This Great Stage of Fools: An Anthology of Uncollected Writings

by Alan Booth, Timothy Harris (Editor), Karel von Wolferen (Afterword)

Alan Booth (1946-1993) is recognized today as one of the finest expatriate writers on Japan. His travel books, The Roads to Sata (1985), and the posthumously published Looking for the Lost (1995), are considered classics of commentary on modern Japanese culture and society. Booth was also the author of some extraordinarily perceptive journalism. This book consists of a rich selection of reviews and articles he wrote for magazines and newspapers in Japan, its topics covering Japanese film, festivals, and folk-songs. It is a remarkable volume, written with keen insight and a wickedly wry humor–a work any Japanophile will appreciate

Genres: Japan, Essays, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Alan Booth was born in London in 1946 and traveled to Japan in 1970 to study Noh theater. He stayed, working as a writer and film critic, until his death from cancer in 1993.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was thoroughly impressed with the essays in this collection – for their range, their incisiveness, and the sheer beauty of their language and storytelling. Having read and immensely enjoyed Booth’s two longer works, I was a little surprised to find that I perhaps enjoyed this collection even more. And for fans of The Roads to Sata, there’s an 18-day diary included of a walk he did across Shikoku – a kind of follow-up, or companion piece, to his classic journey.

I was surprised, too – okay, dismayed – at how often Kanazawa and people from Kanazawa kept popping up in the most embarrassing ways (even as far away from Kanazawa as an Ainu village in Hokkaido), and part of me hopes he would have liked what Kanazawa has become in the 30-40 years since he traveled through and wrote about it. I’m not sure the things he faulted it for have greatly changed, however.

This is a wonderful book, and in the end, as he discusses his travels in Calcutta and then his cancer diagnosis and quick decline, a very touching one, too.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been many foreign chroniclers of Japan since Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships forced Japan to join the modern world in 1853. But precious few are considered required reading about the enigmatic country. Suffice it to say, the late Allan Booth has earned membership in that rarefied company with his remarkable book, The Roads to Sata, about his epic walk from Hokkaido to Kyushu in 1977. It is notable for his distinct, original, critical, and, often, humorous voice. Tragically, Booth succumbed to colon cancer in 1993 at the early age of 47. However, fortunately, for fans of Booth’s writing, a posthumous collection of other walking journeys, Looking for the Lost, was published in 1995. And now, on the 25th anniversary of his death, a new collection of his writing, This Great Stage of Fools: An Anthology of Uncollected Writings, has been published by Bright Wave Media, which is best know for publishing the bilingual craft beer magazine, Japan Beer Times.

The essays and articles were collected from a variety of sources and arranged by Booth’s longtime friend Timothy Harris. Harris also penned the foreword, which gives insight in the author’s life and context for the collection. Harris states that he choose to use Booth’s writing on films from 1979 to 1990 to give a picture of what was happening during that time. In addition Harris has collected several pieces on Japanese culture, including a series of essays on Japanese festivals which were printed as an English-language textbook, that he felt were among the best things that Booth wrote. In addition, Japanologist and friend of Booth, Karel van Wolferen (The Enigma of Japanese Power), wrote a touching afterword to the collection.

The essays were divided into five parts: Part I: Film Reviews, Part II: Devils, Gods, and Cameramen, Part III: Songs of The Far Places, Part IV: Wanderers, Part V: Going Hence. Part I: Film Reviews has several subsections: The State of Japanese Cinema, The Best, The Worst, Priest, Peasants, Samurai & Lovers, Anime, and The War. And, indeed, as Harris points out one can get a general sense of what was happening in Japan during the 80s, but it also captures the nuances of Booth’s voice, opinions, and interests. There is much humor that can be seen in the pieces in which he bemoaned the fatuousness of mainstream Japanese cinema and, like all reviewers, he must have taken great pleasure in writing reviews of some of the films he panned in his column. But he can also be laudatory about films and directors that he felt were great art. Among the directors of films singled out for their artistry were: Hideo Gosha, Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura, Juzo Itami, Masaki Kobayashi, Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Kohei Oguri, Masahiro Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki, and Yoji Yamada among others.

Some of Booth’s more insightful comments were seen in his assessment of several film reviews on movies about WWII. For example, Booth makes the following pronouncement about Kobayashi’s four hour documentary on the Tokyo Trials, Tokyo saiban:

It is likely, then, that a Japanese audience-particularly a young one-will leave the cinema persuaded not simply that justice was miscarried at Tokyo, but that the Japanese and their military forces had comparatively little case, of any kind, to answer.

