A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

Delicious... A wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea. - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo as a young film student in 1975, he found a feverish and surreal metropolis in the midst of an economic boom, where everything seemed new and history only remained in fragments.

Through his adventures in the world of avant-garde theatre, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma came of age. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free.

A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him, and a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic and sexual.

Genres: Japan, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Travel, Asia, History

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 6, 2018

About the author

Ian Buruma is a British-Dutch writer and academic, much of whose work focuses on the culture of Asia, particularly that of 20th-century Japan, where he lived and worked for many years.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the years, and especially going back and forth from Japan, I have read many books by fellow Americans and some British citizens on their time spent in Japan. A lot of them are crap. The ones that stand out are the ones that wrote about Japanese cinema and literature. The girls or guys who went there to get a job as an English teacher are usually not that interesting, but alas, those who are devoted to a specific Japanese artist or thinker, then yes I very much enjoy that type of book. There are two writers that I love when they write about Japan - Donald Richie and the other fellow is Ian Buruma.

Buruma wrote a fascinating book called "Behind the Mask," which is an excellent book on some of the darker elements of Japanese literature and the arts. His new book "A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir" accounts for his time spent in Japan to study cinema, but mostly the theater arts of Kara Juro, an avant-garde playwright, with his theater group in Tokyo. Similar to temperament but not precisely in style as Terayama Suiji. Buruma knew both men, and it's his unique point-of-view, due that he was a foreigner, being involved with Kara's theater group. A lot of foreign writers have written about the oddness of one being part of Japanese society, or living in Japan, and finding it alienating. But then again I think that's the nature of the Western fellow or girl. We're raised to be apart than together, and therefore lies the situation of such countries in Asia and elsewhere.

What makes this book unique for me is that I share Buruma's interest in the Japanese arts, and spending time there as well, I can identify in what he writes about, in regards of living there and appreciating the same sort of artists/writers. Also, the book is full of fascinating figures, some know and some entirely new to me. Donald Richie is a writer I know quite well through his writings in various articles (mostly in the Japan Times) as well as reading his books on Japanese cinema. His Journals are without a doubt, the classic work by him. He is a guy who knew everyone from Ozu to Mishima, and also a gay man living in Tokyo. His insights into the Japanese culture, but also his somewhat detached views are excellent observations of life around him. In that sense, he reminds me of Paul Bowles' travel writing. Buruma shares the same interest as Richie, and is also, a fantastic prose writer. His commentary on Richie, who sort of led him through Tokyo when he first arrived, is a fascinating tour of the metropolis. The second personality of interest is the Actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She started her career during the war years making a propaganda film in China, where she was identified as a Chinese actress. But alas, no, she's Japanese and eventually went on to star in the American Film "House Of Bamboo" directed by Sam Fuller. The book doesn't mention it, but she was also married to the artist Isamu Noguchi. Yamaguchi eventually became a member of the Japanese parliament for 18 years and had a TV show where she focused on and interviewed such characters as Mao, Idi Amin, and Kim Il-sung.

"A Tokyo Romance" is a book full of fascinating people, and Buruma himself is interesting because he is also an individual who is half-Dutch and half-English, so he's very much a bi-cultural, or maybe at this point, since he lives in New York City now, a tri-cultural figure. With his background, he has an understanding of what it's like to be in a culture that is very singular in focus and design. A classic book on Japan, but also a rare text in English on the world of Terayama and Kara Juro.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a young man, Ian Buruma lived in Japan for several years , exploring the fringe worlds of theatre, film and performance art, where erotu, grotu and nonsensu prevailed (erotic/porn, grotesque and nonsense) prevailed.

He hung out with actors, joining them on tour, eating, drinking, visiting sex clubs – all part of the life of the Tokyo under-life that he wanted to explore. There was more than enough detail for me of his and the group exploits, though those interested in the inner workings and tensions of extreme Japanese theatre might hold more of the names and works than I do.

This being Buruma, his observation/analysis hat is on, as well as the older-man-recalling-outrageous-past hat.

It’s the intermittent acute comment that kept me going past the stage shows. He reflects on the place of the violent, sexual themes and acts in Japanese entertainment and how they sit within a culture that is very tightly structured, ordered and, superficially at least, polite.

The last chapter I found particularly interesting as he examines why foreigners can never really fit into Japanese society/culture, and why many Japanese find it difficult to fit in else where.

