it is liable to come right out of the kendo gear altogether.” “Yes, so it does, so it does,” the Hokkaido playboy cries. Bursts of merriment.

26 june 1989. Dinner with Zushiden. He is forty-nine now—and it has been nearly thirty years since he and I were together in Otsuka. He’s still a big, good-looking boy from Kagoshima.

He married early and then had various problems. He, handsome, widely admired, married a woman who would have nothing to do with him. She kept putting him off. Said he was too big. She could never, etc. Finally he went to a doctor who, in the Japanese manner, advised determination. Determination is nothing that the good-natured Zushi could easily summon, but he tried. And tried again and again.

Three children were the result. But now another problem. The first one has turned out bad. Like a cuckoo chick in the swallow’s nest. Where could she have come from? Wild, glue-sniffing, promiscuous, insubordinate—still living at home, now twenty and not speaking to her parents.

However, just recently something nice happened to him. A long time ago when in high school he had this girlfriend he really liked. He was her first, and she his. Then he came to Tokyo, to university, and she married and went to LA and had kids, got divorced, got married again, became a widow, got married again—and looked up Zushi in the current high school graduate directory (Japan keeps these things up to date) and called him.

With Teshigahara Hiroshi on the set of Rikyu, 1989. teshigahara productions

Then she came to see him. “And it was as though all those years had never existed,” he said, as though in awe. “I didn’t recognize her but she somehow recognized me. And we had dinner and it was just like always, and so we went to a hotel.” Pause. “And guess what hotel we went to—the Urashima!”

And that great boyish laugh of his. [The hotel was named after Urashima Taro, a folk figure who, like Rip Van Winkle, came back from a period of enchantment and found himself old and everything changed.] Day after tomorrow he is going to Kagoshima and will again meet her. They will walk where they walked hand in hand three decades ago. I said it was like an English movie. “No,” he said, “it’s like a Japanese movie.”

29 june 1989. I go to see the Teshi­gahara Rikyu, the rough-cut version, no music yet. Very pretty—but on this viewing my major interest was myself. There I am in my surplice, my hat, my mustache—the head of the Portuguese mission. Astonishing resemblance to my paternal grandfather. Paternal grandfather in drag. How old I look, how awful—all the usual reactions to self suddenly revealed.

But what else I notice is that the editing has resulted in a credible performance. I am a stupid church father, but well intentioned. Just what the director wanted, I guess. Certainly my idea of playing a cynical worldly Jesuit is not apparent. Instead, an old child, silly but pleasant. A nice, understated comic performance that I did not know I was giving. [The entire scene is given in the “Hitomu Yamazaki” section of Public People, Private People.] And again, how strange the gulf between what you feel and what you are—what you show and what others see.

30 june 1989. Showed The Izu Dancer at the International House, the Gosho 1933 silent version. Weak film, contrived, stupid added plot about a gold mine, travesty of the Kawabata novel. But in back of all of this—how astonishingly beautiful the Izu peninsula was half a century ago. Something then rarely noticed. I took it for granted in the forties and fifties, when it was still beautiful. It certainly isn’t now. And so I gazed at this scratched, faded, black and white image and saw Eden.

4 july 1989. Murray Sayles called. Wanted permission to give my number to the London Tatler. What on earth for? “Well, they are doing a series on people who know everyone, in each city as it were, you know.” No, I did not know. “Oh, you know. Like Harold Acton in Florence. And so I told them that you are their man in Tokyo.”

Me? The Harold Acton of Tokyo? The way one must appear from the outside! Murray sees me as this. I look like this. Maybe I am this. But I never thought so before. And I never felt so until now, this very moment. The Harold Acton of Tokyo. Not a bad ring to it.

12 july 1989. Dentist. He took out the root, stump and all (prying, with something like a can opener), and it hurt. Home, aching, took a nap, then woke up and did not want to stay in. Pain better, and I felt I needed some recompense. Hunting around would have taken energy better spent in convalescing, and finding something would have been, given the great bloody hole in my lower jaw, both unhygienic and unaesthetic. So I decided on a cheap, dumb movie.

With unerring taste I chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is energetic to no end, active to no result, and divertingly brainless. What with novelty all long gone, it is tired replay. Now no reference (the Comics, the Movies) seems real any longer. It is a walk-through, a staged rerun. Watching it is like being locked in with an over-active kid. The picture starts with Boy Scouts and never ages. It can’t, for it is the creation of the two richest adolescents in the world: Lucas and Spielberg. They are very active in acting out their concerns. Again, a thing about fathers. That is where the love story is, too. Women, we cannot trust, any of ’em, ever. And sure enough the blonde is lost down a crack in the earth. But done with no knowing irony. One feels that Steve/George truly believe. The Power is With Them.