He also takes Imamura (a two time Palme d’Or winner at Cannes) to task for his equally uncritical postwar drama Black Rain. Booth points out the displays of collateral damage of the nuclear bombs were “without the least reference to the historical circumstances that brought it about or the suffering caused to countless non-Japanese people by their subjugation at the hands of the Japanese military,” It was something he found “both historically inappropriate and morally contemptible.”

Perhaps the second half of the book, which deals with more general topics related about Japan will be of the greatest interest to people who have an interest in Japan. In Part II: Devils, Gods, & Cameramen he visits and writes about 14 yearly festival held throughout Japan (from the Neputa Matsuri in Aomori to the Eisaa Matsuri in Okinawa). Each festival was recorded with personal detail and evaluation. Some of the festivals do not pass the mustard with Booth, but several offer transformative experiences. Part III: Songs of Far Places allows Booth to travel to places where folk songs originated to write about the place and circumstances of such songs. For example in “Wild Pictures” (Ajigasawa jinka, Aomori prefecture), he proclaims: “The song Ajigasawa jinku, a lively song that reflects the stubborn pride of the Tsugaru people and the way in which the hardships of the north can acquire a stark and glittering beauty.” Part IV: Wanderers includes a portrait of a self-taught musical genius in “Chikuzan’s Song: The Life and Music of a Shamisen Master.” As well as, “Roads Out of Time: A Walk across Shikoku”, which acts as a sort of addendum to his celebrated The Roads to Sata, with similar humor and insights into the region and the people there.

The final section of the book, Part V: Going Hence chronicles the end of Booth’s life from his misdiagnosed colon cancer to his post surgery chemotherapy last days. In a series of articles written for Tokyo Journal, he recounts a journalistic trip to India followed by a medical check up due to prolonged illness from said journey, which is diagnosed as stress related. The reader will quickly learn in the next series of articles for The Asahi Evening News that he has an advanced case of cancer of the colon. He takes the reader through his personal odyssey at the hospital and coming to terms with his illness and imminent death with clarity, humor, wit, and profundity. These qualities infuse the uncollected pieces-collected here, for the first time, waiting to be appreciated by discerning readers.

[Trevor Skingle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a testament to Alan Booth’s skill as a writer that he is regarded by Japanophiles as one of the pre-eminent commentators on Japan and Japanese culture (though a culture far removed from Japan’s city environs). This even though only two of his books about Japan became mainstream publications, ‘The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan’ (1985) and, posthumously (Booth passed away in 1993), ‘Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan’ (1995). *

‘This Great Stage of Fools’ is a comprehensive collection of his journalistic articles. Initial impressions were good and as this review progressed it became increasingly apparent that the same sardonically insightful and playfully humorous analytical frame of mind that Booth applied to his two published books, which engage with and draw the reader in and makes Booth such a popular author, is evident in this collection of articles making them a delight to read.

The collection is broken down into five parts; the first covering Booth’s critiques of the Japanese film industry and films between 1979 and 1990, the second on Japanese festivals, the third on Japanese folk songs, the fourth on wandering, and finally the fifth which covers his experience of life after his cancer diagnosis.

In Part I, the largest in the book by far, his initial negativity towards the Japanese cinema industry, quite apparent in the first section, is replaced in the next, on the best of Japanese cinema, with a sort of bemused wonder – especially at the seemingly limited faculty of the Japanese film industry, in his opinion, to appreciate the best of its own film directors and their films whilst espousing, in no uncertain terms, the genius of his favourite films in spite of their apparent niche separation from mainstream Japanese cinema. In the brief section on the worst of Japanese cinema Booth comes into his own, ending the first part on general cinema releases between 1979 and 1990 with his personal brand of hilarious laugh out loud ‘say it as he sees it’ cutting edge sarcasm. The section on Anime exhibits an almost childlike yet erudite fascination and wonder at the worlds of Japanese animation, reaching almost an apotheosis of prose in his descriptions of the magically childlike and the childishly cartoonish, across all; the excellent, the violently banal, the profoundly brutal, and the pleasantly misplaced. In the penultimate section on war films Booth’s analysis is as unflinchingly honest, at least from his point of view, as it is critical of the stance of the Japanese on the Second World War before, during and after. This is not without hope however, invested in the youth of Japan at the time though he also goes on to highlight with depressing honesty the vicissitudes of the contentious themes in the war films he reviews, on atrocity and culpability, the appeal of and responsibility for revisionism and distortion, honour and respect, and sheer lunacy. The final section of Part I is a relatively brief foray into the world of the Japanese theatre covering three plays, and whilst this reviewer, unable to comment on the critique for the first two plays never having seen productions by those Directors, is in almost total disagreement with his analysis and critique of Ninagawa’s ‘Macbeth’ – but then perceptions differ and Booth, as interesting as ever with his views, does have a particularly singular outlook. It would be interesting to know what, if anything, was the response of the Japanese, and the Japanese film industry in particular, to these reviews.

