30 december 1954. A brilliant day and we slept until ten. After breakfast, however, the sun retired and so I wrote postcards and Tani read movie magazines, just as if we were waiting for its reappearance.

I suddenly realize how happy I am—it is an instant assurance, but when I try to grasp it, it slips to one side, eludes me. It seems to me that I ask little to be so happy, yet this kind of conscious happiness is so rare that I remember all the times when it has occurred. This is now one of them. Ah, see, the clouds are parting. Tani looks out of the window and up at the sky, his neck strong in the weak light.

Todaiji—looking like a section of some celestial city, but sharing with the rest of Nara the pleasing appearance of a capital in ruins. Inside the hall, big as a stadium, we see the famous Daibutsu himself. There is something theatrical about him. I am reminded of backstage at the opera, during, perhaps, Lakmé. This is because everything is so huge. The statue looms like a holy King Kong. And behind, the rows of statues make the place even more theater-like. They are the patient audience to all this absurd grandeur.

In so secular an atmosphere the crowd makes no effort to hush itself. A tourist party, laughter echoing back and forth, attempts to push a small and reluctant child through a hole in one of the pillars. “No, no, go on now,” says an adult in Tokyo dialect, “One time through means good luck forever.”

Nigatsudo—up on the side of the mountain, the roof of the Daibutsu a colossal tent below. Around it the rest of Nara, clear and sharp as in a photograph. This pavilion of the second month is not kept up. It is dirty and dusty and the neighborhood children play familiarly at the front gate. From here the stairs start and climb the hill behind to the great veranda that encircles the temple proper.

We sit there and look at the view, the big pagoda by the distant pond standing like a pine, the fertile vale of old Yamato stretching to the mountains on the horizon—and Tani makes a sketch of what he sees while I write in this journal until the wind chills the fingers and I can no longer hold the pen.

We stop, cold, in a warm open shop and eat warabi mochi, a hot and grainy concoction, made of yuba powder and sugar and probably much else. Tani discovers that the shop is built around a live pine tree and runs outside to observe the effect.

Back at the inn we wait for the bath to be free, both of us lying on the floor by the brazier and talking about the war. He was about ten at the time. It was terrible, he says. You couldn’t get any candy or anything. Then he tells me about some war hero he particularly admired but I don’t know any military history, and so we give up.

31 december 1954. Tonight we walk the lanes of Kyoto, and I am once again struck by the difference from Tokyo. It is just as busy, just as full of neon and pachinko, yet not at all the same. Perhaps it is that the neon is attached to an ancient façade and that the pachinko is next to an eighteenth-century dwelling. It is the feeling of the old still alive in this city that makes it different. And today the women and children are already in kimono, that traditional dress.

I wander about without my map, trusting to memory, but soon become lost. We sit in the courtyard of a temple I may once have been in and watch the children fly their kites, sharp against the cold winter sky. One kite is caught against the telephone wires and the wind beats it to death. Later, on the other side of town, we are in a coffee shop and it is quietly raining—as it always seems to be here. The streets are full and I look at the people but see no other foreigners.

Later, near Yasuka Shrine, the streets are so full I walk in the gutter. Maiko and geisha are out, parading on the edge of the Gion. Maybe Japan looked like this fifty years ago. Here people turn to look at me. They seem surprised when I smile.

A small boy with his parents sits drinking hot orange juice and staring at me, turning away when I look, but always swiveling back. Friendly and shy, he drinks with both hands. On his head is a baseball cap with a large M on it. Now he lifts the glass, trying to get at the sugar at the bottom with his little pink tongue. The geta on the foot of a sleeping little girl is nudged by a tired parent, and I hear the little bell inside it.

1 january 1955. Excitedly awakened by the maids who insist upon our coming down to the big room for breakfast—the ceremonial first meal of the first day. We are given otose, very sweet herb-filled sake, then charred fish, lotus roots, preserved beans, frozen tofu, lots more sake. Before we are fully awake we are drunk.

Ceremony often takes the place of civility here. Politeness, in my sense, is sometimes missing. Instead, we are given to understand that an honor is being done us. Here we are treated to food and flattery but we are not the objects, we are the side-benefits.

This is not so with Tani at the train station, however. He must go home—his parents doubtless wondering just where he has been these past few days. Our ceremony of departure is personal. We ourselves are the reason for our formality. He bows, I bow, we shake hands. We will meet again, in Tokyo, often, always. And he stands soberly, black in his student uniform as the train pulls out, looking until I disappear.

My coach is almost empty. Only a man and his son, and a soldier. My room for the night shakes, comes alive, and I look back over black Kyoto and there is the moon rising.

The friendship with Tani Hiroaki was to continue through the lives of the two men. (Those wishing to read a fuller version of the meeting and to learn what followed are referred to the “Hiroyasu Yano” section of Public People, Private People, 1987.)

2 may 1955. On the steamer from Niigata to Sado Island, Tani and I lie on the tatami in the big, second-class salon. We have just been given tea and the ship is already rolling. Overhead the loudspeakers are pouring out recorded folksongs from fabled Sado, and the decks are full. So is the tatami; I had my feet on someone’s open book.

We left Tokyo yesterday noon, for no reason other than that we wanted to, and in six hours had crossed the island, gone over the still snow-covered mountains, and gently descended to the plains by the Sea of Japan.

Ah, the motion of the boat has already lulled Tani to sleep.

*

At Aikawa. Sado is much larger than I had thought. The bus trip across it took almost two hours. And it has high, snowy mountains, too—as well as streams and lakes. Not much like an island except that you can see the sea more often.

Tani is impressed by its resemblance to his part of the country, near Nara, and accents on the bus indicate that, indeed, almost everything came from Kansai. I look from the window of the bus and recognize the architecture, and the shape of the fields—like the fields of Kyoto.

Sado is still pleasingly primitive, however, and considering its fame, is still not touristy. The towns remind me of Calabrian villages—they are that plainly, that casually put together. Ryotsu, where we landed, could have been a village on the Adriatic.

We are now in an inn on the other side of the island, drinking tea and eating cakes the like of which I have not seen before. Brown and bitter. My audience sits and looks. The hotel maids find my white skin and round eyes so different they cannot bring themselves to leave. They keep staring at me and then at the cakes. Probably expect me to rub them into my hair.

A long walk, both of us in geta, and at the end we reach a small park beside the sea. There are bridges and a hill and a toy temple, desolate and swept by a strong, steady wind from the Sea of Japan. I see that the bushes, even the trees, have learned over the years to lean away from it. It must always blow.

We rent a boat and Tani rows me far off to the pebbly shore, where a single, enormous rock hangs suspended between two cliffs. We were going to explore, but the boat drifts off and we catch it just in time.

After supper we go to the local theater to see a dance program—the famed Sado Okesa. Though this is famous as a women’s dance, all eight dancers tonight are boys. They wear girls’ kimono and red ribbons, but this is their single concession to femininity. They are probably carpenter apprentices or fishermen, and they dance like it—rough, male. This unison dance is full of high steps, the kimono opening as the dancer turns. But instead of the rounded calves of fisher maids, we see the muscular thighs of the local boys. Japan is casual about gender. This is the dance the men know too, and so they perform it for the benefit of their neighbors and whatever visitors the town might be having.

Performance over, I congratulate the boys in their women’s straw hats and pretty ribbons. They are flushed and friendly, but not very used to foreigners. The children, for example, do not shout out haro, as they do in Kyoto, or simply pay no attention as they now do in Tokyo. Rather, they look, mouth open, then turn away, suddenly shy. This is true of many of the adults, too. No one seems to stare and yet, when you look back, the gazes are still sliding away.

Much later. Tani is asleep on his stomach, half on the futon, half not. He breathes quietly, regularly, his profile sharp against the shoji, shadowless in the night light.

3 may 1955. A boat ride to Senkakuwan, a large and rocky bay with an island at the further end and a hanging bridge famous for some reason or other. We left the boat and went up a steep path to the plateau from where we can see the whole coast.

Tani has already seen the place. It is famous as the location for some movie. Here, he tells me, is where Machiko stood and wept. Why? I asked. Because she had yet again missed her lover. And they almost met on that bridge back there. Then I remembered the film, Kimi no Na wa [What Is Your Name?], in which the two followed each other all over Japan, always missing by inches.

After a long and seemingly perilous bus ride we have come to Ogi, on the southern side of the island. It is a pleasant fishing village, more prosperous-looking than most, and split into two by a large cliff. We take the top floor, a single room, of an enormous, rambling old inn. From here the wind shakes the windows and we can see miles out to sea.

Later we get a rowboat and go out into the bay, heading for a small shrine on the opposite shore, past little islands that hold large sea caves. We row into one and push our way up a dim channel to a dark beach where the rocks and sands are black.

The light from the distant opening is bright, but the cave is like night and reflections as though from the moon are cast across its ceiling. We beach the boat and look for interesting stones. Tani finds so many that we cannot carry them all, though we fill all our pockets

When we leave the sun has gone and wind come up. We row with it, and just as we reach the hotel the rain begins. Now the windows are rattling and there is the smell of brine in the room. The electric light flickers and Tani sits across from me, looking at what I write, wondering if it is about him, but not asking.

4 may 1955. The weather has now cleared and Tani has gone to the harbor while I, having slipped on the rocks in my geta this morning, stay in. We had rented a motorboat and gone to a pair of small islands off the coast, Yajima and Kyojima. These little islands, each only a couple hundred yards across, rise straight from the sea, and hold some tiny peaks, upon one of which Nichiren is supposed to have sat for a month or so. Clumping about in my geta, carrying my paper umbrella, I was thinking about the predicament of the foreigner—ridiculous if he does not adapt, amusing if he does—when I slipped and banged my foot.

Now, laying down my pen, I look out over the bay and there is Tani now, tiny in the distance, black in his school uniform, paddling along in a small, perfectly round boat, unable to make any progress at all. I regard him for a time as he struggles and then wish I had gone with him so that we could have enjoyed the predicament together.

5 may 1955. Boy’s Day, paper carp flying from the roofs indicating the number of male children within—some have up to five. We take a bus to Akadomari and get a room directly on the sea. Here people do stare, so I must seem truly odd. The girl at the inn tells me that no foreigners have come for five years. I believe it. I am followed about the streets by processions of small boys who perhaps think that I am part of their celebration. When I turn to show my fangs, however, they scatter.

Tani and I leave the hotel to walk along the beach and a whole group is lying in ambush, but one look at my horrid face and they flee. All except one, who falls down. I stand over him and say that foreigners find nothing more delicious than a child. The others, coming back to rescue him, stand in a line, and I turn and ask which among them tasted best. They look wide-eyed, and then the older and more sophisticated begin to smile. By this time, however, the fallen boy under my feet has scrambled away in terror.

We walk along the seaside so far as the shrine, high up on a cliff, surrounded by cedar. It is so still at the top, that I can hear the whisper of the surf far below and the cry of the distant sea bird. In every Japanese village there is such a place—clean and quiet, where anyone may come.

Akadomari is a poor village, like many on Sado. Here the poverty hidden in the towns is displayed. The main street is unpaved, the houses are old, and the plaster is cracked. Children play in the dust and munch stalks of burdock. I do not see any of those candy stores beloved of the big town young.

As the maid puts down our futon she tells me that I have been the main entertainment this boy’s festival, that the children are talking of nothing else. She also adds politely that she herself is so excited she does not know what to do. All this is Kansai-accented language, which she is not at all surprised to see that I understand. Indeed, no one is surprised that I speak Japanese. In the cities one is being forever complimented, as though learning the language of the country you live in is some kind of feat. Not here. Here we are so strange in ourselves that an added bit of oddness—knowing the language, for example—is as nothing by comparison.

In the bath sliced iris stems are floating, filling the surface. Tani and I sit in this prehistoric lake, and I am a mighty brontosaurus, head breaking the surface. He says he is a baby brontosaurus and lies on his back to allow the smaller head to rise. I ask him if the iris, so much a part of Boy’s Day, is truly invigorating. He says he thinks so.

6 may 1955. Waiting for the steamer back to Honshu we walk about, look at the souvenirs, eat when not hungry, drink when not thirsty, all those things one does when waiting. There are boats to rent and Tani is wild to row again, but after all we have now drunk and eaten we decide not to. Instead we get a haircut for me.

The steamer is crowded and we can barely find room. Children everywhere, boys mainly. Perhaps returning from their holiday. Perhaps going for a holiday. On the island, as in the rest of rural Japan nowadays, lots of kids and oldsters, lots of girls too, but few young men. They have all gone to the city to work. Not many will return.

In the train, waiting for it to start back to Tokyo. The station loudspeaker is playing Poulenc. In what other country, I wonder, would they play Les Biches as departure music? No other country. In Japan, however, the music is merely Western, of no particular cut or shape. Like Guy Lombardo, Bach, and “Jingle Bells,” it is appropriate, particularly for departure, adding its modish, festive, Western tone.

Tani sits across from me, his feet in my lap. He is sleeping, indeed is usually sleeping when I write in this journal. He is tired but happy because this trip has taken him to the ends of the earth, the great edge of the empire. But now he has awakened and is looking at me writing. I shall stop, for soon we will start.

17 september 1955. Fukuoka from the air looks like Cleveland; on the ground it looks like Pittsburgh—but a Pittsburgh that something has happened to. Fukuoka is one of the few Japanese cities that still looks as though it has been destroyed. And now the reconstruction chokes the streets and tosses its waste to the skies. Along with this, a lack of friendliness. My questions are answered politely but shortly, my inquiries with a firm courtesy and nothing more. Then I notice that there are still lots of jeeps and young male foreigners on the streets. The U.S. Army is still here, years after the end of the Occupation. I understand this aloofness.

Karatsu—one of those seaside towns that seem always out of season. Just enough of the festive—strings of lanterns, plastic maple leaves—to lend an air of sustained melancholy. A few lights glimmer; there is a distant phonograph, a faraway laugh, and the sound of amado being slid shut. It is all very sad. I amble through the darkened streets and finally sit down in front of the bus terminal, where two men are already sitting. I remark that it is a sad town. Yes, they agree. Karatsu is a sad and lonely town. They are both carpenters, and both have had enough to drink, to become melancholy but still coherent. “If you really want to have fun,” says one of them, “there is some place to go, though, a really nice place—Fukuoka.”

18 september 1955. Early morning at the Karatsu station, the clouds hang low over the far mountains then fall like cascades down the slopes, a part still clinging to the pines at the top. It begins to rain and the mountains are gone, their places taken by ink washes, only a dim outline remaining, impossible to see which is mountain, which cloud.