Not here so much. The film has just opened and the theater is half empty. It is not that young Japanese (all on dates) are above this. It is perhaps not brainless enough to draw. At any rate, not new enough. After all, their mothers probably went (on a date) to see the first of them, the mighty Jaws.

For me, just the thing. I was anesthetized for two hours, deafened by the Richard Strauss score that fits the Nazi antics so well and makes me wonder if they are still villains. One wonders further when Harrison Ford is forced to say: “Oh, Nazis, I just hate those guys.” Formerly this statement of dislike would not have been necessary. It could have been taken for granted. But now the Nazi are like the Comanche. You say you hate them, but you love to watch the scalping. Much set up by the viewing, came home, slept like a child.

18 august 1989. Chizuko Korn’s birthday. Very lively, with everyone working quite hard, in the manner of successful Japanese parties. Much badinage about the centerpiece, a structure of chestnuts. From talk of these (kuri) to talk of squirrels (risu) and then the putting of them together—kuri to risu, which is, of course, Japanese for clitoris.

Wordplay is always popular at parties, and this was an enormous hit. The language is so proper that any hint of impropriety (even a medical term, Latin strained through English) is welcome. Also, most of the women had been in the mizushobai or are else emancipated enough to imitate it. Biggest hit was the stout Lio, hair slicked back, in a pin-stripe suit with white shirt and necktie. She threw back her head and chortled while her friend, older but more frilly, tittered at the other end of table.

Later Mr. Soda, the playboy from Hokkaido, kept telling us how sumo wrestlers force their testicles back into their bodies before their bouts. Then he insisted upon standing up and (through his trousers) demonstrating their probable route.

On June 4, 1988, Richie met Choi Dae-Yung in Seoul. It was a friendship that has remained to this day.

21 august 1989. I am here at my desk typing away when I get an early morning phone call from [Choi] Dae-Yung in Korea. Sounds in the same room. He actually was until last week, having spent two weeks with me here. Full of his plans—one more year as soccer coach, then a sports store. Is near thirty now, must be thinking of the future. His English is better, a year ago there was none.

But I wish it were much better still. His ghost is in the room with me, and all we have is words. I think of Proust’s muses of the switchboard. We no longer have switchboard girls; we have microchips. But still there is this medium, this curtain of ether. Communicating with the dead must be something like the telephone.

Also striking is the coincidence of the call. I was just now writing about him, writing Earle Ernest, who is curious about someone who has come to mean so much to me. “You asked about Dae-Yung,” I write:

What he did before me and besides soccer? Well, he was born twenty-nine years ago in Pusan and had an ordinary childhood until he was ten, when his mother died. His father remarried and in three years was dead himself. He had married unwisely, because the new wife took everything and turned the orphaned Dae-Yung out on the streets. There he made a kind of living—paperboy, milk-boy, and ice-boy—until an uncle took pity and brought him into his home and sent him to school.

Dae-Yung worked hard in school, particularly at sports for which he had an aptitude, one so strong that by the time he was sixteen he was school soccer star, and by eighteen was voted best high school player in all South Korea. After his military training he went to university and was star of the team. He was on TV; his picture was on sports magazine covers.

Then another setback. Playing a game with Australia, he was hit in the back by a ball and injured. This led to a series of operations. He spent his twenty-second and twenty-third years on his back in a cast looking at the ceiling. His stepmother visited him once, to ask for money. Finally recovered, he was too old to be a soccer star, and though exercise brought back his strength, it could not bring back time lost. When he was twenty-six he was offered a coaching post in a small mountainside high school. This he took, and this is where he is now. During all of this time he, in the manner of sportsmen, devoted himself to his sport and nothing else. He had had a girlfriend for a time, and he had had sex with her when he was eighteen or so. Also like most Korean young men, he went to the whorehouses, where he found that his staying power made him popular.

Choi Dae-Yung, 1989. donald richie

He was also popular with his teammates and with older men, several of whom made passes. These he rejected, but some persevered. This had the result of making Dae-Yung secretive about his private life, his real address, his telephone number, etc. Then came me.

Due to the several mistimed and misinformed occurrences that marked our meeting, I accidentally overwhelmed him. I also demonstrated that someone could like him, could even love him, and yet not threaten him. This was, apparently, the first time for him to experience this. So he found a place for me. I filled a need. I became the long-missing parent, and he has begun to address me as though I indeed were. It has been over two years since we first met.

Dae-Yung now shakes his head and says he has the kind of looks that women do not like and that men do. This is probably true. He says we fit well, a good combination. And so we do. He also says he wants us to always be together. And so we may. And all of his history is merely what I have been told. I have no proof of any of it. I write an address said to be his uncle’s and the mail is given him; I have no phone number; I have never met one friend of his; I have no reason for believing him other than his word, his character, and the complete consistency of his history in all of its varied tellings to me. I complained once. And he nodded and looked sad and said he knew, but I must believe him, because it is true. So I will believe him. I keep remembering Psyche and Eros, and how it ended.