Fascinating book if you can get past the ineptitudes and grossness.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was prepared to love this book and looked forward to a trip down memory lane since I was also in Japan during the time period Buruma is writing about. But it's more of a brag about his own youthful sexual exploits and unless you have a really strong interest in Japanese cinema, a lot of this is old hat and just another gaijin in Japan story.
There were moments when he did express some deeper and more interesting thoughts so the book is not a total loss. But mostly I just thought, "this again." It could have been so much more....

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is both a poignant account of Buruma's romance with Japan, a romance that both succeeds and fails, and also a compelling "insider" account of 1970s Japanese avant-garde culture, particularly the theater of Juro Kara. Buruma confronts an old problem with insight and sympathy--the inability of the gaijin, however much energy he might pour into the effort, to ever be accepted in Japan as anything other than an exotic outsider (so-called "gaijinitis"). Ironically, he argues, the more adept one becomes at the language, the more problematic and even embarrassing one becomes for the Japanese. Although Buruma decries the insularity of the Japanese, he remains understanding: "No matter how hard you might behave as a Japanese, you will never be Japanese. Some foreigners find this painful. But you cannot blame the Japanese for failing to comply with the illusions of foreigners." Buruma describes some of these illusions as he writes of his gaijin acquaintances, including the great Japanologist Donald Ritchie. I have seen similar illusions in my waiguoren friends in Taiwan, and have surely held some myself during my four years in that country, but the type of exclusion one can experience in Japan is, i think, a bit more rigid and direct than what one encounters in the Chinese world. I should end by noting and applauding how honest and self-revealing Buruma's memoir appears to be. So many autobiographical accounts are more an effort at hiding than revealing (I am even tempted to define autobiography as "a written work in which one lies about oneself"). This book, much to Buruma's credit (and courage) seems actually to tell the truth . . . hard to do unless one is a saint, which none of us are.

[Andrew]

I frequently point out my disgust at my fellow Westerners in Bangkok, and the many grotesque variations thereof, and my occasional slippages into their tendencies, and well, looks like Buruma's done something not too different for Tokyo. He tries to integrate himself into Japanese society while at the same time appreciating the impossibility of such a task, and in doing so, has produced a phenomenal memoir of his years abroad and what that meant in the tumult of the 1970s, and the world was trying to figure out what to do now that the youth had gone ape. A Tokyo Romance is hardly a masterpiece, but memoirs rarely are. It is very good as a memoir.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian Buruma is one of my favorite public intellectuals due to the variety of subjects he explores in his writing, Asia and Europe, religion and history among other others. However, he cut his teeth in Japan and that is where I first came across his writing in the fascinating Behind the Mask, which had some interesting insights into Japanese culture-particularly literature and film. So I had somewhat high expectations for this memoir, A Tokyo Romance (2018), that were not met. That being said there were some interesting revelations and memories from a forgotten Japan circa 1975 to 1981, I believe. I was unaware or forgot that he was related to Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger. Buruma states that he chose to study Chinese in Holland since he liked Chinese food. And that Francois Truffaunt's film, Bed & Board, in which a young husband strays from his young family to have an affair with a Japanese expatriate (played by model Hiroko Berghauer), as the impetus to come to Japan. It may have also had something to do with the fact he already had a Japanese girlfriend, Sumie-who would become his first Japanese wife, in tow when he arrived in Japan to study film at Nihon University's School of Art in Ekoda.

He was warned to stay away from the Donald Richie set, but immediately met him when given the chance and became friends with him (they collaborated on a book Japanese Tattoo). I remember reading in Richie's journals that he thought Buruma was playing at being gay since it was fashionable, Buruma suggests that he was experimenting somewhat, but remained steadfastly heterosexual. It seemed he liked watching from the margins-something he was called out on by his Japanese artist friends on many occasions. I was disappointed that there wasn't more about film since it is one of my great interests in Japanese culture. I was first drawn to Buruma through his writing on books and film, which he acknowledges was his starting point as a writer and public intellectual. What we get instead is an inside look at the world of avant garde theater and dance. Something that fascinated the young Buruma so that went on stage with Maro Akaji’s butoh dancing company Dairakudakan. He also joined Kara Juro’s theater troupe as a sort of Gaijin mascot and acted the part of “Iwan Gaijin.” And On New Year’s Eve in 1977, at the Asbestos Studio in Tokyo, Buruma met Hijikata Tatsumi. The founder of Ankoku Butoh who christened him Underpants because his name sounds like the Japanese word for “bloomers”.