Part II, on Japanese festivals, is in much more familiar Booth territory, one which it is obvious he relishes and with each festival description, from horse festival to a celebration of the Heian age, from a festival of giant neputa lanterns to the festival of the dead, it’s like dipping a scoop into and sampling strange sweets from one in a long line of large sweet jars in an old fashioned sweet shop, the end result being a hugely enjoyable and wonderful mix of the superstitious and the ordinary transformed and transubstantiated into the extraordinary, all sprinkled with a dusting of verse and the most wonderfully reverent and irreverent ‘off piste’ MacGuffins… …and finding oneself at the end of this part still wanting so much more.

And in Part III the wish for more is granted. His ‘specialism’, if there was one, was folk songs and in particular enka (ballads) and for a non-Japanese his knowledge of them was exceptional. Here though the oeuvre is niche, probably even for the Japanese. Yet again he doesn’t disappoint covering a broad mix of travelogue, local traditions, and folk songs. Yet apart from the definitive change in subject heading there is only a slight yet subtle shift in structure from the articles of Part II, a transition, for this reviewer, from enchantment to delight.

Part IV, the briefest in terms of articles yet perhaps one of the highlights of the collection, consists of two articles devoted to wandering. The first an evocative and fascinating journey into the life of the incomparable Chikuzan Takahashi, the blind shamisen player from Tsugaru who in later life became one of Japan’s most successful players of Tsugaru shamisen music, an article in which Booth combines two of the elements which seem to fascinate him most, Tsugaru in Aomori in the far north of Honshu (an area he expanded on in his later travelogue following in the footsteps of the writer Osamu Daizai in ‘Looking for the Lost’), and folk music. In some strange way Chikuzan Takahashi seems to mirror the no-nonsense character of Booth which emerges from these pages. The second article was originally written to complete his journey across Japan, a journey begun in ‘Roads to Sata’, and this by walking across Japan’s smallest and probably least known island outside of Japan, Shikoku, completed at the behest of and for ‘Winds’, the inflight magazine of Japanese Airlines. Here it was like picking up the ‘Roads to Sata’ again, somewhat like bumping into an old, well known, friend and catching up on what had been going on since last those pages had been turned.

The final Part V about his post diagnosis life is by turns heart-rendingly sad and yet injected with some very funny but uncomfortable humour. Booth, never one to hold back, at first seems to wander into a stream of consciousness narrative, leaping from one aspect to another, though he does in fact quite quickly settle down into a chronicle of sorts. And yet still irrepressible, with the accounts of his treatments, as harrowing though they are, he is unable to resist interspersing his narrative with his usual glib yet very funny acerbic comments.

A story teller to the end perhaps he is still sitting comfortably, just this side of the arched red bridge over the Sanzu river, the intersection between this world and the next, on his fifth and final trip to Osorezan, regaling Jizo, the Buddhist patron bodhisattva of travellers, with tales of his adventures his cache of stories not yet exhausted. Yet being the ultimate wise Zen fool he was, he would no doubt question with delightfully humorous sarcasm the very existence of both Jizo, even as he bade him farewell, and the intersecting bridge, even as he passed over it.

This book is an absolute must for Booth fans. In turns fascinating and laugh out loud humorous it didn’t fail to live up to very high expectations. His absence has left a huge gap in the publishing world of writing about Japan, and in the expectation of what might have been there is, as selfish as it may seem, an intensity of disappointment that is difficult to put into words… …but also a delight in his legacy, in what has survived as in the articles in this book through which his memory lives on.

[Patrick McClellan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific talent taken far too soon. A testament to the brilliance of his writing, that it is still so engaging and relevant almost 30 years after his passing. I read this over the course of 6 months, drinking in and appreciating every last detail, not wanting it to end. What would Alan Booth have made of Japan’s transformation, or lack thereof since 1992? We can only wonder. Thanks for the memories and laughs, Alan Booth.