22 august 1989. Invitational premiere at Sogetsu Kaikan of Rikyu. [Teshigahara] Hiroshi made a speech about cultural history; Mikuni [Rentaro], now all hirsute (head, mustache, beard) after months of shave-pated Rikyu, talked about cultural history; Yamazaki [Tsutomu], granny glasses, all crooked from a recent bout with Richard III, talked about cultural history.

Audience was tout Tokyo. This meant a spattering of royalty—one prince, one princess, the cultural ones—and lots of “media personalities.” No government people—these are never out unless the event is in a communist capital, or Washington, D.C.

Issey Miyake looking cast in copper, all red-brown skin and wire-stiff hair. Has not aged a wrinkle in twenty years. Asakura Setsu talking about the new production of Tosca she is doing, and about Ninagawa Yukio with whom she had a fight and out on whom she walked. Is pleased he has lost much luster. So he has, without her sets. Takemitsu Toru told me how he got that grand endless chord to accompany Rikyu in the boat: synthesizers, organs, and lots of celli. Akiyama Kuniharu and his wife, [Takahashi] Aki—who has now done the complete piano Satie. I remember him as a pale, slim youth. Now he is mustached, fattish, red. He has kept his enthusiasm, however. Inside of him sits the youngster who thirty years ago, on this very ground, pushed and pulled the Sogetsu film program into shape.

Many people I do not know. Women in modish hats with brilliant eyeliner smiles. Lots of men in Issey shirts and unruly hair. Rather strange buffet: sake in bamboo containers and little things on bamboo skewers. But then bamboo is Hiroshi’s material. He has made it his own—as in the last scene of this movie.

With Eric Klestadt in Matsue.

Invested head of the Sogetsu school, starting from the shadow of his father, Hiroshi not only stepped out, he also has made it even stronger than his father did. He heads that enormous school, which must be something like heading the Pentagon, makes sure it makes money, and makes certain it does not look silly.

And for his premiere he can command the fashionable world of this capital. I remember ten years ago when he was very unhappy, having to give up film, pottery, himself. Now he is secure—no, serene. He can leave the bureaucracy long enough to make a film, and that is something.

24 august 1989. A walk with Eric along the new esplanade made on both sides of the Sumida River. The river laps right up to the steps. Both of us agree that the city fathers have, in this instance, spent our money wisely.

But how different everything is. Not just the steps and the esplanade. I have been in Tokyo off and on for over forty years now (and Eric for longer) and we have seen the city change. It has become larger and taller and—strangely—cleaner, or at any rate less cluttered. But the former clutter was human. In this new post-modern capital of planned cityscapes, the lack of clutter is inhuman.

Numata Makiyo. donald richie

We look at the complex of towers rising from the Mukojima end of Azuma Bridge: a public housing construction, the multi-story Asahi Beer Building (shaped like a glass of that beverage, with the froth made of glass hexagonals and flashing lights), a disco on the top and an enormous, black granite beer hall with a with a great Miro-like flame-shaped excrescence on the roof. With that in the neighborhood, the neighborhood has to change.

Eric had walked through Asakusa to meet me at Kaminarimon and complains at the extent of the gentrification. All artificial old-Japan now. One can tell by the number of girls dressed in cute camping clothes who time-travel. They run down from Harajuku to see olde Nippon. All of these painfully renovated yakitoriya and noodle shops must be losing money. In the evening no one is there. Everyone is back in Harajuku. The new Asakusa is an empty, barren place, expensively masquerading as what it once was.

25 august 1989. [Numata] Makiyo over for dinner. He is twenty-eight now—I met him five years ago. Has not much changed though his circumstances certainly have. If I were to have to choose a spokesman and paradigm for his age, it would be Makiyo. He is quintessential.

After only a bit more than a year he has made himself a company, one with branches in Kyushu and L.A., employs a number of people, is making a very good profit (took his whole family for a stay in Hawaii this summer), and hopes to continue to go straight up.

This is because he has that ability to do only one thing at a time and to do it as hard as he can. When I met him it was soccer. After that it was English. And now it is real estate. There is nothing else to his life other than the reigning subject, and all of his considerable energy is devoted solely to it.

If you want something badly enough you can do anything. I have suspected this for a time and Makiyo proves it. The problem is wanting something, anything, badly enough.

Of course it is America he is buying large chunks of, and it is Japan that he is “developing.” In a way he has joined the other side—but then he never left it. And he is candid, boyish, decent, fair.

He brings me his wedding pictures—I wanted them to add to his three volumes in my photo collection. Add and conclude it turns out. Just right—the last two pages will hold all the new pictures.