There are many self depreciating stories recounted such as his-flubbing minor dance roles, looking ridiculous after one of his high heel wooden sandals (geta) splinters, and bending over to put on shoes after a bacchanalian New Year's party only to let one rip. So he had this to say as well: "I, too, found Westerns who showed off their fluent Japanese annoying, even though, not infrequently, that show-off would be me." It seems young Buruma unlike, Richie, tried to become a member of the tribe and realized that this would not be possible. I found it curious that he likened his awakening to that of John Nathan, who revealed a similar appraisal of Japanese society in his memoir Living Carelessly in Tokyo. I think they seems like such different cases-Buruma as unformed and had his biggest success ahead of him-he admitted to drifting and dabbling in this and that-without focus. Buruma found his voice in writing in English about Japan that would lead to his career as a writer and to be in the current editor of The New York Review of Books. Nathan on the other hand was very accomplished in Japan-the first foreign student to graduate from Tokyo University, translator of Yukio Mishima and Kenazaburo Oe who won the Nobel Prize, etc.-who went onto fail as a movie producer and make training videos in the US. As an expatriate, I found his analysis of the roles available to gaijin reductive. Is he still a bit bitter about not being accepted? He admits Japan's influence but down plays it-his second wife is also Japanese, the author Eri Hotta. As far as I can tell his best known books are the ones he wrote on Japan. I guess I found his life in Japan less compelling than Nathan and Richie's. But as an admirer of his work-it was insightful and at times entertaining. I can't image that it would be of much interest to a general reader-it would have to be a fan of Buruma or a Japanophile.

[Michelle Curie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up in a bookshop in Tokyo, where I went for a couple of days. The place is so different to what I am used to and as a young European woman it's rare to find yourself as an outsider while not feeling uncomfortable in the slightest. It did make me want to find out how other people felt in a country to special and yet strange.



A Tokyo Romance is the account of Ian Buruma, who went to Tokyo in 1970 where he experienced the theatre and film scene first hand. Back then, Tokyo was little more than an idea in his mind. He got involved with Kara Jūrō, who formed an avant-garde theatre group that shaped the scene. What he found was a strange metropolis full of excess, outsiders and transformation. The memoir features photograph Buruma took during this time period, which help painting the picture.

What I found particularly interesting is how he spoke about living as a gaijin - an outsider. It's something that I have felt nearly fifty years later as well. As someone who is not from Japan, the country bears a pleasant curiosity that you never get used to. You're free and yet never fully integrated into whatever you're a part of.

[Tocotin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked some parts of this, namely the ones where the author forgets about himself, stops being hyper-conscious of his oh-so-exotic surroundings, and just describes the people he saw and/or mixed with. The descriptions of various experimental theatre troupes and little seedy places and shows are especially interesting.

The reflections on Japanese society and culture are surprisingly predictable and masculine-oriented, though. Japan is “a society to which a foreigner could never belong, even if he wanted to”. Japanese girls are “simpering”, seductive but robot-like, their faces are mask-like… Uh… it’s the 21th century, maybe we could hope to see a commentary that is more, uh… insightful and fresh?

“Certainly puritanism, of the Christian kind, is not a part of Japanese tradition.” Well, duh. Why should it be? How could it be?

“Japanese addresses follow no logic.” There is a lot of statements like this. Japan is different. Japan is different. Japan is different. That’s all. It’s boring and lazy.

“That last night in Kyoto had been the moment of truth that all foreigners face in Japan at one point or another. No matter how much you might behave as a Japanese, you will never be Japanese.” And this is a problem how?

“The arguments between the meadow mouse and his friend are still being fought out in the letter columns of the English-language press in Japan, where outraged complaints about Japanese insularity are countered by assertions that Japan is misunderstood, that Japanese are just like other people, or indeed in most respects superior to other people. If the foreigner in Japan is a writer, these arguments can become the main focus of his work, an obsessive theme that will not go away, an endless debate that neither side can win.”

You know, this kind of thing never interested me. I think it is rather silly, to consider oneself expert enough the be generalizing and judging a whole country, whatever it might be. My own country, my own people are the constant source of wonder to me. I’ve lived in Japan for most of my adult life and I found that the shorter one has been living here, the more likely one is to engage in this kind of pointless and yes, RUDE debate; after some time you just shrug and laugh. Japan is different than other countries. So is China, so is Spain, so is every country that ever was. And all those countries are inhabited by people who are just like other people in some things and different in others, being, you know, people. It’s an exercise in futility to try to prove that they are exactly this or exactly that, to try to cut them down to some kind of lazy theory which only ultimately makes the theorist ignore things that don’t fit. And those things are perhaps the most illuminating.

