The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [128]
Getting to the real Japan depends on your schedule. If you have a fortnight, this would mean Kyoto and a day-trip to see some cormorant fishermen, maybe a day-trip to a pottery village, a tea-ceremony with its attendant longueurs. A month would mean a visit to Kyushu in the south of the country. A year and you could write a book. Dozens did. Japan – my, what an odd country! A country in transition. Vanishing traditions. Enduring traditions. Essential verities. Seasons in. Myopia of the Japanese. Love of detail of. Dexterity. Self-sufficiency of. Childishness of. Inscrutability of.
Elizabeth Gray Vining, the American tutor to the Crown Prince for four years and author of Windows for the Crown Prince, wrote in a sequel of the ‘many books about Japan written by Americans who have lost their hearts to their former foes’. There were travelogues by the English too: William Empson, Sacheverell Sitwell, Bernard Leach, William Plomer. It’s Better with Your Shoes Off – cartoons telling what it’s really like to live in Japan – The Japanese Are Like That, An Introduction to Japan, This Scorching Earth, A Potter in Japan, Four Gentlemen of Japan. A gush of books interchangeably called Behind the Fan, Behind the Screen, Behind the Mask, Bridge of the Brocade Sash. There is Honor Tracy’s Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan, with its dislike of ‘young men with their stickily pomaded hair and girls with garish make-up circling the floor, an expression of near imbecility on their faces . . .’ Enright wryly remarked that he harboured an ambition to belong to that small and select band of people who have lived in Japan without writing a book about it, in his introduction to his own book on the subject, The World of Dew.
Writing about Japan means that you have to show a visceral dislike of (Western) lipstick smeared across a beautiful (oriental) cheek, the ways in which modernisation disfigures the country. Or you try to make it funny, like the special issue of Life on Japan for 11th September 1964, with a geisha in full get-up launching a bowling ball on the cover. The new Americanised country tastes like the flatness of pan, the doughy white bread that had been made in Japan since the end of the nineteenth century, and a sort of processed cheese of incomparable soapiness, yellower than a marigold. This you compare to the spikiness of Japanese pickles, radishes, the bite of wasabi in a piece of sushi. In doing so you are mirroring the views of travellers eighty years before. You all share in Lafcadio Hearn’s lyrical falling lament.
And this is where Iggie was different. He might open a black lacquer bento box, with its rice and pickled plums and fish neatly arranged on vermilion for lunch. But it would be châteaubriand with Jiro and his Japanese friends in the evening at a restaurant near the Ginza Crossing where the new neon signs flashed Toshiba, Sony, Honda. And on to a film by Teshigahara and then back home for a whisky, with the netsuke cabinet open and Stan Getz on the gramophone. Iggie and Jiro’s life was lived in another kind of Real Japan.
After twenty years of false starts and comparative hardship in Paris, New York, Hollywood and the army, Iggie had now lived in Tokyo longer than he had in Vienna: he was starting to belong. He had competence in the world, he was making something of himself, earning enough to support himself and his friends. He helped his siblings and his nephews and nieces.
By the mid-1960s Rudolf was married with five young children. Gisela was flourishing in Mexico. And Elisabeth in Tunbridge Wells, walking