28 august 1989. Early morning, waking. Why is this the lowest point of the day? Many apparently wake up depressed. Byron writes about awakening to the dumps. Why must the mind wake up to worry something, like a dog worries a bone, first thing? Is it that we wake up sane and screaming and that then comforting lies and customs return to us our living shroud? Or is it that we wake up inchoate beasts, and that sanity then comes with coffee and crumpet to make us ourselves? A friend of mine wakes up to suicide every morning, he says. I believe him. I wake up questioning life in a manner as profound as I ever get.

29 august 1989. Took a walk along the Sumida and there sitting on a bench in a new cap was Morikawa. We were equally surprised. Over two years ago we had said goodbye in Asakusa and he was off to a new job in Nagasaki where he was born. He is in Public People, Private People (under his own family name), and though I left lots out (including his real first name) the picture is substantially him.

One of the details I left out was that I financed the trip south so that he could get a good job. I mention this suppressed information now because upon seeing me he took off the new cap, stood up, bowed, and said, as family members do upon their return: Tadaima.

He was mindful that I had provided the train ticket and might be thinking that he ought have stayed where I helped put him. When he was assured that I did not, in fact, think this, he then explained. He had really gone there. But after two years in the capital he just couldn’t take small town life any more. And after having learned to laze around in the big city, the nine-to-five construction job he was stuck in (diversions were TV, manga, and the attentions of a bar girl whom he really did not like all that much) seemed impossible. So he talked with his dad who said, well you got to do what you want to, and that is fine if you don’t hurt anyone doing it, and so he came back. Just three days ago. He had lazed around the big city; been surprised at all the changes (most of all, the higher prices), and just yesterday landed himself a job.

He remains cheerful, optimistic, not changed a bit. Then he said he was a little hard up. And since he did not mean money, I was happy to oblige.

30 august 1989. Went in the back of Shinjuku Station, east side, and there were the pushers busy with their wares—uppers and downers and stimulant drugs. They would be serving out heroin if they could, but they can’t. Busy shifting supplies from one coin locker to another. I know some of them by sight now—ill-favored, rat-like faces. Then, in the corridor, I saw a couple of plainclothes cops. They were busy walking a youth toward a box. I followed. Inside the police box in front of the station they pushed him in, and in the back room, with all the doors open, began cuffing the lad about the head.

I stood and watched. Since I was foreign and hence uncomprehending, I was not driven away. In the same way, the pushers had worked right in front of me. The boy was cuffed in that offhand, exasperated big brother way that Japanese cops cultivate. I am sure he deserved it, had done something wrong. At the same time, just in back of the station the criminals were unloading their drugs, and those thugs deserved the cuffing more than did the naughty boy.

After I had stared my fill I got on the subway and came home.

1 september 1989. Morikawa was early, so was I. He was sitting there on the bench, still in his new cap and beside him a bag with his belongings in it. Tokyo had not proved welcoming. “Just two years and everything is changed.” What had changed in particular was the method of hiring laborers. It has been consolidated. This means that, as in any kind of local distribution, so many middlemen have stepped in that no one makes much money. As a commodity, labor—like any product—has been ratified, which means that companies no longer use expensive labor brokers. They prefer to organize their own laboring forces. “So you either belong or you don’t.” And someone new from down country doesn’t. Further problem is the number of foreign workers in Japan—Chinese, Thais, Filipinos. They are made to do the worst jobs for the worst pay. Any unconnected Japanese must now start on that level.”Lots of middle-aged Koreans too—with no jobs.” What to do? “Well, tomorrow morning I am going to get up early and go to the labor union. I am not going to be fussy.” And as for tonight: “Well, I thought maybe you could put me up.”

I did—the Asakusa hotel, clean rooms, air-con, TV, a little window to slip the money in, no questions asked. Lying on the futon we talked about Kyushu and then he said, “But no matter what, I learned one real lesson there. I am a city boy. I got to come back here. Back to Tokyo.”

After a while it was midnight, time for me to go home. We talked about how to meet again. He did not know where he was going to be, but would probably go to the country to work and get some money together before he returned to Tokyo. We finally settled on a method which does not seem likely but which somehow always works. We agreed to meet on that bench some Saturday night around eight in the evening after New Year’s.

6 september 1989. In the subway, no smoking allowed, I spot a smoker. When this occurs I am like a game dog at sight of a pheasant. Go, stare, and would bark if I dared. If the smoker snarls, however, I back off, tail between legs.

What is this? Am I so conservative that I wish everyone to obey all notices? Or, am I now so convinced that I am more Catholic than the Pope? It is a warm, full-blooded feeling as I go and pounce upon the prey and indicate my displeasure. But why? Even as I do this, I wonder. Something deeper? Like racism? Like misanthropy? Like being psychotic? The reward is that I feel righteous. How ridiculous.