[Chad Kohalyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is now September, 6 months after reading this book. I still think about it time-to-time. 1960s Japan is fascinating, and Buruma's experiences still reside. I probably should rate this book with an extra star since it has obviously resonated with me.

[Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was mildly entertaining read, mostly more interested in the picture then the text, which isn't a good sign.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 2 out of 5]

An unfinished book that regularly reappears on my bedside table is The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan, or its alternate, The Japan Journals: 1947-2004. Richie arrived in Japan in 1947 and ended up enjoying the rest of his life there – the journals, writings on Japanese cinema and culture (not to mention, The Inland Sea), never lose their charm for me. Richie appears in the first sentence of Buruma’s new book, and I was guilty of expecting a modulation of the same, the insider/outsider’s view of living in Japan in the 1970s.

In this respect the book is a slight disappointment, lacking the force and focus of Buruma’s other writing (most of which I read as it turns up in various literary journals). The “romance” never quite gets off the ground, and the chapters on his picaresque involvement with various outré theatre troupes would be interesting only to an aficionado. Buruma seems to have had a terrific time during his Japanese sojourn (I was frequently impressed), but little of the fun filters back to the reader.

[Books on Asia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an easy read, and it was well-enough written, giving some interesting insights on Japanese culture and what was happening socially in Tokyo in the late 70's. Ian Buruma lived in Japan for 6 years, but he says he didn't keep a diary and he didn't write many letters during that time. He had only photos and his memory. Perhaps that's why the book seems to be lacking any narrative. The book is more about other people—mainly the literati he hung out with—than himself. Buruma spends most of his time doing very little and having very little influence on others. He's given many opportunities, but doesn't throw himself into any of them. I'm glad he skipped over many of the petty triflings of being a foreigner in Japan, and I respect his deep analysis of the position as the eternal outsider. But it's not till the very end of the book that he puts much of himself into the book. I didn't feel any Tokyo romance between himself and his adopted city. I even wonder: if Japan had loved him, would he have loved Japan back? Without more of a narrative thread, the reader is left wondering where the "radical transformation" of the author is that the book cover flap promises.

[Ditchface · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve travelled several times to modern Japan, I adore the country, so I appreciated the perspective of the country in the time that Buruma writes about, the 1970’s. It is a fascinating account of some of the avant-garde creatives of the era, and is set to a good pace. However, the let down of this is, unfortunately, that the writer himself anchors the interesting parts of Japan around his inability to do anything interesting at all. I suppose it is one way of reflecting on the way a gaijin’s experience of Japan will always be restricted, incomplete, as the “real Japan” is for the Japanese only. But as a narrative, it’s a little frustrating to keep by the side of the writer who won’t step outside of his foreigner box, however carefully he details being within it.

[Anatl · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than a memoir of a six year stint in 1970's Japan this is a book on Avent Guard cinema and theater in with an emphasis on dark, bizarre and seedier sides of the culture. Alongside interesting insights into the culture and its place in it as a stranger, there are also a lot of fetishization (which he is aware of) and a lot of descriptions of misadventures in sleazy dives. Readers with feminist consciousness will find here many red flags, however if you are interested in an introspective account of what's it like to be a foreigner trying to blend in Japanese society in the 70's and have an interest in 70's Japanese films like In the Realm of the Senses, authors such as Donald Richie and Mishima this is the book for you.

[Matt Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this while travelling through Japan and really enjoyed it. It offers a simultaneously broad and detailed examination of Japanese culture from a foreigner’s perspective, using experimental Japanese theatre as it’s starting point. Do not be put off by its supposed focus on Japanese theatre and film; I had no prior knowledge of these subjects and found the book engaging throughout as they are often used as a springboard into a more holistic discussion of Japan. The proliferation of Japanese locations, however, can prove irksome to a reader without a detailed knowledge of Japanese geography.

[Dmitry Nikolaev · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short sad story about the author's quarter-arsed attempts to assimilate in Japan by means of getting drunk in the company of theatre people.

[micha · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested into Tokyo's 70s avantgarde cinema & theatre - art scene, this is the book for you. It's an entertaining read aswell.