Near me on the station platform sit two older women, two girls, and a baby. Every once in a while one of the girls turns to the baby and says o-me-me, and the child, obedient, opens wide its little eyes and turns them high into its little head. The girls shriek with delight and the baby, having performed its single trick, screams as well. Finally, the older women must shake their fingers in order to continue their own interrupted conversation. Then one of the girls says o-me-me, and it starts all over again. The baby crows, claps its hands, and the girls lean against each other in their delight.

Kubata—a small, gray square surrounded by small, frame buildings. It rains, and inside, the station steams. Then the train shudders, begins to steam as well, and the trip to Nagasaki begins. We click and patter along an oyster gray sea, with high cliffs and houses at preposterous angles, leaning out toward the small islands that dot the bay, all decorated with small, fragile-looking pines. Around a bend slides Mount Unzen, the meadows in front foreshortened by the black and steaming mass behind. Staring at all these sights hitherto unseen, I buy a bento and recognize everything in it, except something that looks like orange peel and tastes like fish.

Nagasaki, a true southern city, with parasols, shirtsleeves, palms, and a bright, dusty atmosphere. The downtown is hidden away in the alleys and is difficult to find. It reminds me of a Chinese city, with its labyrinth of lanes and its shops that open out into your lap. In all my wanderings here, however, I have not been able to find a cheap hotel.

Determined to economize later, I now sit high above a formal-looking garden, gazing at the distant hills and drinking a sweet tea I have never tasted before. Made of flowers, it seems. And the sunny afternoon is so quiet, morning rains all gone, that I can hear the crickets below me.

In the evening I walk about the back streets of the city. In general, I am disregarded. Foreigners have been here before. Some even came and dropped an atom bomb on the city. I feel more of an outsider here than I ever do in Shinjuku or Asakusa. Yet, Nagasaki at night is much like those two pleasure quarters—everything is given over to the appetites.

I go to Maruyama, the prostitute section. It is large and very logically laid out. Like Washington, D.C., it has main avenues, circles, spoked streets, and an apparent assumption that it will last forever. As in the Kansai, the girls sit in large and brightly lighted genkan, as though on stages. Dressed in the brightest kimono, each assumes a mannequin-like pose, fan in hand, head turned back or shoulder raised, an erotic neckline showing. Two old women on either side of the doorway attempt to direct the traffic, and occasionally the girls themselves cry out in shrill, birdlike voices.

A few English words are tried out on me as I pass (Hey, you), but when I stop and step into one of the brilliantly lighted entryways, all twittering stops. After I offer polite phrases in Japanese (Konban wa. Ikaga desu ka?), there is silence, and then, suddenly, laughter. This is not derision, but a sort of surprise, a kind of friendliness that seeks to put me at my ease. Two come forward, smiling through their makeup, ready to maneuver me upstairs. Such, however, does not occur. Rather, we stand there and talk about various things—about how nice Nagasaki is; how I ought to have gone to Karatsu only for the festival, for it is then lively enough for anyone; that in Kumamoto I should try the horse—delicious. Then, a young girl in a red kimono asks, “And what is Tokyo like?”

And the way in which she asks it, that half-hidden tone of longing, that self-deprecating shake of the head as though Tokyo has been often thought of, but—it is so far away, so expensive—always given up on. The two old ladies suddenly bark, and I suddenly see her life as she sees it. Then, with a show of vivacity, she asks, “And the Ginza? I was there once.” And the spell is broken. I am on the outside again, looking in.

Past midnight, I stop and talk to the young doorman at a cabaret called The Florida. “Don’t bother,” he says, looking at me looking inside the paneled door. “We’re closing up anyway.” So, I invite him to come with me and have a drink. He hangs up his epauletted coat, and we drink beer and eat cheese in a small bar at the edge of Shinbashi, the night district. His name is Sakaguchi, and he is from the farm, and after graduating high school this was all in the way of a job he could manage. He then says his generation is truly unfortunate. I ask why. He says that those now over thirty at least knew the war, knew what life was like before it, and though much poorer now, at least they knew what they could do because they had done it. His generation, however, was different. It had never had the opportunity of doing anything, and so does not know what it can do and, he added, never will. All of this is said with no self-pity. He is sorry for his generation, not for himself.

19 september 1955. The bus ride from Isohara to Shimabara, through Unzen Park, filled with forested mountain slopes and stately hotels with steam coming from the roofs like smoke. Here was the great prewar spa, where people from Shanghai and Hong Kong came to take the waters, to ride, to play golf, and to dance until dawn. It seems no longer so elegant. I see tour buses in front of the façades, like buggies at the Ritz. And here around the corner comes the tour group: office workers, keeping step, singing at the top of their lungs, safe in their crocodile.

Shimabara, down by the sea, is not elegant at all. It is all business, all crisscrossed with narrow lanes and with no direct approach to the bay. Nets are carried through the streets; fishermen in their boots walk along the streetcar tracks, and for supper I eat a prawn as big as a small dog. This is where the last Christians held out after Hideyoshi went after them, but you would never know it.

20 september 1955. On the boat to Kumamoto. The sea is a lake and the ship seems hardly to move at all. Only the passing fishing boats show that we glide through the heavy water with a kind of imperative energy, as though we must move like an airplane or else we will drop like a rock to the bottom. Away from the shore the sea turns light green, celadon under the first light of the clouded sun.

I sit on the third class deck and wish for breakfast, while around me, those wiser drink cold sake from teacups. They are now well through the bottle and are singing. It is Saraba Rabaru, but in place of that lost Pacific port they have substituted Matsubara, which means some extra syllables to cope with. At the end of the first line they still have a mouthful, and turn to look at each other. Then they repeat it. They, indeed, never get further than this first line.

A further complication is that the ship’s loudspeakers have decided to regale us with Stephen Foster. This, I feel, is no accident. Indeed, I believe that the majesty of Unzen looming over us, with its crags and peaks, is thought well-augmented by these homemade strains from far away. Soon the native singers themselves are all nodding their heads over Jeanie with the light brown hair, while the sublime mountain recedes.

Kumamoto—the bombings still visible a decade later. Vacant lots in the middle of the city, cleaned up, but empty, naked looking. Indications of the Occupation as well—signs to the Ordinance Dump, a shirt maker’s sign in English, a jeep or two on the streets but driven by Japanese, perhaps sold to them by departing Occupiers. The conductor on the streetcar I took into town from the port was filled with understanding, a sure sign that he is used to the lost, the strayed, the foreign.

This is the only place in Kyushu where I know anyone—the family of a friend in Tokyo. I find the house and they, having been forewarned, are expecting to see me. My loneliness lifts like a cloud when they take me into the family. Watermelon is produced, the son is spoken of, and a soft futon is provided.

21 september 1955. The younger brother of a friend shows me the ruins of Kumamoto Castle and describes the siege of a century ago in a vocabulary I cannot possibly understand. Then we go to the museum. Since he is keen on history, he acts out some of the historical exploits, waving his arms, jumping up into the ramparts. I ask how Saigo died, hoping for a harakiri, but he tells me that he expired in Kagoshima, and that is out of his province.

In the afternoon I take the express to that city, and pass many fishing villages, each so beautiful with its coves and crags and little seaside shrine that I want to stop and stay forever. But the train goes so fast that by the time I have managed to read the first syllable of its name, flashing by on the platform sign, the entire place has been yanked from view, never to be seen again.

Viewed from the city of Kagoshima, the volcano of Sakurajima seems as big as Vesuvius, and the city huddles around its skirts like a smaller Napoli. Here I encounter the famed and feared Kagoshima-ben, a dialect so fierce that those from other parts of Japan are intimidated when they hear it. Still, I am understood when I ask a question, and I can understand the answer. Then I realize that those addressed are resorting to hyojungo, standard Tokyo dialect. I realize this after I have talked to some children who are ready enough to talk, but who know no hyojungo.

Later, a young man in a yukata takes me to a bar where we sit in a large room, drink, beer, and look at four girls. One of them, fat little face and lustrous large eyes, sings a song apparently daring, but all lost on me. The yukata-clad youngster laughs uproariously. His mood changes, however, when the bill is produced. Parting, poorer, I am walking back to the inn when I am stopped by a young taxi driver who wants to talk. Since there are no customers, we drive up into the hills and park, and in the dark look at the city laid out in its Neapolitan splendor beneath us. Afterward he drives me back.

22 september 1955. The taxi driver was supposed to call for me at noon but does not, so I walk into town. It is easy to meet people here, but difficult to keep anything going for very long. Perhaps it is because here, unlike Tokyo, people do not want anything from me—or, better put, I have nothing to give anyone. Different from the cities where people want to learn English. Here, no one has any interest in English. What would they do with it? So I am deprived of one of my attractions and feel a bit poorer, as though a stranger with no coins of the realm jingling in my pocket.

23 september 1955. A crowded train ride through the mountains and I stand most of the way. Get off at a small town on the sea named Shibushi. I go swimming and the children come and talk. They speak right out, in their native ben, as though there is no other. A few of the older, having been to school, know Tokyo dialect. They act as interpreters—Japanese to Japanese. Jabber-jabber, says the smaller boy. “How old are you?” translates the larger. “I am thirty,” I answer. Jabber-jabber, translates the older to the younger, who shakes his head.

Late in the afternoon, passing the station, I see a youth I remembered speaking with on the streets of Kagoshima last night. He had taken the noon train to, he thought, Miyazaki, but it had stopped here. What to do? No more trains till morning. Guessed he would have to spend another night on the streets. So I bring him back to my inn.

Modern-minded type. Has been to Tokyo, learned just enough to rub off some of his country innocence, but by no means all: “Yeah, just tell the bartender you’re twenty-one, and it’s OK.” “How old are you?” I ask. “Eighteen,” he says, ducking his head in a rustic manner. All country children are asked how old they are. All of them duck their heads when they answer.

“With girls you got to be tough. I got these dark glasses. They work sometimes.” I ask if that means that he takes advantage of the young ladies. “You bet,” he says with a city grin. “They’re just a bunch of country broads anyway.” I pull out my dark glasses and put them on. He laughs nervously, very much a country youth.

He is going to Tokyo tomorrow. Is excited at the prospect. Can hardly wait to get back to Kabukicho—“that’s in Shinjuku, you know, a really swell place,” he says in his rustic accent.

24 september 1955. Nakayama, for that is his name, wanting to catch the early morning train to Shinjuku, let himself out of the inn. I slept until nine, then walked along the beach and looked at the single island, distant in the bay. The children form processions behind me wherever I go, and occasionally mimic me when I have difficulty with my geta. A young man, burned black by the sun and wearing only a pair of pajama-like suteteko trousers, comes by and I ask him about the island. It is a deserted island though tourists sometimes go there in the summer. Then, since I apparently look longing, he offers to take me out in his boat.

It is a large boat with nets piled in it and green glass floats shining in the sun, and is powered by a small motor that makes tiny gray smoke rings in the still summer air. When we reach the wide sea there are small waves, though the bay is flat, and the boat bobs and dips until we reach the island with its pink cliffs and deep blue trees. There, in water so clear that the bottom is sharp at twenty feet, we swim and try to dive for that red stone just under me. I cannot get down even halfway, but the young man says he can go four times his own height. Once he tried five times, but that hurt his ears. “There, you see,” he says—holding up the red stone.

He takes good care of me, as though he has been entrusted with some large and probably breakable object. He warns me away from the brightly colored jelly fish, informs me when a large wave is coming in, and tells me not to step on a spiny sea urchin so large it looks like a mine.

Later we dry in the sun and I learn that he is twenty-three, and has left little Shibushi only once, and that was to go up the coast and fetch a boat back home. We talk about Tokyo and he asks which is best: Asakusa or Ueno. And so he echoes the poet of more than a century past who asked: Asakusa ka? Ueno ka?

Dried, beginning to burn, we go up and lie in the shade of a palm. I had noticed that his suteteko, being thick cotton, are still damp from the swim, and so I suggest he take them off and hang them on a branch to dry. He does so.

*

Later, in the afternoon, I take a train around the coast and eventually reach Miyazaki, where I board a rattling bus down to Aoshima, a drop-shaped island appended to that rough coast. It is made of diagonally stratified rock base—shelves along the sea, looking like steps set sidewise and leading nowhere. The bus girl obligingly informs us that they are called the devil’s washboard. In between are other formations, bigger, rounder, browner. I am suddenly reminded of something—but what? It is round and brown and very nice indeed. What could it be? Then I remember. Yes, chocolate pudding, drying out.

It is near sunset when we reach Aoshima, windy but not cold. It is like an atoll, with palm trees and white sand. It looks man-made, a vacationland to be called something like Tropical Paradise. But it is apparently natural, just a bit of Samoa that somehow floated north. I stay at the big white hotel across the causeway and eat a local fish.

In the evening I go for a walk and am joined by one of the cooks, whose name is Yamanaka, who strolls with me along the darkened beach and says it is lonely there. He sings one of the local songs, which sounds lonely indeed. Then he wants me to sing a lonely song. Stephen Foster, he says. What he really wants is “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” Though I cannot remember the words, I do know, I discover, all of “Camptown Races,” which I render. He thanks me, but says it did not sound very lonely.

Later we shop in the empty tourist arcades and buy some beautiful and indecent objects—cups you turn over to discover a coupled couple, an articulated vagina disguised as a shell, and a sake cup with a mushroom-shaped penis attached. One is to suck the sake from the mushroom head.

25 september 1955. In the morning Yamanaka, having made breakfast, accompanies me across the long white bridge to the island itself. It is covered with tropical foliage, but one cannot get into it, I discover. One walks around the perimeter—all of us, since it is Sunday and the buses have come. Yamanaka buys me a towel, as he noticed I had forgotten mine in Kagoshima. I give him one of my articulated vaginas. Then he puts me on the bus for Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is noted for its clean, wide streets. There is, it turns out, just one of them, and it stretches—clean and wide—for miles and miles, and I finally find the place along its inordinate length where the express bus to Beppu stops.

Beppu—lots of small, squat and sickly looking palms, many frame, stucco buildings, and miles of neon. Like Atami. Lots of folks strolling around in yukata with nothing at all to do.

26 september 1955. In the morning Beppu looks less garish, but also less attractive. It looks, in the new light, like a town with a hangover. The wandering revelers in yukata are now back in their clothes, serious, responsible, paying bills. I sit and sip coffee at a shop by the sea, and over me Rachmaninoff rains. When I look out I see the steamer coming in from Osaka, right on time. It will dock precisely when it is supposed to.

The boat is crowded with school children, all leaving Beppu for the first excursion of the year—all the way to exotic Kansai. Yes, I have been there, I say when asked. I saw Kyoto live. No, the Golden Pavilion is not made of real gold (this in answer to a first-year student), but it looks like it. No, I do not know how much a geisha costs (this in answer to a high school junior)—his chances of acquiring one are, in any event, slight.

The ship sails through the afternoon sea, a white scroll of foam at its prow. By morning Osaka will be outside my waiting porthole and my Kyushu trip will be over.

