Exotics and Retrospectives

Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn's earlier works on Japan. It starts off with the author's account of his arduous climb up Japan's Mount Fuji (3,776 meters). Because it's more personal in nature, I preferred it to the dozen or so other essays in the collection, which, in Hearn's oftentimes meandering yet lucid style, cover a heap of subject matter, from Japan's singing insects, frogs, and thoughts on death and Buddhism, to his notions and flights of fancy on such topics as memory, evolution, the nauseating orange-red of sunsets, beauty in sadness, and even azure, the color.

More so than this collection, I've enjoyed Hearn's later works on things Japanese, particularly his telling of ghost stories and a mishmash of other fantastic tales. His passion for writing about insects, which he does in this and later books, is also unique. I find interesting not just the ways he describes or documents these tiny beings but also how he personifies them, sometimes matching their characteristics with elements of Japanese culture as well.

Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the U.S. and became a successful writer for newspapers, living in and writing about Cincinnati and New Orleans. Defying a law against interracial marriage, he married an African American woman in his early 20s (1874), later divorced her, then headed to Japan, where he had a family and is well known to this day as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published an excellent article about Hearn in July of last year, which gives a much broader picture of his life, interests, and achievements.

Also, something I didn't know until recently, Hearn's grave was only a few blocks north of the building where I lived in Bunkyō-ku in the 1990s, and where I first read his work. I took a lot of walks in that area but somehow overlooked Zōshigaya Cemetery, the location of his grave in Minami-Ikebukuro.

Exotics and Retrospectives can be downloaded here free and legally thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Days of Youth

Days of Youth (学生ロマンス 若き日) is a 1929 silent comedy by Yasujirō Ozu. The seven or eight films he directed before this are considered lost, making Student Romance: Days of Youth, as it's also called, his earliest surviving picture.

This playful story follows two university students (Ichirō Yūki and Tatsuo Saitō) who, during winter exams, take a skiing trip to Akakura and compete for the affection of the same girl (Junko Matsui). Although what we can see is now blotchy, faded, and uneven, the film fortunately still exists. Countless others from that era have decayed beyond restoration, burned up, or were destroyed many decades ago to make space for new ones.

The snippets of 1920s Tokyo were the highlights for me, along with the slapstick scenes on the slopes, featuring some rather nasty spoilsport gags. The film also includes a number of delightful shots of smokestacks, automobiles, telephone poles, and other technologies of the time. Throughout the narrative, there's a subtle undercurrent of transience, as suggested by the title. This reflects the distinctive form of mono no aware for which Ozu would come to be known by some critics and audiences.

Ambivalent Zen

An excellent, entertaining and, dare I say, enlightening memoir by Lawrence Shainberg that I've been meaning to read since it came out in 1995. Took me so long to get around to it because Zen and its philosophy—its contradictions, like "perfect imperfection," maybe, but not maybe, maybe—stuff like that, twist up my mind and confound way worse than this sentence likely does for you. Had I read the book when it came out, I would've long ago realized I'm not alone. Though while I've barely scratched the surface of Zen, Shainberg went in deep and in Ambivalent Zen recounts his spiritual pursuits over decades, his endless effort to sit zazen correctly, with the perfect posture, and his experience with the rōshi Kyudo Nakagawa, who led the Soho Zen Buddhist Society in Manhattan. He covers a lot of other ground as well, family relationships, the business of Zen, history of Buddhism... We see him balancing his frustrations and ambitions, and these colliding too, which Shainberg describes for us with a masterful mix of wit and wisdom. A great book to read again.