[Daniel Warriner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Tokyo Romance (2018) is Ian Buruma's memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 when he was 23 and studied cinema at Nichidai in Ekoda, then met author and film historian Donald Ritchie, director Akira Kurosawa, Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi, and a hodgepodge of other artists and avant-garde theater performers as he refined his spoken Japanese. Buruma covers an array of topics, including the "role" of the gaijin in Japan and also immersion of the outsider into Japanese culture (or inevitable failure to achieve this and resultant disillusionment) versus remaining on the periphery as a sort of voyeur, which he describes as a radical type of freedom.

The first chapters are imbued with nostalgia as Buruma recalls a more raucous theater scene and much edgier city. I came to Japan about twenty years after Buruma and also lived and worked around the Ikebukuro area, and while Buruma's experience was much different from mine, parts of his memoir brought me back to the wilder Tokyo of the 90s.

Buruma shares anecdotes about outrageous times with eccentrics and outsiders, and dabbles once or twice in their performances. He writes about bizarre carnival acts, romance porn films (roma porn), fashion photographers, tattoo artists, and his short documentary on the training and work of a department store elevator girl. I read a review that referred to the book as a journey into Tokyo's underworld, but outside of the arts it's not. While Buruma encountered underworld figures, he didn't enter their realm; he rather brushed by it occasionally—his preference it seems. He didn't move to the "plebeian shitamachi" (lower city) despite part of him wanting to, he left the cabarets to acquaintances, and he met a few who were perhaps connected to yakuza crime families or the Japanese Red Army but didn't hang out with the underworld figures himself. Nevertheless, his relationships with those in experimental theater troupes and traveling players, belonging to a weird world of their own, would have been quite a feat for a foreigner.

Buruma paints a vivid picture of a Tokyo that has changed over the past forty to fifty years, particularly its avant-garde theater scene, and seems to lament the city's east-to-west shift of its nightlife and fashion hubs. He mentions a number of important Japanese and French films, but each time Donald Ritchie's name popped up, I got the impression Buruma was reluctant to delve into Japanese cinema in this book, perhaps because that was Ritchie's area of expertise.

Something that surprised me was Buruma lived in Japan for only six years. I read his The Missionary and the Libertine in 1996, the year it was released and the same year I moved to Japan. This collection of essays shaped many of my initial views of the Japanese and relationships between East and West. At the time and since then, I've thought Buruma lived in Japan for decades because of his wide understanding of its history and culture. At the end of A Tokyo Romance he explains why he had to leave after those six years and how the experience shaped him and made him who he is today.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great source of reading ideas for me these days is the weekly NYTimes Book Review "By The Book" column where I was first introduced to Ian Buruma who I hadn't heard of before. The idea of this book resonated with me as my wife and I spent two years in Japan. Buruma was attracted to Japan by the Japanese cinema and spent much of his time there among some of the most radical, innovative theatrical producers and movie directors in the country at the time (the mid-1970s). Can't say that I could relate with much of the book...while his various experiences were interesting, this reader didn't find much meaning or lessons from those experiences. However, the last chapter of the book (Chapter 11) is quite interesting. In it Buruma reflects on the difficulty (impossibility?) for a non-native visitor (gaijin) to be taken seriously by an inner-directed country such as Japan. He makes an interesting comparison to E. M. Forster's "A Path to India" as an illustration of the challenges inherent in cultural connections, but that Japan in the 1970s represented an even deeper challenge to him and other westerners he knew there.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uninspired. And at least 60% of the material here can be found in other (better) books by Buruma.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was Japan before the Bubble. And yet, despite the lack of economic miracles, 1960s Tokyo was a city bubbling with excitement. The deposed (WWII) god-man, Hirohito, was still on the throne, albeit with a quieter presence. A time of change brought a divided nation, with the communist league of students putting pressure on the US-Japan Security Alliance, and amidst the fervent protest campaigns that mark the era, artists rose up to bring in a new aesthetic.

Ian Buruma was late to the party, arriving in the mid-1970s from Holland. Buruma has been more recently in the news—not for his memoir A Tokyo Romance but because of his fall from grace from The New York Review of Books. This occurred shortly after becoming the third editor since its founding, when he was forced-out amid outrage over an editorial decision deemed unsympathetic to the contemporary mood of the #metoo movement.

Buruma’s memoir came out by Penguin just prior to this scandal in 2018.