In 1956 Richie published Where Are the Victors? and in 1958 appeared (in Japanese translation only) his first book on film, Eiga Geijutsu no Kakumei (The Cinematographic View). He had also met Joseph Anderson, and the two of them began the research that would result in The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959).

Writing in the Japan Times and appearing in magazines abroad, Richie began to be known outside Japan and consequently met interested visitors. Although he apparently kept some journals during this time, these were mainly about film matters and were used in later books and articles. He did, however, keep notes about the visitors. These pages were to make up a volume to be called The Sociable Lions. Some of them were later incorporated into The Honorable Visitors (1994). Below are some that were not.

truman capote, 1955. His trip got off to a bad start. He had not known that a visa was necessary. Consequently he was refused at the Tokyo airport, had to return to Guam, wait there until the visa was issued, and only then was allowed into Japan.

Cecil Beaton and I went to pick him up. Truman had originally come with Cecil, who had known all about necessary visas and had acquired one. Consequently he had already been here three days. “It is so nice here, Truman,” he said. “You will like it.”

“I doubt that very much,” he said, “this country is very chintzy about its visas.” Truman had already lost three days of a two-week stay. He now glared about the airport. “All I can say is that you certainly wouldn’t know they’d lost the war.”

“One of the things the matter is that no one here is taller than Truman,” said Cecil next day. “He needs someone taller than he is.” We were waiting for the American author. I was taking them sightseeing. “It tends to keep him in line. Otherwise, it is fine. All the chairs fit him. Even the toilets.”

Truman, when he appeared, did not, however, think it fine. Complained. The water tasted funny. Was I absolutely certain that it was all right to drink it? I was? Well, I’d better be. It was all on my head—his subsequent illness, death, who knew what?

On the Ginza, Truman talked about New York and Paris. In the Hama Detached Palace grounds, about Fontainebleau and the Villa d’Este. On the boat up the Sumida, about friends in far places that neither Cecil nor I knew, and, in Asakusa, about his wretched publisher.

But then he suddenly turned, peered about at the lanterns, the distant temple, and the cherry blossoms. “Why,” he said with some surprise, “it is a veritable fairy-land.” The appreciation lasted for a time and he bought an imitation geisha wig. “Oh, no, not for me, my dear. For fun!”

On the way back to the Imperial he entertained us with stories. All were grisly. An especial favorite of his, he told us, was the one about a mother and son. They were like pals, went everyplace together. Then one day, out on the pier of some Long Island estate, people saw them feeding the birds. The gulls collected in great flocks. She was waving her umbrella in presumed greeting. Investigators later found them there, their eyes picked out, faces almost unrecognizable. They had indeed been “feeding the birds.”

“You know, he told me that story in London last year, and again on the flight over,” said Cecil later, shaking his head. “It seems to have some meaning for him.”

“Anti-pally-mothers,” I said.

“Or sons,” said he.

“At any rate, it is pro-bird.” Then, “You said that one of the things the matter was that no one was taller than he is. What are the other things?”

“Oh, no,” said Cecil kindly, mouth pursed with concern, “You are not to take him so seriously. He is like that, you know.”

“He is?”

“Why, yes, of course,” said Cecil smiling, as though disclosing before me one of the facts of life. “You wait. After we have gone out of an evening he will much improve.”

So we went out of an evening. Cecil enjoyed himself and was seemingly pleased with the results. Truman wasn’t. He was rude, sent the boy back, spat out, “Little pussy cats!” and went off to bed alone.

One of the things the matter, as Cecil would have said, was that Truman had nothing to do. He had come over because Cecil was coming. At the last moment he got the New Yorker to finance the trip by suggesting he interview Marlon Brando, now on film location near Kyoto but at present too busy to see him.

Cecil on the other hand was so busy that he had little time for Truman. His trip was financed by Vogue and he was supposed to be photographing Japanese high society. Since Japan has no high society except for a few potted royals and the sedate wives of robber barons he was busy indeed—searching everywhere. Consequently Truman was much alone, a state which did not agree with him.

“Hello,” he drawled into the receiver. “It’s me again. Bet you think I don’t do anything but telephone. But I am so bored. I cannot tell you how bored I am. So I just called up to have a chat. . . .”

I told him I would like to chat but that I couldn’t right then.

“Oh, really?” Disbelief followed by resentment. “Well, in that case . . .” Then, anxious at being once more alone, “Still, just a minute or two is all right. Right? You know what Barbara Hutton said last time when I was there?” I did not know what she had said but I soon learned.

What I did not understand about Truman was how anyone could go to a new country, any country, and pay so little attention to it. He was supposed to be some sort of reporter, at least he was reporting for his magazine, but he stayed entirely in the Imperial, ate there, slept there. And, he never asked a question.

“But he’s always like that,” said Cecil, wondering at my complaint. “You really do not know him very well, do you?”

“No,” I said.

Several days later I was to take Truman out shopping. I phoned up from the lobby. “I am not going,” said the small, petulant voice. Asked why not, he sighed and with the air of beginning a long story said, “Well, I was washing my hair . . .”

Then he stopped. “My neck. It’s my neck.” I said that the Imperial had a stable of masseurs. “I would not let them touch me,” said Truman virtuously. “But you may come up,” he added.

Instead, I persuaded him to come down. We sat in the coffee shop. Truman was cross, tired, and bored—he looked ten years old, and acted it. “I don’t see why you came here anyway,” I finally said.

He looked at me, wonderingly. “Why to do Brando, of course.”

“Not to see Japan?”

“Why no,” he said, as though mystified that anyone should think anything so unlikely. Then he looked at me severely. “Look, I have seen Japan. And I may just as well tell you that I do not like a country that has little cocks.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“Little cocks, little cocks!” he repeated irritably, his high tight voice carrying through the coffee shop. “This country has little cocks. Not a single tenpenny among them!”

“A what?”

“A tenpenny!” he said then, seeing that I did not understand the expression; and pleased, as always, to be explaining, his expression softened, a slight smile appeared, and—now that it was much too late—he lowered his voice.

“A tenpenny? Why that’s what we call them down South. You see, you get it there and you lay it on a table or something and if you can line up ten pennies in a row on its back, then it’s called a tenpenny. Understand?”

I understood. Pleased, Truman then told me again what Barbara Hutton had said, went on to other topics of equal interest, and was in good temper when we said goodbye.

The mood did not, apparently, last. When the interview with Brando came out in the New Yorker I saw that black bile had returned and that the actor was being made to pay for all that Japan, or perhaps Truman himself, wasn’t. Yet, a note from Cecil seemed to indicate otherwise. “Saw Truman at a party. Charming as usual. So full of Japan. Told most wonderful stories of Asakusa, of Kyoto. Made it all so real. Says he is thinking of doing a book.”

sacheverell sitwell, 1958. We were talking about Japan. Or, rather, he was. I was not saying much because I could not understand what he was saying. Never having heard a true upper-class English accent, I could make nothing of the long-drawn vowels, the swallowed syllables, and the sudden spurts and equally sudden stops. Words appeared here and there—“geisha,” “cunning carp,” “little paper triangles,” “Mount Fuji”—but I, not comprehending their context, could extract no meaning.

That I could not understand did not deter him. He sat with his head thrown back, his nose high, and his eyes half closed, and delivered what I thought were probably his opinions. Nonetheless I was disappointed. I had admired his writings and wanted very much to know what he thought of Japan. He seemed to be thinking a lot, he was talking so much.

Seeing my predicament, his wife kindly took me to one side while he talked on at the others. Since she was Canadian I had less difficulty with her accent.

“Sir Sacheverell seems very interested in Japan,” I said.

“Knows it. Backward and forward. Studied it for years.”

“Probably a book will be appearing then.”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

Then in order to demonstrate that I in turn knew something about him I began to talk about his book on southern baroque art. At the same time I marveled that she, who spoke English so well, could apparently understand everything that he said.

She turned and smiled, aware that she was interpreting. “He is speaking of those cunning ivory cages into which singing summer insects are placed to cry away the dwindling day.” I was struck with the sentence and wondered whether it was hers or was, perhaps, a literal translation.

In order to interest her I told her about two kirigirisu, a kind of katydid, I once had. Perhaps she would tell Sir Sacheverell and it would amuse him. I had, I told her, forgotten to give them their daily slice of cucumber and when I came home I thought them gone. The cage was empty. Or, it appeared empty. Actually, it was not. There in the corner were the two heads in a pool of green slime, still gnawing at each other’s necks.

But my story did not interest her. At least she did not translate it. He was still talking to the others, all of whom apparently understood him. I caught “marvelous brocades” and “cunning little match boxes.” Lady Sitwell’s interest was, after my little story, turning elsewhere and so, in a perhaps ill-advised attempt to divert it again to myself, I again started talking about her husband’s books.

In so doing I said that I liked his essay on romantic ruins and particularly liked his pages on Hubert Robert.

“Who?” she asked suddenly, sharply.

“Hubert Robert,” I repeated, innocently, pronouncing the name as though the French painter had been an Englishman—or, perhaps, an American.

“Who could that be? Did he ever write about anyone named . . . Oh, I see. Oh, this is just too precious. Sachy, Sachy, you simply must hear this.”

Sachy stopped in mid-rumble, turning an unfriendly eye upon her. “I know, I know,” she said, having apparently been warned not to interrupt, but all the same certain that this time it was quite worth it.

“This is simply too exquisite. Do you know what this gentleman just said to me? He was speaking of Hubert Robert. Yes, goggle you well may. You see, he obviously has seen the name written—in something of yours. And so, oh, it is so darling, he speaks of Hubert Robert.”

Seeing the look on her husband’s face, she filled in. “It is of course Hubert Robert he means,” she said giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “But isn’t that too dear?”

He smacked his lips and allowed that it was, then turned and resumed the monologue. I too turned, and went and sat down in the next room.

Later, not so much later, his book came out. The Bridge of the Brocade Sash was its name. It was about cunning little matchboxes (a whole chapter on them) and ornamental carp and grand geisha. It was also about the Japanese character. He observed that often the Japanese are given to unintentional rudeness when the foreigner gets something wrong about their culture, mispronounces a word, for example. And that confronted with a new culture that they cannot understand (the English, for example), they make many a laughable gaffe.

romola nijinsky, 1958. Big fur hat, swathed to the neck, jeweled fingers, and a pleasantly carnivorous expression. She looked like a witch, but a familiar one, the one perhaps from Hansel und Gretel.

Her friend with whom she was traveling, was a very tall, manly, German photographer and big game hunter. She was playing Hansel to Romola’s witch. No Gretels in sight, but they were looking.“Every day,” she said. “We go toTakarazuka, we sit in front, we look, we watch. Ach, how lovely. Romola, she never get tired and so near, just across from hotel here. Yesterday one smiled. Today we go and smile again, perhaps we meet.”

“Yes, but so difficult to meet in Japan,” said Romola.

“Certainly easier than elsewhere,” I said.

“Ah, but you have the tongue,” said her friend.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You speak Japanese.”

“Oh.”

Then Romola suddenly, as was her way, began speaking of the past. “Ah, Ravel. Charming, you know. Too charming. A little man, small. But what you call a fashion plate. Oo-la-la, such clothings. I wild with jealous. But too charming. And cold. My late husband thought so too.”

This perhaps prompted further memories, “One man my late husband hate. Stravinsky! My late husband, he trust him, work with him, Le Sacre du Printemps, then monster goes writes horrid things in Figaro, Le Matin, I no longer know. He never forgive. And me too. Never forgive.”

“Then, years after, I hear Stravinsky ill in Azores. Is dying. Pneumonia. Me and Cocteau put together our heads and I send telegram. I will sue for millions. Igor and money! He read, he gasp—Roberto Craft and Vera come but too late. He die. He no die, hélas, not pneumonia, only cold.”

“Now you go home,” said the friend, towering over me, gray eyes, gray hair, gray teeth. “Today Takarazuka has performance. We go. We smile.”

So they went and they smiled, and somehow they also got backstage and at last met the one who had, perhaps, smiled at them. Then they left Tokyo and I did not hear the sequel until the following year when Romola returned.

“Ach,” she said, “it was hell. Los Angeles. But better now. Idiot Ed Sullivan, he want stupid ‘Dance Around the World’ so I go round and round the world. Very pleasant for me. I come see Harumi.”

Harumi was the Takarazuka girl. She sang and danced. She was also one of those who played girls. I was shown a picture. Very pretty she was too, too pretty to play a boy. She was in the starched organdy and picture hat that the Takarazuka girl-girls always wear. The boy-girls on the other hand wear flowing ties and sideburns.

Romola, with the help of one of Ed Sullivan’s helpers, had sent Harumi a letter in Japanese. An answer arrived. Then, also from Ed Sullivan’s office, Romola began a series of long distance telephone calls to Japan.

Since neither could understand the other’s language, the conversation was a series of sighs and giggles, the operator expertly switching these noises about. Eventually, curious, she was brought in to interpret. The foreign lady wanted to visit. Well, the Japanese girl guessed that that was probably all right. And the kind white person wanted to bring a gift. Well, the Japanese person had never owned a silver fox stole. “Stole?” said Romola, “Hah, I want bring mink—a cape.” So she went again to Ed Sullivan.

She showed the article to me the day before she made the presentation. Very handsome. Romola herself was also very handsome. The witch had vanished and she was magically transformed into an attractive matron with a smart Paris hat, a single gold ring on a slender finger.

Then again I did not see her for a time. A year later came a crackly call from Riga. “Riga? Oh, idiot ‘Dance Around the World.’ Harumi, she no write. She ill? She angry?” The anger, it appeared was perhaps due to Romola’s refusing to send a present to a favorite aunt. Romola had already sent gifts to mother, father, brothers, sisters and a single uncle and felt that the family might go on and on. “Family, family—uncles, aunts, cousins. It is like Russia.”

Again in Tokyo (idiot “Dance Around the World”), she had me to tea. How were things with Harumi, I wanted to know. “Not good,” she said. “Expense is OK but a lot.” She began counting on her fingers. “Adults’ Day, then Children’s Day, then Emperor’s Birthday, then her birthday, then . . .”

“And a present for each?” I asked.

“Oh, but you should see her dear little face, it light up when she get present.”

“I can imagine.”

There was a silence, then a sigh, then, “You tell me. How do you do it?”

“How do I do what?”

“Not you. How does one do it? In this country. With these people. It is so difficult. I no understand.”

“You mean . . .”

She nodded sadly.

“You’ve been putting out for the Emperor’s birthday and all and haven’t even . . .”

“One embrace. After the cape. That is all.”

“Romola, you are very slow,” I said. “At your age . . .”