8 september 1989. Called a flaneur in print. Looked it up. “Witty, insouciant, man of the world.” Like that very much. Also, “not serious.” Like that even better. It is like being a dandy without having to pay tailoring bills. An element of pose and nothing, such as earnestness, to mar the effect. Also, though this the dictionary does not say, someone who sees through appearances and who refuses to abide by the dull rules. Have no idea if all of this was intended by the writer [Arturo Silva] but I like the fit of it.

9 september 1989. Out in the afternoon with Richard Avedon. Brought over by Canon for what purpose he knows not. I take him to the Edo reconstruction in Fukagawa, since he likes small and enclosed worlds, then to see the few real Edo buildings left in Asakusa.

He talks about how he felt, still feels, at exclusion in the photography field. He remembers the years when he was considered not serious by the establishment because he worked for magazines and did advertising features. This at a time when Stieglitz had done photos for Cunard. But that was forgotten.

Photographers on the West Coast would have nothing to do with flashy Easterners. “They liked their rocks, their integrity.” And it continues, he says, which is why MoMA [New York Museum of Modern Art] has nothing of his. Talks of John Szarkowski [MoMA’s Director of Photography] and his limitations. I listen and remember John, seeming to pursue some Calvinist ideal of photography. I remember what an unhappy man he seemed.

“But it hurt. It still hurts.” And Avedon still feels excluded. I look at him, a very open man, always interested, and perhaps consequently always vulnerable. He has enormous charm as well. I understand part of it now. He seems really interested in the person he is talking with. Royalty sometimes cultivates this naturalness, this interest, and a very few of the wealthy (Mrs. [Babe] Paley) have acquired it as well. With Avedon it seems innate.

10 september 1989. Took Richard Avedon and Norma Stevens to the DX Gekijo sex theater. When we went in a serious middle-aged man was earnestly sucking the breast of the girl on the stage, stroking her vagina the while. When he attempted to move downward, however, she, following some choreography of her own, moved up until he found himself facing her rump, which he then in somewhat perplexed fashion began to lick. She kept turning and he kept trying to catch up. It was like a pas de deux in which only one of the two knows the steps

It was amusing but no one smiled, because in this temple no one ever smiles. Then we looked at two girls who simulated lesbian passion, and watched another satisfy herself, or appear to, with a small device. And then we watched other customers play counting-out games and climbing onto the stage. One young man with a large member excited some interest, and his coupling technique was more uninhibited than most. But he was also a long-timer. After the others had somehow or other finished he still continued. Finally the girl told him to get off, which he did; still unfulfilled, he struggled to get his large hard cock back into his pants, then went and sat miserable in the corner.

Dick and Norma were astonished by this, as most foreigners are. The experience offers no handles; it is so smooth and featureless, so practiced, so benign—it is the last thing that the Christians and the Jews expect from sex. When I took Susan [Sontag] she said it all: “Well, I guess it is sexy but it is about as erotic as a cake bake-off.” Richard thought of kindergarten; Norma thought of a day-care center. They also thought it very “sad”—which is a common reaction from liberal Americans. This tells more, however, about their assumptions than it does about the Japanese DX theater. They found it sad. I found it matter-of-fact. But then I think that Americans believe that being matter-of-fact about sex is sad. One must make it special: either celestial or infernal.

With Oba Masatoshi, Yodogawa Nagaharu, Yanagimachi Mitsuo, Kakeo Yoshio, 1989.

21 october 1989. Gene Langston is very ill again, not expected to live; his trials—sufferings emphysema, with asthma, with his various pneumonias—seem about to end.

Today I went out to his hospital. The new nurse did not know me but bowed deeply. A bad sign. Before, the busy nurses waved a hand or indicated the room with their chin. This was a full, hands-folded bow.

Gene has much changed in the past month. He can no longer be fed because he can retain nothing. Can be given no more chemicals because they too now seep away. Consequently he is starving to death.

There is a generic similarity among such unfortunate people. I thought of pictures I have seen from Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, where people were systematically starved. Gene’s starvation results in the same expression. The skull is visible, the skin taut, the eyes seeming larger. When I came in his eyes turned. He tried to smile but his skin was stretched too tight. He is alert, his eyes show this. They also show that he knows. He is lying and watching himself dissolve. He cannot talk because of his tracheotomy but his eyes speak for him.

I began to cry and he shook his head in gentle reproof, which I remembered from many other times during the more than forty years we have been friends. Then we talked, or I did. I told him we all know, we all wanted to do something, we all can’t. He nodded and mouthed: Thank you.

When I left he looked at me again. And raised his hand to wave goodbye, that open-fingered gesture, hand moving sidewise, which had always been his. But the strength did not last. His hand fell.