The book roughly covers his time living in Japan from 1975 to 1981. Six years is not long when it comes to language-learning or becoming at home in a megacity like Tokyo, but Buruma is no ordinary person. Half-Dutch (Protestant) and half-British (German, Jewish), he arrived in Japan already fluent in two languages and cultures. And it would not take long before he had become friends with some of the greatest artists of the time, participating in cutting-edge, avant-garde theater performances to boot.

A Tokyo Romance opens with a wonderful scene of the young Buruma, still in Holland, leaving a party telling someone of his plans to move to Japan, only to be told in no uncertain terms that he should, “Stay away from Donald Richie’s crowd.”

But what is a young man with a passion for film off to Japan to do but seek out Donald Richie?

This was the heyday of the “three greats” of Japanese cinema – Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. And before long, Buruma is participating in the avant-garde world of Butoh dance, including acting in Juro Kara’s “Red Tent” performances around the country. In one of the highlights of the book, he accompanies Kara to New York City where they stay in the rundown Chelsea Hotel, with slugs and worms climbing up the wallpaper. While in New York, Buruma unpacks some of the complicated issues revolving around intercultural experiences and the cultural divide between Japan and the West describing the famous 19th century experience of the novelist Sōseki Natsume when he was in London. Kara, like Sōseki before him, was uncomfortable and hardly left his hotel. Buruma wonders at this, given Kara’s boldness and exuberance back home.

He also connects the famous incident of Sōseki catching a glimpse of himself in a shop window in London and being horrified at his diminutive appearance, to an incident in 1981, when the Japanese exchange student Sagawa Issei, lured a German woman back to his apartment in France and killed her. The French did not keep Sagawa long after questioning and ipon his release he made the rounds of Japanese TV shows in the early 1990s. Apparently, before committing the crime, Sagawa wrote of sitting in a café one day: “Suddenly I looked at the glass front door of the café and reflected there were the five of us. A small Oriental in a charcoal blazer was submerged amid large white-skinned men and women. Instinctively, I looked away.”
Investigating the experience of alienation, Buruma spends many words describing his sex life vis-à-vis Japan. Unlike Donald Richie, who was a sexual refugee in more tolerant Japan, Buruma arrived with his Japanese girlfriend. He was no refugee. And he writes of his many affairs and romances with men and women, before he eventually marries for a time—in the end, moving to London, the home of his mother.

Toward the end of the book, Buruma makes mention of translator and scholar John Nathan, whose life trajectory had some similarity with Buruma’s and whose memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere came out in 2008.

For more, please see my review in Books on Asia

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, seemingly first of Buruma’s books on Japan. This one an early autobiography, modeled (consciously) on Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” but Buruma is entirely non-fiction, and Isherwood the far better writer. It’s not bad, but feels dated. Perhaps because Buruma (unlike Isherwood’s “I am a camera”) did not keep a diary, and instead had to reconstruct this after leaving Japan.

That’s good, on the one hand, given Buruma arrived not long after Mishima’s spectacular suicide, so the literary and performance set with which Buruma burrowed had known, and frequently discussed, Mishima (Buruma winds up becoming a photographer, interning, in effect, with one photographer who took the famous picture of Mishima on the stone bench in the snow with his sword, and another the one who took the picture of Mishima as St. Sebastian). But less interesting when Buruma clicks with two avant- grade troupes the descriptions of which would make sense only to one deeply steeped in Japanese culture.

The most interesting element here is Buruma’s discovery, and continued re-assessment, of the Gaigain factor. At first, he’s frustrated by the fact that—no matter how skilled his Japanese language and culture (e.g., the angle of the bow) he never will accepted as anything save an outsider. He comes, properly, to serve this as an advantage. He’s right.

I haven’t been to Japan in 25 years but, until recently, two of my clients were two of Japan’s largest companies. There is a threshold of “Japanese sensitivity” one must have to score the first phone call or meeting. Then, they test you again: don’t bring up business, for example, until they do. Instead, talk about Icharo or Otani. Then, on your first visit, they’ll try taking you to some Italian restaurant; refuse, and tell them you love sushi. Then be prepared—they will test you, by trying to refill your Sake (for heaven’s sake, learn pouring roles, and always leave your alcohol glass half full). Then the sushi they order will get more and more unusual: “Hmmm: he ate the sea urchin without complaint. What’s more foul?” I remember eating increasingly vile sushi, until I asked if the restaurant served blowfish. My prospective clients decided it might be terrible publicity to kill an American lawyer (blowfish is poison unless cut properly). I said the meal was delicious; that night was a tie.