“My age. That is the problem.” She looked at me, her eyes bleak. “When my age and then love comes you must not hurt it, you must shelter it,” and she folded her hands as though they contained a bird. “It is precious. It is all that I have.” Then, recovering some animation, “How they do it, Japanese girls?”

“Well, I don’t know . . . fingers maybe?”

“No, that I know. The occasion, I mean.”

“Maybe you ought to be firm.”

“She says she want go to Paris . . .”

“That’s it, Romola. You take her to Paris, you lock her up at the Ritz or somewhere, and you have your way.”

“But what will she think?”

“Romola! She is in the Takarazuka. This will come as no surprise to her. All the girls must know about it after the first week.”

“Yes,” said Romola with sudden scorn, “The big ones, who play men, with hats.” Then as sometimes happened, the past clouded the present. “Ah, Debussy. Such a nice man, so warm. Nice eyes. And all the last pretty things written standing at the mantelpiece. Yes, no sitting down. Cancer. Behind. Oh, no, no,” she wagged a mischievous finger, “Not what you think. Not at all. No, hélas, bicycle accident when small.” Then, “My late husband like Debussy, but Debussy no like my late husband’s Jeux. So sad.”

I heard nothing further. Then a friend called to my attention a small news item. One Takaoka Harumi, deported from France where she had been living. Had run up massive bills at Le Printemps and others of the grands magazins. Curious, I tried to discover where Romola was. I called Ed Sullivan’s Tokyo representative and was hung up on once my business was known.

Months later a friend told me that he had seen Romola at a spa in Austria. She was there for treatment. Arthritis. Said she was wearing black, looked like a spider. She had again transformed back into a witch. And she was wearing a veil, they said. And when asked if someone were dead, she answered that, yes, someone was.

philip johnson, 1958. We were at the Sanbo-in, near Kyoto. Reconstruction was going on. The pagoda had been newly painted—orange, white, and green.

“Now that I like,” said Philip Johnson. Someone demurred. “Not at all,” he continued, “This is the way they were and this is the way they should be. That is why Nikko is better than Nara. They keep it up.” Then, after a glance at the guidebook, “But, where is it?” Where was what? “Why, the geometrical sand garden, of course—the one with the circles. Tells all about it right here.” A strong finger jabbed the guidebook.

Johnson then forged ahead, tall, strong profile, like the figurehead on a Yankee clipper, cleaving his way through whatever separated him from where he wanted to be. “We’ll find it,” he said, shortly, then, “Trust to them”—they were two young Buddhist acolytes we had brought along—“and we’d never find it. Don’t know your own culture too well, eh?” he said, turning to the acolytes who knew no English but who now laughed politely at what they took to be a jest.

“Yes, here’s where the corridor bends,” he said, consulting the map in the guidebook, “but where are those damn gardens then?” He strode on, leading, peering left and right, now more American bald eagle than clipper. “Philip,” said someone, “Remember to check your guidebook after you’ve run something down. If you don’t put a big check mark there you might forget you’ve seen it.” Philip nodded vigorously, striding on, then brandished the book and said, “Oh, yes, yes. I always check it.”

“He’ll love these gardens if he finds them,” said one of his friends. “They have no people in them, you see. And we’ll have some quiet. The only time he has remained silent for more than two minutes was at that inhuman Ryoanji the other day. For a full five minutes he said absolutely nothing. It was heaven.”

“Now where in the hell are they,” asked Johnson, forging ahead.

Hideyoshi’s garden spread before us. “Oh, lovely,” said someone, but Johnson complained after a swift glance. “Doesn’t have any sand circles in it.”

“It was a pleasure garden . . .” someone began.

“Do be quiet,” said someone else, “that’s enough to turn him against it . . . pleasure, people!”

I had been told about a row he had had once. New building, all completed, and then an argument about there being no drinking fountain outside the auditorium. “No, no, no,” he is supposed to have said, “drinking fountains are hideous, they would spoil the line.” “But people have to drink,” he was reminded. “No, they don’t,” was the reply.

With Lincoln Kirstein. Nara, 1958. donald richie

And I remembered that in Tokyo he and I had talked about people. I had asked what kind he liked. “Oh, any kind. But, here, in Japan, well—I rather want to be like Madame Butterfly, but in reverse. I want people to like me, and then be terribly disappointed when I leave, to feel miserable, and never quite get over it.” I asked him if he also wanted them to kill themselves. “Heavens, no. What a bother.”

“Philip can’t help it,” said someone, the one who had spoken of the pleasure garden. “He’s just like that.”

“Now, God damn it,” said Philip. “Just where the hell does it think it is.” He turned a corner. There it was, circles and ovals of gravel.

“Lovely,” he said.

I asked one of the acolytes what the gravel meant, why it was in that shape. The acolyte told me that it was because this garden had been used for drinking parties. The guests sat there, on those little islands of greenery outlined by the gravel. That was why some of them were in the shape of gourds. That was because they used to drink sake from gourds. I explained all this.

“Drinking parties?” said Philip Johnson. His tone indicated surprised displeasure. “You mean that people actually sat there?”

“Lots of them,” I said, “And drank sake too.”

He shook his head. It was really too much for him, the way people behaved, even back in the seventeenth century. Then he turned, garden forgotten. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve had it.” And again he strode back through the corridors.

“Philip,” called someone, “don’t forget to check your guidebook.”

lincoln kirstein, 1958. He looks very Western in Japan, the large nose, the black eyebrows, and the big body—a seagoing New England prophet. At the same time a natural, massive gentleness. He is here in Japan even more, as though his large feet might stomp holes in the tatami. Tall, he apologetically curls under lintels. Heavy, he tries out floors with a smile of trepidation.

His is the gentleness of very strong people, those who do not need to exhibit their strength. The clumsiness is also that of the big—particularly here in the land of the nominally small.

Hands too big for any practical purpose, head too large for easy thoughts. Lincoln in his own home decides to move the big chair and does so with one hand, holding it aloft. He could, one thinks, have as easily moved the bed. But Lincoln in Japan in the print shop trying to turn over the pictures with his thick fingers; Lincoln trying to leaf through a book, the pages jamming; Lincoln trying to pay the bills, the money refusing to separate, the thousand yen bills sticking together in the mighty grasp, fingers ineffectively shuffling—it is like watching Moses trying to pick up the tab.

Lincoln and money. Here he turns very Japanese. It is there for use but is not somehow quite right. Old-fashioned Japanese wrap it in white paper in order to be able to handle it. Perhaps he ought to try that. Certainly, he thinks of money as the Japanese do. It is for use. Its only value is in its buying potential. It is for the present and perhaps the future.

In the same way both Lincoln and the Japanese regard people. These are also a kind of currency. A man is worth what he does. Lincoln upon hearing a new name asks, “What does he do?” Almost never, “What has he done?” Much more often, “What does he want to do?” He invests in people—as do the Japanese, and just as freely, just as openly. People are currency. They pay dividends. Both Lincoln and the Japanese pay high dividends too. The resulting relationship is one of nature’s happiest—symbiosis.

Flesh may dazzle, wit may seduce, but not for long. Infatuation over in a matter of minutes, Lincoln wants to know, “Now, what is it that you can do best?” He wants to know because then, to protect his investment, he will put you on the proper road, help you achieve your potential. Often in his own country Lincoln is misunderstood. They do not comprehend that there are rewards for accomplishment but that there is no sympathy for failure.

Japan understands well. This most pragmatic of people do not count hopes or intentions as accomplishments. A man is what he does. After his death, he is what he has done.

Consequently Lincoln in Japan for the first time meets a nation that feels as he does, a whole people whose values are his own. Since such values are, eventually, about power, Lincoln soon learns to use it in a very effective and quite Japanese fashion.

When he wanted the Kabuki to go to New York and could not get the proper cooperation from its sponsors, the mighty Shochiku entertainment combine, he deliberately went up to the man in charge of the troupe at a formal function and gave him the longest, lowest, coldest, most venomous bow that this Japanese could ever have seen a foreigner give. Such a show of submissive despicability could not go unanswered. It led to a series of meetings the outcome of which was that, Lincoln getting his way, the Kabuki went to New York.

Once Lincoln woke from a sound sleep and sprang up to say, “Oh, a vision.” He had seen Tokugawa-period Japan as a system of closed fusuma. One opened and there was the shogun himself. But then the doors behind him opened and there was the real shogun manipulating the first like a Bunraku puppet. But then the doors opened behind him, and there was the really real shogun. But then those doors behind him opened and on and on. He was going to tell Balanchine about this. It would be the basis of a new ballet.

It was not, but the grasp shown of the structure of power and responsibility in Japan remained. The Kabuki, the Bugaku, the Gagaku, anything that Lincoln had liked and thought worth seeing, were all eventually pried loose and sent over. People too, talented people, sculptors, designers, all were one after the other sent back to the land Lincoln came from.

They gained much from the experience and, from Lincoln’s point of view, they had paid off their investment. They had been successes. He had helped. Trouble he might have sorting out the bills to pay for the dinner but he had no difficulty at all in manipulating all of the powerful sources that would eventually pay for everything and make the potential into a reality.

And what happens when the potential had become a reality, when it had happened, when it was done, when it was over? Why then, in the most natural manner possible Japan loses its interest. Lincoln too. It had been done, why look backward? Everything, everyone, must pay his, her, its own way. After it had done, so it gets dropped.

Dropped. The massive fingers loosen; the colossus turns its head, attention elsewhere. The fingers open and down you go, away from the multiplicity of opportunity, away from the infinite possibilities of life with Lincoln.

And then, so Japanese of him, Lincoln’s, “Oh, no, you don’t want to know him. A horror of the first order. An utter and complete shit.” Or, if the retained memory remains a good one, a smile and, “Oh, absolutely, unbelievably monstrous.” But these are only token attentions to the past. In actuality Lincoln lives in the fluid and promising future. The present is there only in order to lead to promise.

This being precisely the way that Japan as a nation also thinks, I—firmly dropped myself—waited with interest to see which of the titans, Lincoln vs. Japan, would first get rid of the other.

Of course, it was Lincoln. He won. He dropped Japan before Japan was ready to drop him. He found that it had really little of interest. It was actually, he discovered, a very provincial little place. Funny in its way but dowdy, tawdry actually. Now that he had plundered it, there was not, he seemed to say, very much there. Balanchine was advised not to come. The ballet, misunderstood its first time in Japan, was not to give these people a second chance.

How Japanese of Lincoln. They too, having taken what they wanted from other countries, always despise the rest. When they have what they want, they bad-mouth. And what could be more natural? The Japanese and the Lincolns of this world are the true realists.

So, the Japanese would have dropped Lincoln and his demands after a time had not Lincoln first dropped Japan. But, had they been wise, they would somehow have held onto him. He would have made the most remarkable ambassador Japan had ever had. He was, for one thing, one of the few foreigners who instinctively understood. And he was, for another, just as pragmatic as they are. Life is, after all, for use.

angus wilson, 1959. An animated manner, a vivacious tongue, a high-pitched voice: “And so there I was, my dear, in the midst of one of our famous fogs, could see nothing whatsoever, and became quite lost. Stumbling into trees I eventually collided with a gentleman and I said that I begged his pardon but could he direct me out of the park, and he said, ‘I believe it is over in that direction, but these fogs often lift quite suddenly and once it has I will take the pleasure of guiding you out myself, madame,’ and the fog did lift just then and there we were face to face, two middle-aged gentlemen confronting each other.”

Like many of his jokes, this one was against himself and he relished the telling, the high voice modulated itself into a melisma and with a dying fall into “confronting each other.” Then, the yelp. There was always a little yelp at the end, as though there were a canine inside enjoying the tale.

He curled up in the chair, tucked his feet under, and extended a paw for his tea. There was indeed something doggy about him, something to do with the gray mane, the docile but guarded eyes, the bulldog expression. But not all was canine; there was something more.

As I gazed I saw that Angus was the Mad Hatter, without the hat. The same nose down which he looked, the same mouth, the same eyes. He looked like the Tenniel illustration, and he spoke as the Hatter would have. “Years in the British Museum, years, I assure you. Imagine—books, handing books to elderly parties for years. Then putting them back. And all during this time, some modest writing about people I did not much like. Much? Well, what is much? And those books. Those years. Oh, dear.”

He leaned forward. “You see, success came so late, so very late, that it was natural that I am regarded as an upstart.” He glanced around the lobby of International House as narrowly as his wide, round, Anglo-Saxon eyes would permit. “And the jealousies, my dear, the jealousies.”

“To be sure, I do have a poison pen. Oh, you would be shocked to learn the number of people nightly praying that I do not do their portraits. This, however, is not what I do best, merely what I do most. I am, you see, a very good mimic.”

Then the stories, one after the other, unrolling, narrative ribbons festooning. A moment of repose, of silence, then another spasm, another story. But the stories after a time stopped. “You know, my dear, I am not actually like this at all. As you may have already guessed, I am a moralist.” And he turned to look at me with his large, round, gray, humorless eyes. “I am not in the Waugh line at all. Actually, I am Dickens. I am preparing a book on him at this very moment.”

I had earlier seen signs of moral earnestness. He had irritated Stephen Spender by springing to his feet at the PEN conference and—at the conclusion of a speech by the older poet—saying, voice waving like a tiny pennant: “We of the younger generation of British intellectuals would seek to differ . . .”

Later, speaking of Spender. “You see, he feels—feels mind you—that he has been passed over, become even something of a relic. Oh, I understand because the same horrid machinery has made me feel the upstart. Oh, yes, I can quite assure you that I am made to feel the parvenu.”

Then he looked out of the window and said, “Oh, we have this wonderfully remote place. And right in the middle is this entire Chinese room that came with the house. It is sort of bad Chippendale, unbelievably hideous, and I breakfast there mornings.”

With Tokunaga Osamu, Stephen Spender, Alberto Moravia, Angus Wilson. Koya-san, 1959. donald richie

“Tony has said time and again that we should raze it but I am adamant when I wish to be. I also managed some delicious drapes, very French, very old, shepherds and things on them, and amid all the red lacquer and teak the effect is simply unbelievable.”

“Tony dislikes these too, I believe. Oh, dear Tony, what do you suppose he is doing now? Heavens but I shall be happy to be home.”

Such serious moments were, however, few. Mostly Angus was almost excessively entertaining. “You see, I am quite good at this sort of thing. Quite amusing, good for picnics, much better than the ants.” And another part of the repertoire would spout—but the only story I remember is the one about the fog.

With Angus Wilson, Alberto Moravia, Tokunaga Osamu, Stephen Spender. Kyoto, 1959. donald richie

And at night, exhausted by his day, he always took his medication. “Triple the dose while I am abroad—always.” He composed himself on his futon . “Don’t mind me,” were his last words. “When I fall asleep everything falls in. I think the tongue gets swallowed, and the sinuses do something horrid—the entire palate collapses, you see. It will begin in just a second or two. Well, good night, dear.”