28 october 1989. Kawakita Kazuko had a party for Hou Hsiao-hsien at her new house. Non-chan [Nogami Teruyo] was there and we talked about Kurosawa’s next film. “Oh, it is late, as usual,” she said. Not only because of Martin Scorsese, however, who was a month late himself. (He plays Van Gogh in what sounds a very peculiar picture [Dreams].) “Warners wanted it about now. They’ll get it late winter. Opening at Cannes, they want. We’ll see.”

Yanagimachi Mitsuo there too, back from Hong Kong. “It was extremely difficult,” he said about making his new film [Shadow of China] there. I had heard of some of it. Plans to shoot in Peking around beginning of June for example. Also heard about script problems, producer problems, John Lone problems. He did not speak of these, however, just kept shaking his head. “Well, it is finished now, the shooting. I am editing it now.” Now he wants to make a nice “easy” film right here in Japan.

Said some of his problems were caused by the way Japan is perceived now. Seen as economic threat and this affects everyone, particularly Americans, particularly West Coast Americans. “I’m no threat,” he says. “Yet being Japanese gets in my way all the time.”

At that point Hou came over with his hands in his pockets, singing. He was imitating one of the characters in Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival. Then he stopped and asked in his new English, “You name song?” And Yanagimachi had completely forgotten it. He turned red, stuttered.

31 october 1989. At midnight Teshigahara Hiroshi called. People have told him Rikyu is too long. Wants to cut. Where? My opinion is asked because I am, after all, foreign, and it was abroad that his film was thought too long. I told him I thought the whole pre-credit sequence should go, that it was distracting, and poorly done. Silence at the end of the line. The iemoto of the Sogetsu School is not used to being told that he is capable, like everyone else, of sometimes doing poor work. Then he said he would think about it. Other foreigners have told me that they thought it a coffee table film, but this I did not tell him.

2 november 1989. At Frank’s, sitting on the sofa with his sister Eva, a stout and highly opinionated person who often takes exception to whatever one is saying. She has stayed, visiting for two months. Frank and Chizuko are being very good to her. The toll is apparent. Anyway, I was on the sofa with her, and she turned to me and, talking about her various ills, said, “Well, one good thing. It is almost over. I do not think I would have the strength to do it again.” At first I thought she was talking about the trip and then realized that she was speaking of her life. “I sometimes think of that,” she said with a smile. “It will be nice, having everything finished. Having had lived.” I looked at her, aware that I was being given a glimpse deep, very deep, into another human being who has fears and hopes the same as I, and who was facing these with more openness and bravery than I do.

7 november 1989. Trying to get my reentry permit since I will be going to Hawaii shortly. The Otemachi office is now impassable, with hundreds of Asians trying to extend visas and dozens of Japanese immigration officials trying to obstruct them. Hearing of the new, small office at Hakozaki, I went.

Too late. The yakuza have discovered it. Parties of Filipinas escorted by men in pinstripes. The girls chatter and show their curves. The Japanese gents bow low to the immigration officials who stamp away. If the girls want to make money, and the guys want to make money off the girls, that is fine. But what renders the scene comical is that officially Japan is shaking its warning finger, deploring what it so openly allows. And what renders the scene irritating is that I must wait until beauty is served. Still, it only takes an hour and a half. In Otemachi it would have taken three—merely to pay my fee (¥6,000 a time, which is why these reentry permits are needed) and get my passport stamped.

In the evening I go to see a selection of the earliest films of the brothers Lumière. These magical pictures show the world a century ago. And they are real. This is something only my generation can have seen—the living past. It is a truthful, reliable, actual picture. (Cataloging less so. The one called Tokyo Street Scene is not Tokyo. It is someplace in China.) I watch the baby being fed. That child, if alive, is ninety now. And during the entrance of the king of Sweden, a guard turns to look suspiciously at us, at the small, square black box whirring away. Little did that long dead soldier know that he was actually peering into the future—that a hundred years later, I would be peering back at him.

11 november 1989. Took some shirts to the laundry. Laundryman looked up, mock severe, head cocked, “I saw you!” he said accusingly. Instant guilt. What, where, with whom? Then I saw his sly smile. It was followed by the information: “I saw Rikyu.” Ah, he’d seen me in the films. “Hai, hai. Yoku gambatta.” In English this does not come out too well: “You did your best.” It seems to leave something unexpressed. Not in Japanese, however. In Japanese it is highly appropriate. I say the proper thing: “Yah, daikon datta yo,” which might be rendered as: “Naw, I was a real ham.” Small flurry of denial. Then a question rather un-Japanese: “Omoshirokatta?” “Was it fun?”

17 december 1989. The memorial gathering for Eugene Langston. White lilies, a rather severe picture of Gene in a black turtleneck, looking out at us. A few dozen of us, all elderly, all properly lining the walls, as though waiting our turns. Kamikawa in charge, that strange man with whose life Gene’s was so entwined and who is now heir.

