The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [127]
Ninety years after they first left Yokohama, someone picks up a netsuke and knows who made it.
33. THE REAL JAPAN
By the early 1960s Iggie was a ‘long-term Tokyo resident’. European and American friends came on three-year postings and were gone. Iggie had seen off the Occupation. He was still in Tokyo.
He had a tutor for Japanese and now spoke it beautifully, with fluency and subtlety. Every foreigner who can stammer a few apologetic phrases in Japanese is complimented on their extraordinary skills. Jozu desu ne: my, but how skilled you are! My own Japanese, wrenchingly clumsy, full of strange longueurs and rushed ascents, has been praised enough for me to know how this works. But I heard Iggie in deep conversation and know he could speak Japanese well.
He loved Tokyo. He loved the way the skyline changed, the rust-red Tokyo Tower built at the end of the 1950s to emulate the Eiffel Tower; the new apartment blocks hard against the smoky yakitori booths. He identified with the city’s capacity for reinvention. The chance to reinvent himself was one that seemed godsent. There was a strange correlation between Vienna in 1919 and Tokyo in 1947, he said. If you haven’t been so low, you don’t know how you can build something, you can’t measure what you’ve built. You will always think it is due to someone else.
How can you bear to stay in this place? Iggie was asked repeatedly by expatriates. Don’t you get bored doing the same old things?
Iggie told me what qualified as expatriate Tokyo life, the eight brittle hours held between your orders to the maid and cook after breakfast and the first cocktail at half-past five. If you were a man of business in Japan, you had your office and then you socialised. Sometimes there would be geisha parties of such length and tediousness and cost that Iggie cursed leaving Léopoldville. Every night, cleanly shaven, he had drinks with clients. The first bar was at the Imperial, dark mahogany and velvet, whisky sours, a pianist. Drinks at the American Club, the Press Club, International House. Then, perhaps, another bar. D. J. Enright, a visiting English poet, listed his favourites: the Bar Renoir, Bar Rimbaud, La Vie en Rose, Sous les Toits de Tokyo and, best of all, La Peste.
If you had no work, you had those eight hours to fill. What could you do? Go to Kikokuniya in the Ginza to see if they have any new Western novels and magazines or to Maruzen bookshop with its prewar stock of lives of clerics, which have been on their shelves for thirty years? Or to one of the cafés on the top floors of the department stores?
You have visitors. But how many times do you take visitors to see the great Buddha at Kamakura, or to the shrines for the Tokugawa Shoguns at Nikko – red lacquer and gold climbing up a hillside of cryptomeria? Outside the temples in Kyoto, or the shrine at Nikko, or the steps up to the Buddha at Kamakura are the kiosks of souvenir-sellers, the prayer-hawkers, the o-miyagi-pushers. There are the ‘take your photograph’ merchants under a red umbrella, by the lacquer bridge, next to the Golden Pavilion, by the side of a simpering girl dressed in an ersatz costume with white make-up and a comb in her hair.
How often can your bear kabuki? Or, worse, three hours of the Noh drama? How often do you go to an onsen, the hot-water springs, before the prospect of relaxing chest-high in a pool comes to be one of horror?
You can go to the lectures at the British Council by visiting poets, or to an exhibition at the department stores of ceramics, or you can learn flower-arranging – ikebana. To be a women in this expatriate environment is to be made aware of your fragile status. You are encouraged to learn what Enright wrote was one of the ‘humiliatingly “simplified” art-crafty cults’ like the tea-ceremony, newly resurgent in Japan.
Because this is what it was about: Getting to the Real Japan. ‘I must try to see something in the country that was