It began almost at once: a stern, nineteenth-century sound, iron on iron, Mad Hatter turned Mr. Murdstone, interrupted by barks and yips and growls. Lying awake I realized toward morning that it was also very deep, very strong, very male.

alberto moravia, 1959. “You must show us the real Japan, said Stephen [Spender], looking about the hotel lobby—the French windows, the Italian floors, the American cash register. “Yes, you must guide us,” said Angus. “We will positively penetrate those cunning paper doors.”

Already we were calling each other by our first names, indicating the relief that was felt that the PEN Conference was over, that they were no longer obliged to be Mr. Spender, distinguished British poet, and Mr. Wilson, eminent British novelist. Relief—and the prospect of leaving disappointingly modern Tokyo and discovering what Stephen called “the real Japan.”

“No,” said Alberto Moravia, who was joining us only because he did not want to be left behind. “Tokyo is real. Tokyo is real Japan.”

With Angus Wilson, Stephen Spender. Shirahama, 1959. donald richie

I agreed. Not, however, for his reasons. These I had already discovered, having noticed him at the celebrated temple looking at the attractive young lady guide, at the famous view regarding the excursioning schoolgirls, and at the holy shrine delighting in and then disappointed by the flapping skirts of the priests. Further, I had been pressed into interpreting for him with a young lady who worked as a cashier and was not averse to foreigners, particularly if they had written Woman of Rome.

The Italian author had taken us both to the Queen Bee Night Club where he had scotch, she had crème de violette, and I had a coke.

“Ask her if she honors me with a dance.”

“Would you honor him with a dance?”

“Yes.”

Once back, he said, “She is a good dancer. You tell her.”

“You are a good dancer.”

“But you haven’t danced with me,” she said.

“No, that’s what he said.”

“That you haven’t danced with me?” she asked.

“No, no. That you are a good dancer.”

“What she say? What she say?”

Despite my interpreting, Moravia was successful in his aims. I received his gratitude. “You are my only help,” he said, holding me with his dark gaze, his warm Italian smile. She received a crocodile bag.

Having discovered the real Japan, Moravia now wanted to stay in Tokyo. The other two, having not as yet discovered it, had no such reasons for remaining.

In a bar, late, with the poet, I said, “Stephen, don’t you think we could go now? Which one do you want?”

He gazed benevolently first on the left, then on the right. “Oh, it is so difficult to choose. I really don’t know. The problem is, you see, if you take one, then the other feels so terribly left out. And that would be unkind.” Being unkind called for the strongest censure.

But it was late and I was tired. “No, it wouldn’t. People who hang out in places like this are quite accustomed to being left out.”

“Oh, but it is so nice to sit here, choice unmade, but pregnant as it were.”

“You could take both,” I suggested.

“To that hotel?” He smiled at my absurdity. “Besides, it is so pleasant here, so—well—cuddly, don’t you think?” And he smiled, gripped hard, and closed his eyes.

So I said, “Of course we’re keeping the help up. They want to close. It does seem a bit unkind.” Instantly he was standing. “Oh, how perfectly dreadful. Why didn’t you tell me?” Shortly we left and he took neither.

With Angus the question of choice never even arose. He peered about in the gloom and said, “We have places like this back home. Why are they always so dark? Don’t tell me. I know. Same reason we keep the lights low in the house. Wrinkles, my dear. Wrinkles.” Then, eyes on the dim ceiling, “Oh, home. Would I were there. Dear Tony, what do you suppose he is doing now?”

With Stephen irresolute and Angus nostalgic, there was nothing to keep them in the capital. They were ready to be diverted by authenticity, and be quit of the summer heat of Tokyo. And the following evening we were in the coolness of Koya-san, holy mountain, which I had decided was the real Japan—dozens of temples, some with pagodas, lots of paper doors, a whole cemetery.

Their reaction to the real Japan was not, however, happy.

“Are we supposed to sleep there?” asked Stephen in dismay, looking at the thin futon spread on the hard tatami. “Are we supposed to eat that?” asked Angus with disgust, looking at the frozen tofu. “We take a bath in that?” asked Moravia in disbelief, staring at the bubbling cannibal pot, the goemonburo in which he was supposed to immerse himself. And when my literary trio saw the real Japanese toilet, an enameled chasm, they turned away without a word.

They did not like the noted cemetery either. “Grey wouldn’t have made much of this,” sniffed Angus. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Stephen. “The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,” he observed, looking at the other tourists.

He was attempting to keep up our spirits. This was necessary since Moravia was unhappy. After the inedible dinner, the impossible bath, a night of insomnia on the dreaded mats, and the terrors of the toilet, he had after the hideous breakfast turned and snapped at the other two writers.

“Agh, so easy for you! So fortunate homosexuals. You run down beach, you find simple fisher lad, you come back radiant. But, agh, we heterosexuals. The hope, the failure. So difficult.”

“What beach?” asked Stephen.

“There, there,” said Angus soothingly. “He is missing his cashier.”

I looked sympathetically at the sufferer. Here we were in the real Japan and his manhood was steadily accumulating. And not, apparently, only that. He was not hungry, pushed away his tofu, his color was bad. “I am ill,” he said.

He looked ill. To cheer him up I told him that women were now admitted to Mount Koya, though they hadn’t used to be. But even the later sight of two sturdy females in climbing boots just outside our paper windows did not rouse him.

Feeling responsible I managed to discover the nature of the complaint, went to the drugstore, and bought some medicine, the kind marked strong. But he would not take it. Already he was breathing on his chopsticks, then polishing them, inquiring into the nature of the local water then dismissing news of its safety with a wave of the hand. Now he refused the medicine.

“If you don’t take the medicine you won’t get well,” I said, guide turned doctor. “And part of your trouble is that you aren’t drinking enough water.” But to this he only shook a gloomy head. “Idiot—water make me more ill.”

Eventually lack of water, food, medicine, proper toilet facilities, and female companionship rendered the Italian writer prostrate—he lay on his side, panting. Angus and Stephen exchanged worried glances and went shopping. I called the doctor.

The local practitioner was not certain that he wanted to treat a foreigner, particularly one with this complaint. But I persisted, spoke warmly of Woman of Rome, and he reluctantly agreed. So there Moravia was, on his side again, and the doctor was applying a clyster.

“Agh. Tell him he hurts.”

“He says you hurt.”

The doctor said he was sorry but that usually people performed this operation on themselves. Otherwise it was practiced only in hospital or upon the unconscious. And would I please help. “Here, hold this.”

But the author of Woman of Rome did not like my helping. He turned his dark gaze upon me. He did not like my being there. He did not, in fact, like me. Here I had dragged him into the wilderness, had made him ill, and was now enjoying his degradation.

“Tell him to relax.”

“The doctor said you are to relax.”

”You shut up!”

Despite the patient, the operation was a success and when the two British authors returned from their expedition—Stephen had bought some attractive Buddhist prayer beads, Angus had, however, found nothing Tony would have liked—the Italian novelist was sitting up on a number of stacked cushions, drinking tea.

“Well,” said Angus, “I see that at least one of us has—er—penetrated—ha-ha—the real Japan.”

After that I took them down the mountain to Shirahama, a resort town, where they had canned orange juice, innersprings, expensive steaks, and sit-down toilets.

They were much happier than they had been in the real Japan. Even Moravia brightened up and told long stories about women in Rome. Told to Stephen and Angus, however, not to me. Not only did he tell me no stories, he also did not speak to me—ever again. And when we returned to Tokyo he apparently found someone else to interpret for his love affairs and his illnesses alike.

One by one the unlikely trio left the country and I would have heard nothing further had I not met Stephen later. He was remembering our search for the real Japan.

“Such a good guide too. Even procured a bit, I believe.”

“No, he found the cashier all by himself.”

“Well, at least you provided the enema. And, oh, how tiresome Angus was, going on about penetrating.

Then, reminded, “Did you know that Moravia is writing about his stay here?” Long pause while Stephen looked at the French windows, the Italian floors. “Anyway, one story is about this dreadful American in Tokyo whose only pleasure is in forcing unprincipled women on famous and unwary visitors.” His pink laugh tinkled. Then he remembered to look sad and said, “But it is a bit unkind, isn’t it?”

stephen spender, 1959. “Yeats and the Noh—terribly interesting that. But, don’t you think, actually, that it is rather the case of his having found the perfect receptacle for his thought, rather than the other way around, if you see what I mean. What I really mean is that for him Hawk’s Well did not exist, as it were, on any definite level. Of course, he may well have thought it did, but it was, I sometimes think, a thing which was seized upon, quite outside any considerations of worth (and I must admit that I do sometimes think considerations of meaning as well) of the object itself. At any rate, so it has seemed to me. Don’t you think?”

Don’t you think? A phrase that hung over his talk, a demand for confirmation, a cry for understanding. Also a courtesy, opening the door and standing aside. A question completely satisfied with a simple yes.

No, on the other hand, would bring concern, the pupils suddenly focused. One had become very small, something to be searched for until the poet’s head with its mane, a corolla, would turn away, as though in consternation.

One consequently rarely said no. One wanted, rather, to emulate. To imitate this exquisite show of hesitation among shadings, to share a politeness, to cultivate a humbleness.

“Yes, right? Oh, one is quite afraid to move. Particularly in this mannered land. It is so easy to wound. So difficult not to. Still, if one stood very still, one might, perhaps, not, just might not injure. Don’t you think?”

Consideration for others continued. In the taxi, going to yet another literary gathering, I asked, “But if you hate them so much why go? It can only be punishing for you.”

“But, don’t you see? It will not be punishing for them. And they have invited me. They want me.” This graciously acknowledged failure. The smile implying that failure occurred, that nothing but failure occurred, yet one must somehow keep on trying.

His attempts were constant. Involved conversations with graduate students solemn about Firbank, Babylonian dialogues with professors during which Henry James grew gradually opaque and then slowly disappeared.

In the taxi going back I said, “Such verbalizing.”

“Yes,” he said, then, “but if I did not trust words, just what would I trust?” Then, the smile, “Oh, I know. It is ghastly, isn’t it.” Then, “Still . . .” and the qualifying statement.

On the other hand, yes, if one thinks about the matter, still, I wonder . . . he was conciliatory to the degree that the Japanese, unused to this prized quality in foreigners, were invariably charmed.

He could be provoked but the retort was then delivered in a manner that rendered it unnoticed. One tiresome literature student’s effusions on Lawrence Houseman brought forth: “Quite, but one must not forget the other Lawrence—Lawrence Hope.”

When I mentioned this he said, “One of the things you must understand about me is that I refuse to hurt.”

“That must be difficult.”

“Quite.”

“Even Beverly Nichols?

“If you knew him you would not say that.”

“You would say worse.”

“You are very unkind.” This strong term of censure was accompanied by a quick look: I had become small, difficult to discern.

Such failures of communication—his with me—were acknowledged by a show of sadness. He was thus reminded that he had just seen Moravia in Rome. “Terribly sad it was. We were having a drink, sitting in a cafe and he was upset about something and said that all he ever seemed to do was to sit in cafes and have drinks with utterly boring people.”

“Now, naturally, I knew he didn’t mean it, did not mean me, but I felt sorry for him, so sorry, terribly saddened, that after an interval, I excused myself. I left.”

“I had nowhere else to go. I am not really that fond of Rome, actually. Yet I felt I must leave him. And you know he seemed actually distressed. And surprised. But then I could hardly have stayed on now, could I have. I mean, it would have been inconsiderate of me.”

“And so I walked away, and I am not all that fond of Rome, you know, and I looked back and there he was sitting, all alone, and it is so terribly, profoundly, well, sad, if you see what I mean. Don’t you think?”

The awareness of others. He was in a few days particularly aware of someone named [Tokunaga] Osamu. “Human relations are dreadfully difficult.” This was said pensively, eyes on an invisible horizon. “But,” and the gaze refocused, “dreadfully important, too, don’t you think?”

Later, “But you see, what makes it so difficult is that I am in love, I suppose. I do care, you see. And it is hopeless. Oh, I know all of this, don’t you see. But I will not be unkind. I refuse. I will not raise false hopes.”

“But you have already raised hopes and these, as you point out, can be nothing but false.”

“Oh, you don’t really think so, do you? How utterly ghastly.”

“Stephen,” I said, having had enough of this. “Someone once told me you had love affairs in all the great capitals of the world and after each, weeping bitter tears, you left them behind to run out in front of the airplane as you soared away.” Then I added, “He was very unkind.”

“Not at all. He was perfectly correct. It does happen.”

“And that the reason you attend all these conferences in Rangoon and Riga is to . . .”

“No, that is not true,” he said. “I can see why your mysterious informant would so believe but he is incorrect. I attend these deadly conferences because I want to help; I want to influence a bit; I want to do what I can.”

“Through congresses of intellectuals?”

“Precisely.”

I looked at him standing there, his white mane glowing, brave, the poet on the battlefield.

“But,” he said, “what am I to do about Osamu?”

“Don’t do anything,” I said, but I saw his dilemma. He was a man walking on eggs and complaining that he was crushing them. “Stephen,” I said warmly, “You ought to stay in Japan. It was made for you.”

“Do be serious. What am I to do? I refuse to hurt.”

The blazing blue eyes, the halo of hair, the long neck rising from the open collar. And now I saw the resemblance so clear that I was surprised I had been blind to it—the poet Shelley.

w. somerset maugham, 1959. A very old man, neck corded, skin leathery and wrinkled, a nose like a beak, sunken eyes that seemed to be gazing at the distant past. He has already outlived nearly everyone—born a year before Ravel, five years older than Klee, eight when Joyce was born.

“There we are,” he says, having managed the stretch of parquet in his slippers, settled into a chair, handling himself with care the way that old men do, knowing they are breakable. “There, we h-h-have c-c-come b-b-back.”

The stutter is initially surprising. He is so very old, and stuttering is an affliction of the young. Even more adolescent seeming is that he has apparently never accustomed himself to it. It still retains, after all these decades, the power to disturb. He remains embarrassed by it.

He turns away when he speaks. “I suppose you two are off to paint the town red,” he says, stuttering.

His secretary turns to me, “He always says that. I am allowed out once every three weeks. It is always the same. I am forever painting towns red.”

“Alan,” says Maugham, “Don’t mumble. You know perfectly well that I am hard of hearing. And yet you mumble.”

“It is because you are hard of hearing, that I mumble,” says Alan in a louder voice, “I was saying something I did not want you to hear. That is why I mumbled.”

Maugham snorts, offended I thought but, it appears, amused. “There,” he says, “You hear that?” And he snorts, a chuckle deeply hidden, almost inaudible, sunken amid the years.

“Does he dislike being alone?” I ask, lowering my voice, wondering if third-person references were usual.