Half heir. I do not recognize the other half it has been so long. Bald, owlish, thick glasses—it is Burton Watson with whom I went to university and seen rarely since. “Gene must have wanted me to have his books,” he says, surprised. “You will get considerably more than that,” I tell him, since he gets half the assets. He shakes his head. Does not understand why. Nor do I, but I know that Gene always approved of Burt. He liked his perfect translations, his care, his getting everything right. Just as did Gene himself.

The doctor who presided over the long, painful, protracted death stands up and for half an hour gives us a painful day by day account of the dissolution. A part of the reason for this lack of tact is ordinary insensitivity, an inability to feel for anyone else. But a part is to ward off criticism (after all the patient died in his care) by showing how good he was.

After that, some pieties from Kamikawa—so mealy-mouthed, impossible to imagine him as the fierce kamikaze pilot he once was. Then other voices from the past. I come last. I at least talk about Gene as a friend, and as a fellow human.

Afterward approached by several. People I thought I had never seen, yet here and there, a certain inflection, a way of blinking, a stance, I seem to recognize under these years. Then, swimming to the surface would come: a pretty girl, flirtatious on a summer day in 1947; a good-looking boy with a wide country smile from 1948; a studious young man with slick black hair—now bald. These were all aged members of the Tokyo University English Speaking Society whom I last met more than forty years before.

And time has been no more kind to me—the extent of the ravage was indicated by my being so often assured that I have not changed at all.

18 december 1989. Finally got to hear the main Kurt Weill work I had not—the comic opera, The Czar Gets His Photograph Taken. What heavy music for what slight entertainment! But I think the same about the Hindemith Hind und Zuruk. But when the couple puts on the tango record and sing over it, the work comes quite leanly alive. I think of the fat Fedorah, where the Chopin is magically sung to.

I wonder if I will ever get to hear and see those things I want to. I want to hear Rieti’s Noah’s Ark. I want to see Bresson’s Le Diable Probablement. I remember when I was ten and my passion was to hear Petrouchka, about which I had only read. But in those days there was no FM, no classical music on the radio at all, and records were not to be found in my small and isolated township. Then, finally, Stokowski made a recording of the whole score, on 78s, and I worked a month (washing windows) to save money to buy it. I ordered it, got it, carried it home, waited until my father was out, my mother busy, my baby sister quiet—and put it on. What did I think? I no longer remember. I was hearing a kind of sound that was new to me, though it was now in the late 1930s. I remember later being able to make nothing of the sound, the timbre, of L’Histoire d’un Soldat. It sounded scratchy, unfinished, to me. (And, I later read that the sound of Brahms sounded “raw” and “unfinished” to his contemporaries.) Petrouchka, however I took to at once, I remember, and played the records bare.

20 december 1989. Took Anthony Thwaite out for dinner. We have known each other since the fifties when he was here, young, shockheaded, and filled even then with that charming self-denial, that ability to “see through” himself, which is truly the first line of attack. He has never lost it. In fact, he has honed it. He never takes himself seriously in public, and nothing else but, I would imagine, in private.

We talk of much, of the old days, of [Dennis]Enright here, of [Edmund] Blunden, of poor dead Nigel [Sayers]. Also of his old nemesis James Kirkup, who quoted Anthony as saying something damaging about the Japanese, which he never said. Lawyers alerted. Flustered Kirkup cannot find letter he says he quoted from. Kirkup now in Andorra, where he has created the James Kirkup Commemorative Museum. I imagine him sitting there, waiting for pilgrims. Given the Japanese, a few will actually come. I do not know him. Met him once and experienced chemical aversion. “Chemical aversion, interesting term,” says Anthony, busy with his salmon. “There probably is just such a thing. After all, there are affinities, elective or otherwise.”

21 december 1989. Alice Waters to dinner. How do you take Chez Panisse to dinner? No use spending money on second-rate European. I take her to my Ueno “Edo” place. Cheap, good, and odd. She picked at her toriwasa. Too strong? Too strange? Her husband spurned his. The pheasant on rice went better. Later I took them to the last phallic stone in Tokyo, on the Ueno island. This impressed, as did the ruined lotus lake. Alice still her same gentle, opinionated, charming self. She is like the girl next door who has made good.

26 december 1989. Cut a big slice of ham from the box of meats sent me this year, as every year, by Hashima Kunio who keeps remembering that fifteen years ago I got him to America to school, and off the rap for knocking up a fifteen-year-old student at the school where he was athletic instructor. Then steeped two slices of cornbread from the corner bakery in whipped egg and milk. Fried both. Topped this with butter and the Maine maple syrup that Marguerite Yourcenar sent me. I still have a bit of it left, years now after her death. She sent it me because I had given her a large loaf of bread when I first went to see her. I had no idea she so missed bread and had not actually intended to give her the loaf. But she saw it, wanted it, got it, and never forgot. Eating my concoction, French toast with ham, I remember the past. Madame Yourcenar with her Breton blue eyes and Kunio, still a boy, with dirty fingernails and a sly smile.