I miss Japan; it’s the one place I plan to return when I retire. But there are better Ian Buruma books on Japan than this. I believe I’ve even reviewed them. Start there.

[Jim Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptional meditation/memoir of the author's years in Japan in the mid-70's, mostly as a student. Do not look to this to help you understand Japan or the Japanese. Such understanding would come obliquely, as the author examines his "otherness" vis-a-vis both the Japanese and Westerners as well.

Buruma has a Dutch father and an English mother. His mother brought him up with a lot of English traditions which led to his feeling apart in Holland. There are also feelings of sexual ambiguity even before he arrives in Japan with a Japanese wife. They separate and eventually come back together at the end, but there is very little in the way of description of this relationship, other than to note his wife did not feel comfortable in Japan and was glad at the end to return to England.

Otherness, what it means to be a gaijin (whitey) in Japan is central to the concern and reflection. Beautifully written, and well read by the author (enjoyed as an audio book).

Highly recommended, especially if you've spent some year abroad, either as a student or an ex-pat.

[Vidar Alne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boka er en skildring av unge Burumas møte med Japan og landets kulturliv på 70-tallet. Den følger bare delvis den biografiske sjangeren – vi får f.eks. høre hvorfor han dro nettopp til Japan og hans første møte med landet – men storparten av boka er preget av anekdoter. Burumas møter med storheter som filmregissøren Akira Kurosawa og forfatteren Jūrō Kara blir utførlig skildret. Den amerikanske forfatteren Donald Richie spiller også en overraskende stor rolle i boka – det føles iblant som boka handler mer om Richie og hans eskapader i Japan enn om Burumas. Buruma ikler seg rollen som en en observerende forteller, ikke som hovedperson i egen bok.

Som i nesten all memoarlitteratur skrevet av utlendinger, bruker også Buruma en del tid på å reflektere rundt sin egen gaijin-statusen i landet og på japanerens syn på ikke-japanere.
Bokas anekdotiske karakter gjør leseopplevelsen nokså ujevn. Enkelte av småhistoriene er mer interessante enn andre.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir from Baruma about the six years he spent in Tokyo in the late 70s when he was in his 20s. Confession: among the Japanese playwrights, poets, filmmakers, etc., that he writes of working with/knowing during this time I knew of almost none of them. So honestly on the whole, this wasn't that interesting in that sense, but what I did like is just getting a slice/picture of that time in one's life before picking career/settling down when you can kind of do anything and particularly if you're an expat. I also love Japan/Tokyo and the sense of it being 'surreal' I would certainly agree with. The summer I graduated from college I was thinking about going to Japan to teach English and it's one of my regrets that I didn't.

[Danish Prakash · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read numerous memoirs set in Japan at this point and almost all of them covered a handful of topics -- the Japanese quirks, exotic cuisine, an amalgamation of the traditional and modern Japanese culture -- but this memoir traces the provenance of Japanese theatre, arts, and photography. The latter half of the book touches upon the tendency of westerners to be obliged to blend in with the insular Japanese society and how it often ends up with them giving up and returning to their homelands. This is precisely how the author has structured the book together, he starts off with the nascent excitement of moving to another country and then goes back and forth to being "accepted" and then being "left out" by his troupe, eventually moving away to London after 6 long years. The journey itself is worth a read.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bonus points because I found this book in the very limited English section at a bookstore in Naha and I read it in Tokyo which was cool. However, it was heavily written about film and theater which I don’t have interest in. I really liked his brief commentary here and there on being a foreigner in Japan.

[g ✰ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was the most unexpectedly brilliant books I've ever read. The cover is a joke, and the title is so unrelated to its contents- a gritty memoir about the film and theater scene of 1970s Tokyo, a tale of outsidership, and just the right book for someone about to attend university overseas.

[Luciano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing if you, like me, were expecting a broader panel of the life in Tokyo in the 1970s -- most of the book focuses on Buruma's experiences in theater, dance, and photography. Not a pain to read, but left me uninterested most of the time.

[Gayle Zawilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

West meets East and past meets future in this somewhat self-indulgent retrospective into the “gaijin” author’s foray into the creative, if sometimes seedy, underground culture of 1970s Tokyo. It reads like an ethnography in parts, which I guess it is. I was given an advance copy courtesy of LitHub First Readers’ Club Book Giveaway (thank you).