“Loathes it, hates it. Either stays up until I come back to berate me, or takes double his usual dose and goes straight off, to punish me.”

“Not very entertaining, I must say,” says Maugham, “you two mumbling away there.” But he is not irritated. When I look at him he is gazing at the opposite wall as though he had not spoken at all.

The telephone rings. This he has heard, looks apprehensive.

Alan reappears, “It was Life, wanted your impressions of Japan, said you could name your own price.”

“Refuse,” said Maugham, and his mouth shuts like a beak.

“I already have,” says Alan.

“My impressions of Japan,” he then says. “I don’t have any, shut up here like this. Oh, I was here once before though. So young. I walked in the park. Some good-looking people, some awful policemen. But Japan was even then too neat for me. I like places with a bit of mess, you see.” He sighs. “And now it is quite horrid. They will never leave one alone. I do believe that that young lady is still outside the door. Do look, Alan. Are you certain she has actually gone? Well, she was there. For hours. Waiting, dumbly. An autograph did not satisfy her. She wanted to talk about souls, it appeared. Though she was not, I believe, Christian and it is they, I believe, who have the monopoly in that commodity.” Again the hidden chuckle, the snort of amusement, like a sigh, or a snore.

I say that he is indeed famous in Japan. Perhaps more famous than Shakespeare.

“It would be disarming, I dare say, for me to appear surprised at that information but, actually, my publishers keep me well informed. As they ought, given the amount they make off me.” The telephone rings.

Alan returns. “Do you think the Emperor would ring him up?”

I say that I doubt it.

“Then I must have got it wrong. Someone official, however.”

“Refuse,” says Maugham, perhaps misunderstanding.

Conversation is difficult. Alan keeps fidgeting yet makes no attempt to leave. Maugham continues to look at the wall. Then, as though speaking to it, “I was here before, years ago. No,” as though in answer to a question, “I wrote nothing about the country. It was all so long ago. I don’t remember it really. Well, yes, the Imperial Hotel here. And the park across the street. I used to walk there. But nothing else. Change, change. Heavens. Neither of you were born back then.” And the chuckle, but perhaps it is not a meaningful sound, perhaps something to do with his impediment, or perhaps digestion.

Conversation probably would in any event have been difficult. I had been told there were two topics not to be even brushed against. Sex and death. He was too far from one and too near the other. Their absence indeed limits talk.

Yet, during dinner at the grill, he himself seems to skirt them. He lays down his salad fork and addressing no one, or everyone in the restaurant, he says, “So strange. I have, you know, this neighbor at Cap Ferrat.”

“Jean Cocteau,” supplies Alan.

“And I don’t know if you have seen them but in his youth he did a number of drawings, sailors mostly, sleeping mostly. And now he has in his old age done this chapel there. And in it he has drawn angels. There they are—angels, needing only wings and halos. But as you look you see—why, it is those sailors again, the very ones. And here they are, probably all dead by now, and he has made them angels—as they were, you see. The very ones.” Silence, then, “He is getting old.” Then, for the first time, he laughs.

Finally Alan says, “Well, we ought to be cracking.”

“What did you say?” asks Maugham.

“That we should be going.”

“Oh, really,” he says and slowly rises from his chair. Polite, gentlemanly, he holds out his long, wide hand. “You have been so very kind,” he says. Then he turns to Alan and holds out his hand until he recognizes him. Snatching it back, he says, “And you are not to be late. Do you hear. Not. Late.” Then, again turning to me, he chuckles, and waves a long, old finger. “You take care of him, but don’t let him stay out too late. He likes to do that you see, from time to time, stay out late at night.”

We walk to the door. I turn and watch him slowly settle himself into his chair again, arranging his legs with his hands. His head nods. He seems to be chuckling to himself. But his gaze is fixed, unseeing.

Still, he hears our leaving. As the door is closing I hear him call in a voice surprisingly strong, “G-g-good n-n-night.”

igor stravinsky, 1959. At the Kabuki he sat very still, his glasses reflecting the light from the stage, behind them his eyes alert, his hands folded in front of him, the rings on his fingers shining in the dark. With his small, compact body, his large, sleek head, and his big folded hands he looked like a cat—a cat intently staring, a cat about to jump.

We were seeing Kanjincho and Benkei was beating Yoshitsune. Stravinsky sat in his seat as though poised for a leap, and then one finger loosened itself from the others and began to tap.

As the play ended, the clappers sounding, and the great striped curtain pulled across the stage, the cat pounced. “Oh, I had no idea it was like this. I had no idea.” He beamed, looking from his wife, Vera, to Robert Craft. “Oh, the rhythm, the rhythm was fantastic. Fantastic. And, oh, the tempo.” He turned to me suddenly, “They are not the same, you know, rhythm and tempo.”

In the interval he continued, “I do not understand. I conduct Petrouchka here and they are all right, good rhythm. But, tempo? No, no idea. And yet here! Ouf! Fantastic, incredible.”

“And the way they sang!” said Craft. Stravinsky nodded enthusiastically, “That is the way to sing Renaissance madrigals. In fact that is the way they originally sang them. No bel canto. Straight from the throat.”

“And the colors,” said Vera. “Oh, the colors!”

“Oh, we must hear more, more, more,” said Stravinsky, leaning forward in his chair.

Unfailingly curious, Stravinsky. In Kanda, looking at books and prints, “What is that? What are they doing? What does that mean?” He looked with quick, appraising glances, as though he could thus extract meaning. “Ah, look at that. See, look at this.” As soon as he learned something he explained it at once (over again) to Robert and Vera.

He was shown some shunga prints. There was silence and then, “What is that?” Then, “Ah, so?” Then, “But the Japanese they are not really so large.” I said I thought they were probably not. When he found that reality was not reflected he abruptly lost interest. “OK, perhaps. Because not sexy. More like medical drawings. But inaccurate.”

He wanted to know where the prices were. They were on the back. “Look, each of the dirty pictures cost so much. And the others are much cheaper. You would think it the other way around. More dirty, more cheap.”

He shortly discovered the very cheap, a pile at one of the tables. This he turned completely over and riffled through the prints until he had located the two least expensive, both scenes of the Russo-Japanese war. These he bought.

Among the books, attempting to decide between four early European travel books and an expensive four-volume encyclopedia in Russian, he suddenly pounced.

“Ah-hah,” he cried, clutching a copy of his own Poetique Musicale in Japanese, the title alone in French. “This is it, yes, this is it, the culprit book. There, it says so here, in English, shameless David-sha. Famous. I know all about this. Not one cent. They never paid me one cent. They paid nothing. Villain David-sha. And we could do nothing. Nothing.”

I explained that David Publishing had gone bankrupt and that was perhaps the reason they had not paid. “Oh, no. They would not have. They would have taken. Here, this I will buy. How much, how much? They ought to give it to me.”

Economy, an unwillingness to waste—heard in the music, seen in the man. I told him about the singing insects of Japan, sold in small bamboo cages in July and August. “Oh, I will come in July and August, again.” One of them, I mentioned, sang only two notes. “Two notes,” he said, as though in reverence. “Imagine. Two notes.” Then, “How wonderful, a long piece in two notes. Long, very long.” Then, remembering, “Oh, I wrote a piece about one of them, but it was short, and it used many more than two notes.”

With this reference to the Three Japanese Lyrics he next wondered why the Japanese did not make more of this work. I told him that the Japanese tend to regard things Westerners do using their materials as, well, quaint. He nodded soberly. “That is Russian of them. Very Russian.”

Later Craft told me of another example of Russian economy. Stravinsky was writing away, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, and turned suddenly and asked how much the commission had been. Told, he looked at the manuscript page, then added a few notes, drew the double bar at the end, and signed it.

At the geisha party, the same unfailing curiosity as at the Kabuki, the Noh, the print shop, the concert. “What is she doing, what does it mean? I see.” Then, hands in lap, legs folded under him Japanese-style, he listened to the samisen and watched the dance.

Afterward he was very affable as, I had noticed, he often was with women. Much kissing of hands, then holding on to them. “I am old now,” he had said the day before, indicating a passing girl, “But she is truly lovely.” Then, after a time, indicating another, “Now that, that is the way to stand.” Later yet, at the coffee shop, looking at the waitress, “That is a lovely face, a noble face, a true mask.”

The geisha gather round, they know perfectly well who he is; they all know Haru no Saiten. “How do you say that?” one of them wondered. “The Rite of Spring.” I said. “No, no,” she said, frowning, “in French.” Whether she would have then produced it for the pleasure of the master I do not know. They were obviously much taken with his manners.

Extreme politeness, always standing when introduced, always last out of the door, always bowing. And hand kissing. The geisha were enchanted. I remembered that Marian Korn, often his hostess in Tokyo, had said, “I knew he was great, knew the music, but I didn’t know how great. It takes a very, very great man to be sure enough of himself to behave so exquisitely with women.”

Party over, time to go home, with the geisha insisting as was their duty, that it go on, that the guests stay. Stravinsky smiled, blew kisses. “No, I am old. I go. But you, Robert, you stay.” He had seen that Robert, much enjoying himself, wanted to stay.

“No,” said Vera, “Robert must come back with us.”

“Ce n’est pas important,” said Stravinsky, turning away.

“Pas du toute,” said Vera, contradicting.

They then went into Russian. Robert stood between them. He had been somewhat like a confidant, a family friend, a secretary, but he was now plainly the son, and his parents were having a small and quiet argument about him.

It was time now, to leave, leave Japan, and Stravinsky was hosting a splendid lunch at the Imperial. All sorts of delicacies, everything done perfectly, very expensive. Like everyone leaving, he had already left—his mind was back home in California. “My books, oh, but I have missed my books.” He was thinking also of the airplane. He spread his arms like a small eagle, holding them out at either side, looked down at his plate. “This is the way I want airplane to fly. Strong.” Then he flapped his arms and rolled his head. “I do not want airplane to fly this way. Not strong, frightening.”

He turned, smiled, reached for the whiskey. “Like milk to me,” he said with his cat’s grin. “Blood too thick. This is my medicine.” He beamed. “Doctor’s orders!”

After we had eaten, drunk, talked, and it was time to go to the airport, Vera seeing to last-minute packing, Robert assisting—Stravinsky folded his hands, looked at his napkin, then looked up at me, curious, appraising.

As he had the day before when he signed my copy of the full score of Threni, then stopped midway through, looked up, alert, and said, “You did buy this copy, didn’t you?”

Now he looked up again, intelligence manifest, and said, “You tell me. Gagaku—do I have it right?” A single finger unfolded and began to beat out the opening rhythm, from very slow to very fast, an unbroken tempo of beats, consistently accelerating—a Japanese concept of time, one unknown to the West.

He did it perfectly.

With Igor Stravinsky, Marian Korn. Tokyo/Mejiro, 1959. donald richie

rudolf arnheim, 1960. A boxer’s face, and a gentleness found often in those so strong that appearing weak is of no concern. Slow, large, graceful, the kind of man who can pick up a kitten without frightening it.

After dinner he talks about Russia, about Eisenstein. “I only met him once. Only once was I allowed to talk with the great man. Didn’t understand a word he said, though he spoke perfect German. He was leaning on a mantelpiece, holding forth—his theories. What a mixed-up man.”

I mentioned that the Russian director had wanted to come to Japan, almost had. “Oh, yes,” said Arnheim, “and what a good thing he didn’t. He would have gotten it wrong too.” Then, “Now, Dziga Vertov. He was truly amazing. He lived in the house of this most respectable married couple, friends of mine. “And he used to bring in his little friends to live with him, and the couple would say, ‘Dziga, you cannot do this, this is not to be done.’ And he would say, ‘No, in Russia, this is physical kultur, physical kultur. ’ ”

Mary Evans (Richie), 1958. yato tamotsu

“And the last time I saw him he was going back to Russia, this was all in German, you understand. And naturally he had bought everything you were not supposed to buy in capitalistic countries. When I came in he had dozens of silk shirts, all new, lying on the floor. The first thing he said was, ‘Are your shoes dirty?’ When I said they probably were, he said, ‘Good. Now you will please step on my shirts.’ So I walked back and forth on them and eventually they were dirty enough that he could get them into Russia as laundry.”

He then began talking about beauty, female beauty. He had noticed it all around—the Japanese eyes, the Japanese hair, the Japanese skin. “But, you know, it is an abstract beauty for me because I have no associations. Oh, some glimpses of woodblock prints, things like that, but that is scarcely enough. And beauty, beauty you can understand and feel, that is almost entirely association.

“Take Garbo, for example. That beauty is the kind we call perfect, and what we mean by it is it is both inviolate and inviolable. It is odd that we should think first of destruction when presented with perfection, but we do. She is really the Pre-Raphaelite beauty brought up to date, a prime romantic beauty.

“We put her in a shrine, we worship her. Do you know that story of Kästner’s about the beautiful girl who complained about it—men wanting to put her in a niche, never touching her? Which means, of course, that Garbo’s beauty appeals most strongly to those who feel safe only when she is enshrined, endistanced, made inhuman.”

“That’s what I mean by an associative appreciation of beauty. We all know this Garbo-type of beauty. We all agree upon it. Look at Mary there.” He indicated the writer Mary Evans, tall, beautiful, now backlit by the bridge lamp.

He talked on—I was listening to intelligence, inquiring, comparing. It is rare that intelligence speaks. With Arnheim one saw behind the talk, glimpsed the intelligence, outlining, isolating, and defining the pool of the mind.

Not many journals were kept during the late 1950s. The pages below, on Mishima, stand by themselves.

undated, 1958. I am to meet Mishima at the Korakuen Gym for a workout in the late afternoon. Soon, much out of shape, I am sore, but I like the gym. The bodies are nice, but that isn’t it. Actually, a gym is rather like a butcher-shop—lots of good meat, but all this display does not whet the appetite.

No, I like the gym because it is warm and friendly and everyone is doing the same thing and everyone is in a way, well, humble. No one is vainglorious of his body. That is saved for outside. The gym is the workshop. The worst body and the best are after all bodies and in that, they are alike. The best remembers when it was bad, and the worst can look forward to being better.

Tonight is crowded but Yukio is not yet here. He usually guides my efforts and originally got me accepted. I have often watched him work over the top half of his body and neglect the lower. Muscled torso on spindly legs. I am just as bad. Without him there to push I don’t even use all the machines. Just as well. Ache from those I do. The thirties are not the twenties. But thirty-four is no time to sit back and give up. I like the way that physical exercise makes me feel. I can see why Mishima so much enjoys it.

“Where’s your pal?” ask my bench-pressing partners. Since Mishima originally brought me I am now regarded as a part of him. He is popular at the Korakuen Gym. This is because he doesn’t give himself airs. He is not a famous author, singer, boxer, actor. He is just one of the boys—all of them pulling together, all of them working on the buffing of the body, the building of that domicile which will more fittingly house them.