30 december 1989. On the Ginza. Many tourists, mostly American it seems. Seems from their clothes. If the Japanese dress up, the Americans dress down. Such a variety of tracksuits, sweat shirts, overalls, jeans, lumberjack shirts, stocking caps. And all of these are city people, of course, professionals, moneyed or else they would not be here. The false sartorial egalitarianism of the Americans. Jeans on those who never turned a day of manual labor. Was it Veblen who spoke of the affectation for the proletariat as one of the signs of decadence? And by comparison how dressed up and polished the Japanese look. How fifties.

1 january 1990. I was sound asleep when the New Year was ushered in. Did not even hear the bells. Yet I seem to remember this New Year. In Things to Come it was the Year of the Wandering Sickness. People in 1990 tottered around until they dropped dead. In the real 1990 we have AIDS. The coming era, the twenty-first century, is all togas and towers and totalitarianism.

I go to see Patrick [Lovell] and [Yoshihara] Akira for the traditional breakfast of New Year’s food. Together we go to the Benten shrine at Ueno and I make a prayer for Dae-Yung. Benten ought to like that. She was always a sucker for a handsome face. Then go to the phallic stone on the little island, the last from old Edo. Here my prayer is more fervent and more personal. I also put a hundred yen coin on the stone urethra opening. Then take it away. If I don’t someone else will.

New Year’s Day in Tokyo. Even now it takes me back. The streets are empty; seats in the subway; people stroll. And people smile, too, and look at each other. There are fewer Walkmen stuffed in ears, not so many manga opened on the lap. And little of the blind indifference that Tokyo now usually exhibits.

9 february 1990. Dinner with Makiyo. He was once a young Kyushu office worker who hated his job. Now he is president of Ace Corporation, a Tokyo land-sale company with branches in Seattle, L.A., and Beppu, which is where he is from. He hires his father and brothers, makes a great deal of money, and every day is interesting. Next month he is going to fly me down and back, and put me up at a grand hotel in Beppu so I can see the operation and meet the family again.

18 february 1990. The last day before Election Day. Very noisy. Japanese incumbents have only one way of soliciting votes—sound trucks. Numbers roam the streets, shouting. This begins two weeks earlier and continues daily, the pitch becoming higher and higher.

Today, they are hysterical, gabbling into their microphones, panting, racing, and sobbing. This is because they must attempt to indicate, through voice alone, the extent of their striving and hence the depth of their determination.

“I am Suzuki Taro. Suzuki Taro. Remember my name. Suzuki Taro. I am doing my best, my level best. Suzuki Taro, Suzuki Taro.” Over and over, the accent now agonized, so that we may visualize the tearful but determined gaze, the straining but valiant heart, and the gasping but dedicated breath.

The degree of mimesis is extraordinary. If other countries ran their elections this way there would be general laughter because the effect is to the Western ear so false. In Japan, however, the intention is the deed. Though everyone knows this is play-acting of a most amateur order, it is nonetheless accepted as a sign for what it stands for and is hence (Japanese connection) the thing itself.

With Tom Wolfe.

19 february 1990. The outcome of all the noise is that the Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither liberal nor democratic) again captures its majority, and the opposition, divided as always, falters. Japan has declared its priorities. It prefers the convenient, the known—it spurns opportunity for change and a danger of instability. Stability: This the Japanese want more than anything else. Here any surprise is an unpleasant one. And the highly unpopular LDP sales tax is now to be engraved in stone.

24 february 1990. Lunch with Tom Wolfe, who is here to work up a novel. It has some Japanese in it, and he has come to see some Japanese. Tallish, wide forehead, gray eyes, and much sartorial splendor. He mentions this. “I guess I am old-fashioned,” he says in reference to his Edwardian vest, his watch chain, and his wide-brimmed hat. But it is also a way of dress that alerts people. I had taken him to the Press Club, not the brightest or liveliest place, and everyone recognized him at once and several came sidling up.

He is also interested, understanding, curious. Says very little about himself unless one asks. Wants to learn. Is here for that reason. Is particularly interested in what happens to art here, how it turns into money. Tells me about the changed art scene in New York. The days of elegant galleries are over. Instead, one goes to the auction houses. So popular are they that room after room has merely a TV in it and an agent who transmits the bids. Talks also of parties held where the host invites friends to “observe” as he bids, higher and higher. “Of course, he must acquire or else there is no point to the event. Consequently a number of bankrupts.”

Took him to Tokyo City Office, where they were polite and awed, and even honest when he asked if there were ethnic problems in Tokyo. (Yes, of two varieties: one, the resident Korean/Chinese minorities; two, the influx of Southeast Asian illegal workers.) Afterward I filled him in on the details of each.