Japan Journals

May 16-- Donald Richie's Japan Journals grow increasingly lucid and come to hover over death. Richie looks at the frequent deaths of his closest friends and the great figures in his social circles without flinching while at the same time suggesting shock or maybe awe.

I cannot help but feel a heaviness in my self as he moves moves through the early-to-mid 'nineties meeting the news of passing after passing of those very people whose friendship he has documented for some fifty years.

And, Richie is known by some as the guy who knew everybody (Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima, Sontag, Yourcenar, Coppola, even Richard Brautigan).

He is not afraid of criticizing either (few ex-pats in Japan are I suppose). I found the following passage very provoking though I am hesitant to enter into agreement:

[from 7 June 1997]: At International House Mr.Tanami told me that at the Japan Society recently they were speaking of intellectual exchange - country to country. Then they realized that there were no Japanese they could exchange, because there are no intellectuals.
We tried to decide why and agreed that there are none, because to be an intellectual you must espouse your own independence and your own probity, unswayed by political affiliations. This is an impossibility everywhere, true. There ought not to be Catholic or Communist intellectuals, yet it is said that they exist. If so, however, then they might be, like Sartre, intellectuals first, Communists second.
In Japan, however, everyone is, whether they like it or not, Japanese first. Intellectuals, like everyone else here, are spokesmen for the political (Japanese) identification. Even if they are anti-establishment, or what passes for dissident here, they are still oriented by their nationality and its demands.
Until there are real individuals, there can be no real intellectuals. (p.411)


This strikes me as implying as much about Europeans and their breakaway cultures as it asserts about the Japanese.

Donald Richie

May 15-- Current reading: The Literature Machine, Italo Calvino; Tsurezuregusa (Essays In Idleness) , Kenkou; The Japan Journals, Donald Richie; The Perfect Mile, a book about Landry, Santee and Bannister. Am spending most of my time with the Donald Richie, whom it is interesting to watch change as a writer and as a man over an almost 60 year span. At the point my reading is at now (1993) he is, it seems almost weekly, seeing his dearest friends pass on while he remains relatively vital. The Japanese funeral: proper place for an outpouring of emotion. I would do well there.

Calvino may number amongst the few "great" novelists whom I would not regard as mentally ill.