Yet he keeps his distance and this they also appreciate. After all the straining and grunting, sweat coursing, it is customary to hit the bath, a large tiled tub filled with very hot water, built to contain dozens. This I always look forward to—not only the healing heat and the soothing lustrations, but all those big, beefy bodies with you in the soup.

Not for Mishima, however. For him a solitary shower, front decently turned, towel in place, then back into the jockey shorts, the invariable tan slacks, the black jumper, the gold chain around the neck. Then the comradely wave, the quick smile, and the body-builder author vanishes until the next time. Not me. I hang around, loll in the tub, and talk about dumbbell techniques with friendly flat-nosed fellows twice my size.

I am today thinking of leaving when he finally appears, full of apologies. He is naturally sorry to have kept someone waiting, but he is even sorrier that he is the kind of person who, if he isn’t careful, appears less than courteous. Consequently we sit down and he has to tell me the reason. He was rereading Shiosai [The Sound of Waves], and despite everything Greece meant to him, he is not satisfied with this novel based on Longus’ late Greek romance. What he had done was too artificial. It was, he said, Greece in the style of the Trianon at Versailles. Too late to do much about that, but he was attempting to. Hence his tardiness.

Since the reason had been the most serious one he could think of—work—I was to accept this and forgive his lateness. When I did so he gave me a smile and asked how I was coming with the weights. He then went on to show me what he could do. Much more than myself, and I watched as he pushed and sweated and the muscles grew and the mass expanded.

undated, 1958. Party at Meredith’s. Even as I enter the gate I can hear Mishima’s laugh, that great, ugly laugh of his—one that it is said his grandmother taught him. It is a part of his heavy buffoonery. When such protection seems necessary, he turns himself into a harlequin, a zany, is weightily paradoxical, and makes outrageous statements.

He clowns about the things closest to him. Like killing himself. The reason that none of us ever take this seriously is his endless chatter about it. It disarms us. It is intended to.

Much of Yukio’s considerable charm is that when it suits his purposes he pretends not to take serious things seriously. In this he is like that historical personage he much admires—Yuranosuke in the seventh act of the Kanadehon Chushingura.

Here the leader of the now masterless forty-seven samurai pretends to give himself to dissipation and frivolity. In actuality, this is a sham, a cover for his plans for revenge. It is as though both he and Mishima are involved in similar projects.

Laughter continues until late. Not too late, however. Yukio is always home by midnight. Then the serious part of life begins—writing. No laughter then.

undated, 1958. A man is what he wears (a woman too), projecting a desired image. Whether we think about the effect or not, we create it. It is our costume and expresses our intentions. Look at Mishima, that casual wardrobe—the leather jacket, the medallion on its thin gold chain, the boots, the tight trousers, and the wide belt. These create a cutout figure, an outline, and a recognizable icon. We can trace its lineage. From Hemingway to Brando and beyond, this image presumes virility.

No less for the bike people than for Yukio, this icon is magical. But it originally meant that civility was courted, was sought for. It did not presume that it had been already attained. That this image is even now seen as clone-gear in Village ghettos indicates that the search has not ended.

The leather-look, of which Yukio’s is a modified version, is, I think, about a super-virility that can exist only for the wearer and for those who share his dream. Like all icons, this one can never be tested—it is ideal. The icon designates the deity and eventually becomes it.

undated, 1959. Yukio and his deities. Saint Sebastian, for example. This popular sufferer—drawn, painted, sculpted, poeticized, turned into music—has, like most, a double aspect. One can be him, or one can regard him. If the former, then one is the saint; if the latter, then one of the archers.

Mishima, despite his draped and ecclesiastical posings for photographers, would say he was really one of the archers. Yet, unlike them, he knows that a single look from Sebastian will scatter them all. The sadist cannot stand that blow from the eyes of the other. He is so occupied in turning that body into a thing for his pleasure that he leaves himself open to invasion from that very body. It need only reassert its individuality to remove all of his pleasure. Sadism as a means of communication is doomed to failure because communication creates empathy, and this devastates the sadistic impulse.

He talks a lot about sadism, Mishima does, resting after having been translated or photographed. He is as interested (as have been some of his models—Barbey d’Aurevilly, Swinburne, Wilde, Gide) in “evil.” Perhaps he confuses the two. Yet this interest confines itself. Like Baudelaire, who found in diablerie an extension of bourgeois interests, so Mishima retains the sadistic pose because it continues the cult of the self that is so important to him.

It doesn’t go very far. Yukio is not what the books call a practicing sadist. Instead he is a practicing author, and his life like any other involves placation and compromise. These were qualities not unknown to Saint Sebastian himself, slumped there, pumped full of arrows. But those who think they are lined up, bow ready, just one of the soldiers, are really already tied to the post. Sadism is an illusion born from the needs of its opposite. We are all of us masochists, no matter how much leather we wear.

undated, 1958. A party at the Mishimas’ new house. It is all concrete, somewhat Spanish-looking with its whiteness, its tiles. Yukio calls it his “anti-Zen house,” and I have heard others describe it as “Montgomery Ward Colonial.”

There is a large naked man in the forecourt, a copy of, I think, the Apollo Belvedere, and there is a grotto lined with Delft-blue tiles. Inside, the house is light, airy, spacious—and a little strange.

A staircase suddenly descends directly into what would be the drawing room, but it leads nowhere—just up to a high little door with a balcony around it. It is from this staircase that Mishima descends upon his guests, having revealed himself first on the little balcony. In another part of the house is a big, wide set of stairs to the second floor, and this is what the family and servants use.

We guests are served drinks—big choice, scotch, any cocktail you can think of, sherry—and amuse ourselves until the descent of the host. No sign of his wife. Probably in the kitchen being wifely. When he takes her out he is completely solicitous but in the house she turns into a more Japanese spouse.

We hear his laugh above us, and then he is among us, making sure that glasses are filled, a word for everyone, complete charm as he circles among us, addressing remarks mainly in English. This is because the guests are mainly foreigners or Japanese who have lived abroad. One of the reasons is certainly that few foreigners speak Japanese and few Japanese speak foreign languages. Another, however, is that Mishima likes to control an audience. Perhaps he acts differently in front of an all-Japanese party.

Mishima Yukio, 1958. yato tamotsu

In front of us he is charisma itself—fascinating (he explains the philosophy of the Japanese sword), sincere (he admits to doubts about this same philosophy), amusing (he invites a minor ambassador to immolate himself on the carpet), and self-deprecating (tells how clumsy he is, finds difficulty in returning sword to sheath). All of the time being the most considerate of hosts.

The food is very good—fish, steak, fruit—and well served by, I think, hired caterers. No sign of Yoko, however, until the very end when, like a chef, she is brought on. We all sit around and drink chartreuse and Grand Marnier for a time. Typical of Yukio and the enormous divisions he cultivates in himself—house all Western but inside ruled by Japanese customs regarding wives; outside, liberal, egalitarian, solicitous; inside, a Japanese husband.

At the same time, however, signs of concessions. Last week when we lunched he asked me not to send him any more St. Sebastian postcards from my various travels, a habit I have gotten into. The reason is that Yoko has asked that I stop.

There are also from this period several descriptive essays that Richie made from diaries, apparently intending them to be a part of some autobiographical work. One of these is about the marriage of his friend Tani Hiroaki.

1958—nagatoro. I sat all dressed up and looked at the happy couple, while the spring smell of muddy water filled the room. Outside the brown river ran, and Tani stood straight in his new black suit, white gloves in hand, tie crooked. At his side sat the bride in kimono, sleeves trailing on the floor, a white headpiece hiding the jealous horns that brides traditionally wear.

A flash, a cloud, a smell, and there they stood on the photographic plate forever. The local artisan, pursing his lips to indicate optimism, placed the cap back on the lens and we all applauded, while the bride put two fingers into her tight obi and shifted the fan that took the place of the dagger brides once carried to use against themselves if dishonored.

Back at the inn, in a large, low room, cushions had been arranged for the wedding party, small, low tables in front of each, and at the far end a dais for the couple. Outside the low windows the river flowed, rich and muddy in the early spring.

There now sat Tani, enthroned with his bride, and here sat I, first in the row that held his party, all men, all about his own age. They had politely ignored me until it was learned that I could, after a fashion, speak. They then dropped their solemn shyness and wanted to know how I had come to meet their friend.

Prepared, I lied about school, English class, and promising pupil. This explanation was so expected that it was at once accepted and the muscular young man in a white three-piece next to me tried out a few modest English phrases.

The river murmured, the spring smell of fresh water filled the room, and the bride entered, elaborately careful of skirts and sleeves, while Tani gripped his gloves and looked straight ahead as the assembled women broke into a little patter of applause.

These were all of the bride’s party, older, in sober kimono, her mother beaming. She was why we were in this country inn on the banks of the Arakawa in far Chichibu, the low mountains just outside the window. Her daughter had to be married in her homeland.

So city boy Tani had had to transport his party, all members of the same construction gang, and myself, into the deep country. On the way his friends pointed out the horses and pigs to each other and one, upon arrival, had gotten too near a bull, which snorted and sent him scampering down the lane.

Now wary of the country, they sat formally, their legs under them, and looked about as the applause died and bride seated herself on the dais by her new husband.

She was really just as citified as he, had been working a Shinjuku bar frequented by members of this small gang to which Tani now belonged. It was the construction boss who had served as go-between. He was interested in the bar she tended. And she wanted marriage, needing some stability in her fluid life. As for Tani, he found her pretty, didn’t have a steady girlfriend, and as the latest member had to listen to advice from the boss.

Sake was poured, even before the first speech. Local sake, and lots of beer, and a big, brown bottle of whisky for me. Tani smiled, tie still crooked, and indicated that I should relax, stretch my legs out. This I did and his gang friends, all uncomfortable sitting on their calves, spread out as well, pointed out a passing dog, slurped their sake, and turned to look down at the muddy flow.

The bride smiled down upon them. She included even me. Originally I had been a threat—the foreign friend. When I first went with Tani to the bar where she worked, her manner had been coolly professional, a chilly hostess doing her duty. Later, however, she warmed. Maybe I was a good influence after all—keeping him away from all those awful other women.

Now the speeches began—long and stilted, about her virtue or his, older people mumbling about future promise. Then, cups and glasses filled, more toasts. And food—country food: boiled radish and salted river fish, burdock, miso baked on eggplant, and pickled fiddler fern.

Speeches again, but now short and funny, as though having observed the sublimity of marriage we might now allow ourselves its foibles. As a foreigner—and foreigners are famous for being funny—I was first.

Prepared and knowing what was expected, I spoke of the groom’s doomed efforts to learn my language, made affectionate fun, skillfully suggested an apparent stupidity, and ended by blaming myself for all lack of progress.

Laughter, applause, and for me a reward from Tani, now sitting cross-legged in his new suit, a glance of connivance, and a short smile from the bride, and from my three-piece neighbor a solemn paw and a level and approving gaze.

More toasts, more speeches. One old woman with loose teeth spoke loudly of the joys of the marriage bed. The room roared, the member with the perm spilled beer on himself, and the bride, virgin for a day, covered herself with confusion. Everyone was getting drunk.

Me too. I looked at the handsome Tani, lolling up there with his bride, useless white gloves still firmly in fist, and felt sorry for myself. You are losing your friend, I thought, and a tear actually appeared.

The ceiling gently rotated, the river rose, and the smell of spring and mud ran over the mats, while the creamy three-piece pounded me on the back, brimming cup in hand. I drank, handed it back, filled it up, watched him drain it, and then back it came.

This went on for a while—minutes, hours—then it was time to dance. The old women wove among their cushions, the men slapped their country thighs in time, while the boys shuffled and twisted, the bride clapped and shrieked, and Tani grinned, tie askew.

Pulled to my feet, I stood between the young man in the white three-piece and his permed friend. We were to dance, a special dance from their native place—far and fabled Kyushu. I attempted to sit down. My new acquaintance leaned over and pulled me up again, reassuring in a warm whisper that it was real easy.

So it was. While his friend knelt, banged the glasses and sang, he advanced upon me, holding a large empty sake bottle between his legs. I was to hold tight to the folded cushion between my own legs and receive the bottle. We were then to move in an illustrative manner while his friend sang, veins showing, and then back off and begin all over again.

Here he came, sake bottle up, and I was ready with my folded cushion. Bottle erect between his tight thighs, he put both arms around me and humped as the old women screamed and the men shouted with laughter.

This went on until my groom fell down, bottle rolling, and I, the bride, opened my legs and let the pummeled cushion drop. The floor vibrated with the applause and the passing river rippled. Looking at the groom on his dais, I received a smile. This was a wedding, it seemed to say, what did I expect?

Wedding? I think I thought—no: divorce! Eyes full I turned and staggered up onto the dais where I leaned against him, reached out and slowly, carefully, straightened his tie. Slight discomfort from my groom, a ripple of real annoyance from the bride, still in her hood to hide the horns, and then three-piece tackled me, pulled me back, and lay on me as he poured beer down my throat.

The river ran, the sake flowed, the smell of spring mud lay over me as I lolled on the mats, a foot in my face. Then the boats arrived.

At Nagatoro you went boating, that was why you had come, and so a trip was planned, no matter the condition of the boaters. One old woman got her white stockings all dirty when she missed the stern; one old man missed the boat entirely.

Pushed or pulled, the others boarded and the boat swayed. Tani and his smiling bride were in the prow where we would see them, while the rest of the guests gripped the gunwales. I was next to the boy with the perm. His three-piece friend was nowhere in sight, and I gazed about as though seeing for the first time the bright blue sky of early afternoon, the rich clay-brown of the passing river.

Farmland glided past, a curious cow, and we were in the gorge, where the river splashed and the big rock walls slid by, where the bride, pretending fear, clung to her new husband, and one old farmer in braces got sick in the frothing tide.

On and on, the boatman plied his single oar in the wake of the bumping boat, until a pool was reached and we were pulled to one side while he pointed into the depths and told us that here lurked the fabled carp, one traditionally friendly to such brave endeavors as marriage.

Turning I saw that my three-piece neighbor had reappeared. Now he was standing up, pulling off his three pieces and then, only in his own creamy skin, jumped into the chocolate river.

I wanted to save him—a new friend already imperiled—but the permed pal had already pulled off his own clothes and joined him in the muddy stream where they snorted and sported like muscled porpoises, while Tani laughed and the bride, face to his shoulder, hid her gaze from the naughty nudity.

All eyes, I stared down at the naked boys. One floated on his back, chest and loins surfacing, and the other, all buttocks, dove into the depths. Then they gamboled around the boat as the old women shrieked, the men sang, and the boatman beamed.

Back on shore with the afternoon sun low, the two swimmers, though now more modest in long cotton kimono, did not seem much more sober. They and their friends rolled about and told the bride what awaited her, as the sun declined and the shadows lengthened, long and cool, across the mats. The distant rush of the waters, more sake, more beer, more whiskey—and, quite suddenly, sleep.

Tani Hiroaki’s wedding party. Nagatoro, 1958. donald richie

I awoke in a different room, my pants off but still in my tie and shirt, lying on a mat, a coverlet over me. The ceiling swam in the upper gloom and the river murmured as though asleep itself and it was dark night.

In the dim light from the corridor I saw that several bodies were in the room with me—bundles of sleep, an arm or a leg sticking out here and there. The smell of spring mud lay rich and fleshy across us.

And an arm fell heavily on me while someone asked in a husky whisper if it was really true that I taught English. It was the creamy swimmer, now piece-less and under the same coverlet. I said I had never taught English in my life. Then what had I taught Tani he wanted to know in his low, urgent, drunken whisper. “I’d like to learn,” he said, “I’m a good learner.”

And I thought about my friend Tani, under this very roof with his pretty bride, his necktie now off. The odor of mud, of flesh, lay heavy in the dark and I thought about weddings and daggers at the waist, took a deep breath of the soil-scented night and turned to face the Kyushu friend.

In the morning I was wakened by the sound of water, a vision of a vast cool blue lake, and a terrible thirst. Pushing off my sprawled and sleeping partner I staggered to the bathroom, enveloped now by the country smell of urine, and drank heavily from the faucet.

The door opened. There was Tani, fresh from the bath. He wanted to know if I had a hangover. Well, he wasn’t surprised, not after all I had drunk. Not him though—bad thing about getting married was you couldn’t drink, had to sit there watch everyone else make fools of themselves. Liked my dance, incidentally.

“How was yours?” I wanted to know.

“Come on. I was tired. Besides, I’ve done it enough with Machiko already.” Then, “Hope you behaved yourself.”

“Certainly did.”

The sound of running water, the river—like the sound of someone taking a leak.” Oh, shit,” I said. “Forgot my toothbrush.”

“Here,” he said, and as he often had before, lent me his.

I was bent over the basin brushing when Machiko appeared, a summer kimono gathered about her. She smiled, said good morning, and I rinsed off her husband’s toothbrush and gave it back to him.

She kept on smiling—he was hers now, shared toothbrushes mattered little. And I thought of the picture and the two of them preserved in the flesh on the photographic plate and their never changing.

But now in the bright morning light reflected off the surface of the uncoiling river, amid the smell of mud and piss and the gentle odor of miso soup warming in the kitchen, we three stood there, our flesh firm, filled with future promise.

From 1960 on, Richie began to keep a fuller record of his life. From now on, the journals have an existence in their own right. Consequently they take the shape of Richie’s life.

He had come to live in a land as far from Ohio as he could get, and it was becoming his home. Indications of the freedom he found in Japan have already been noted in these pages, but now he began to be aware of an irony. He was free not because he was no longer compelled to “join,” but because he was not allowed to. This was because he was foreign. If he had been Japanese he would have been forced to join. It would have been worse than Ohio. With a growing appreciation of this came an attitude toward self that was quite different from that in, say, the journal entries of 1948. It took the form of an awareness of his singular position in Japanese society, and with it a growing interest in communicating, dramatizing it. An early expression is found in The Inland Sea, but before that, in these journal pages, there are indications. Richie once said that he had thought he was a window, but he turned out to be a bridge.In the meantime he continued to live the life he was just beginning to record in the journals. Since he made little money from any of his books, he continued to support himself doing things—teaching, reviewing, editing—that were not central to the way he saw himself. Though he had a number of avocations—painting, composing, stage and film directing—he really saw himself as a writer, a “creative” writer rather than a critic. He once said that if the house were on fire he would neglect Kurosawa and Ozu in order to save The Inland Sea and Public People, Private People.He was also moving about the city, trying out different neighborhoods. In 1957 Richie had lived in a house in Shimo-ochiai, near Mejiro Station, and in 1959 he lived in a small house on the hill above Otsuka in the north of Tokyo. Here he met Zushiden Tsukasa, a Kyushu student going to Chuo University, and they lived together for a time. In 1961 Richie married Mary Evans and they lived in a small house near Roppongi. In 1971 Richie would buy an apartment in Tsukiji, then sell it and move to Yanaka (1980), eventually settling in Ueno (1996).

5 january 1960. I dream of an experience I had thought forgotten: I am again on the beach at Chiba, and it is the day of the dead, before dawn. I cannot sleep, and wander out onto the beach, looking upward at the summer stars. At my feet is a boy curled up in a hole in the sand and sound asleep. I look further and find the beach is full of sleeping boys, all children. Like animals in their burrows, two and three to a hole, they are curled sleeping. Then I remember that today is the day the dead return. The children are waiting for the dawn, when their dead come from the sea.

I awake and it is dawn: the whole experience, precisely as it was, I see with hallucinatory brilliance. It does not fade, but stays with me all day long. It asks me to use it, to do something with it, not to lose it, now that it has made the immense distance back to me.

In the evening Erik [Klestadt] comes over. He is feeling depressed; feels so wretched that there is something gallant about his consenting to remain the person I know, and to reassure me through various ways of speaking, ways of holding himself, that it is indeed he.

Not sympathetic, I say that such depression is the price he has to pay, that he has made a choice and this is one of the consequences. For Eric is a brilliant linguist who does not use his talents; he is a first-rate critic who never criticizes; possessing extraordinary sensitivity, he allows it to prey on him and never once himself preys on it. He, who can sit down and read a Japanese paper or magazine as though it were English or German, who possesses the ability further to fully comprehend what is left out as well as put in, makes no uses of this gift. He works daily in an office selling scrap metal.

“Oh, you make it sound so easy,” he says. “And perhaps it is easy for you, but something is lacking in me.” He is going to explain, but then that is too difficult. He merely says, “I am terribly lazy.”

I look at him and realize how very much I like him, how much I want to save him. I see him as a swimmer in the unruly surf, sinking, sinking, yet refusing to call for help; smiling with exhausted reassurance, as yet another wave topples. I want to gallop into the raging sea and pull him out; and I would try, but that he would probably pull back and refuse. I tell him this, and he smiles and says, “Well, at least I don’t think I would be strong enough to pull you under as well.”

6 january 1960. Zushiden [Tsukasa] makes supper and afterward we sit in the electric kotatsu and eat mikan, and he talks about Kagoshima from where he has just returned: tells me that even in winter he used to go barefoot when he was a schoolboy; that they had no gas and still used charcoal; that even now in the single motion-picture theater the crowd applauds when the film begins, and applauds all the credits as well; and that they also clap when the plot takes a turn to their liking.

Zushiden Tsukasa. Mejiro, 1960. donald richie

He also tells me about various early amorous adventures. The first little girl with whom he played doctor (she was patient; he, doctor; she had to have an operation) he saw again just this month at home. “And did you play doctor?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was all very proper,” and he did a parody of the way in which he greeted her: important in his Tokyo student uniform, the slight nod, the slight smile, and dignity about all. Then he broke down laughing at himself.

Zushiden is only twenty but knows himself better than do many grown men, including this one. He is proud of his body, but only for what it will do for him; says he thinks he is not too smart but knows that he’s not dumb. Won’t study, though—is interested in the team and the school; stays home here most of the time and reads sports newspapers; willing and obliging, and one of the least selfish people I know, perhaps because one of the least ambitious.

Yet this will change; I have seen it change, and in only five years people just as open and as at peace as Zushiden transformed into insecure, scheming, harassed Japanese adults. Perhaps it is the curse of the city; perhaps the mark of society; perhaps merely another form of the adaptation that I am admiring.

7 january 1960. A cold day. Hurrying home after the public bath, steam rising from my hair, I notice girls sitting in the open shops, boys lounging by open upstairs windows. It is quite true that heating is not needed in this country. Even people who have it do not use it. The hands, the face, become red and chapped. When someone is really cold he doesn’t dance around, his whole body chilled; rather, he pats his cheeks, wrings his fingers. Then (and what a graceful gesture that is) one hand is extended over the charcoal in the hibachi. In the bath, however, with what abandon do the washers douse themselves with scalding water before they plunge into the boiling.

9 january 1960. At the PEN meeting, the sun reflecting off the Sukiyabashi Canal just outside the big French windows, I am introduced to a bird-like, white-haired man.

“Oh, but we know each other,” he said to the man who was introducing us. “We spent a very cold afternoon together some ten years or so ago. I caught a cold. Was in bed for a week.”

Kawabata Yasunari looked at me, kindly, inquisitively, and released my hand, “I imagine he doesn’t even remember me.”

“But I do,” I said.

“He speaks,” said the writer, surprised. Then, to the other man, “There we were, stuck up there, the old subway tower in Asakusa, and I was wondering what to do about him. He was so terribly enthusiastic and kept pointing things out. And we couldn’t talk.”

“Tell me,” I said, a decade-old curiosity returning, “What were you thinking of that day on the roof when we were looking out over Asakusa?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But how did you feel about Asakusa all burned? You were seeing it for the first time since the war was over.”

“Oh, that. I don’t know. Surprise maybe. Sadness probably.”

He had gotten over Asakusa. Had he gotten over it when we stood there in that cold glare? I wasn’t over it, even yet, doubted I ever would be. For me Asakusa had spread to cover the city, the country, maybe even the world.

“And you, did you ever translate Asakusa Kurenaidan?” he asked.

“I never learned to read.”

“Well, at least you learned to speak. We can talk, finally.”

And he smiled, his white head birdlike against the flowing glare of the slow canal and the distant clamor of the Tokyo traffic.

But we never did. And now people were pushing, wanting to speak with the famous novelist. We had already had our talk. And whenever we there­after met Kawabata would cock his head on one side and look at me quizzically, humorously, as though we had had something in common.

13 january 1960. My last day of teaching. Making out the final term marks, I half-heartedly attempt to feel something, anything, about my leaving Waseda [University] for good. Nothing comes. I try again; this time something does:Suddenly I realize how tired I am of it all, with what lack of interest I face my classes. All of which makes me realize what a poor teacher I probably am, that—for my students’ sake if not my own—I should have stopped before.

Yet, this is not true. I am liked, liked for the wrong reasons perhaps, liked because of the show, but the show was there because I wanted to entertain them into learning. And this has been good. I have proof—the letter that came last June after I had stopped two weeks early because I did not feel I could go on, and which I will in part copy here because I want to keep it:

We will all miss you, Mr. Richie! You really brighten our school life. As you may know most of our classes are boring, dry and some even meaningless. We are fed up with old-typed schooling, such as studying the English language in Japanese, which is really meaningless and even harmful, I think. For that, perhaps the bad tradition in English education in this country is responsible. But your class is different; it is interesting, enjoyable, and lively. In fact, your class is one of the few classes we enjoy and like to attend. But we don’t want to ruin your health, and hope you will have a good time this summer and look forward to seeing you in September, and may I ask you to please put up with us once again.

And then it is signed by a young man who sits in the front row and about whom I know little else—Yabuki Keiji.

16 january 1960. Zushiden here. He makes supper. We sit in the kotatsu; he drinks whiskey and I drink awamori. We talk. I realize that I have a home and a family. The electric fire warms our feet; the alcohol warms our bodies. After supper, warm, we sit and talk. It gets later. Then it is time for the warm bed and warm bodies.

17 january 1960. A brilliant day, Fuji hanging over the city, Shinjuku small against its base, everything foreshortened and minutely clear as though seen through a telephoto lens. Meredith and I drive out into the country to see Holloway.

With Marian Korn, 1960. donald richie

I have glimpses of two domestic households: Meredith and [Yato] Tamotsu have a joking relationship, bunkies, pals, supported by affection, by regard, by need; jocular rough talk to each other; laughed insults; rather matey—a domestic arrangement.

Holloway and [Kamata] Michio have another kind: no jokes to speak of, constant support. I think of bookends, of pairs (plaid sox, plaid tie), of dress-alikes. The two make such warmth that the bad cold world is kept out. So shielded and sheltered that the one’s opinion is asked before the other makes up his mind.

Wonder what my household looks like. But which one? Well, right now, with Zushiden. It is roommates. People who go their own ways but attend the same classes. We don’t have a social life together. We have a personal life. This family is more like a boarding house.

18 january 1960. In the evening I enjoy another glimpse of domesticity, this sanctioned by marriage. Frank and Marian [Korn]—married long enough to have three almost grown kids. Hence perhaps Marian’s: “Oh, no, you are very stupid. You are utterly wrong. You just don’t know.” On the other hand: “Oh, you are so very clever,” followed at once by “I’m just a stupid woman. Oh, yes. I am, I am,” even when no one contradicts her.

Frank is determined common sense itself when around his wife. Occasionally public caresses to which Marian lends herself like a petted cat. She holds on to a person as though trying to remember the contours, as though attempting to convince herself that it is all real. Marian, charming figure, charming dimple, turning serious: something of Madame Verdurin there; Frank, something of Basin: a refined, reflective, and self-abnegating cruelty.

Marian on Stravinsky and Craft: “Well, I know who I am putting my money on. The old one, he’s had it; but the young one now he’s coming right up. I imagine that in ten years or so, he will be it—the old one has had it.” Of any composer she doesn’t like (Webern before [Heuwell] Tircuit put her straight): “He doesn’t know what he is doing!” Folk-wisdom—her mother must have said the same thing about some clumsy neighbor farmer.

Frank is, on the other hand, slightly above the arts, patronizes them: in his canon only Bruckner, Mahler, and Beethoven (“Jews every one of them,” a joke) and an I-know-what-I-like attitude.

Both Frank and Marian are now very tired, they are falling apart, they are asleep. I look at my final family, for here I have a place too. Perhaps it was my open unavailability that first interested Marian, perhaps it was Frank’s philandering. At any rate the unlikely happened and I found her doing to me what I do to others. This, I think she thought was the way to my heart. I could never be what Marian wanted me to be—bold, impetuous, headlong. I could not rape. I could only be raped. Thus our small passion petered out and we remained friends.

Now I watch my slumbering hosts, so like a father and mother, and remembered my attempts to confess my philandering to Frank—whom I found just as attractive as I did Marian. And his alacrity at avoiding these confessions. These he did not want to hear. About my boyfriends he was complaisant but not about my girlfriends, at least not this particular one.

20 january 1960. Sick from the dentist and Mary [Evans] tall, wide-eyed, flaxen-hair down to the shoulders, comes over to take care of me. She brings me a bottle of kirsch and curls up on the bed while we talk. Beautiful, strange, something like a tall bird—perhaps a heron. Extraordinary eyes: very wide, large, Egyptian; with those eyes and the El Greco figure I think of Burne-Jones—she is his demoiselle elue. Swann would have thought of Botticelli.