A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories

A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2005) is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Donald Richie. Richie was an authority on Japanese film and culture and well known for his travel book, The Inland Sea (1971). He passed away just a few years ago on February 19, 2013 at the age of 88 in Tokyo.

These stories, some of which are no longer than a couple pages, are centered around moments of realization or little leaps of understanding. They are about everyday Japanese people. A few reflect aspects of Japanese culture that Richie must've been intrigued by, while others look at clashes of culture, mostly through the prejudices of middle-aged Japanese women. Differences in regard to areas of Tokyo is a lesser theme in the collection; in one story a foreign woman who's just moved to Yanaka may have been inadvertently spied upon, or intentionally so, through an open window. Her neighbor sees this foreign women with her Japanese boyfriend, and—although nothing like the neighbor's reaction would happen in Harajuku, we're told—the neighbor brazenly suggests to the foreign woman that she either leave the boy or leave Yanaka.

A few of the stories or parts of them are interesting, but I got the feeling that Richie put nowhere near as much work into them as he did with his other publications. The edition I picked up, from a shop in Asakusa selling used books (600 yen, near-new condition, and autographed by Richie), has dozens of typos, including missing words and egregious punctuation errors, which interfered with how I processed the writing and envisioned what was described. Apart from that, the stories are all right, especially for anyone interested in Japan and Donald Richie.

Star

Star (1960), recently translated into English for a release in April of this year, is a novella by Yukio Mishima written in the first person and about celebrity and the exclusivity, pressures, and pleasures of stardom. A young man contemplates his experience of acting in a yakuza film, his rising fame, and his life off the set. Mishima wrote it soon after or during the filming of Afraid to Die (1960), in which he starred. The novella was originally published in a Japanese magazine.

The novella takes about an hour to read. What I found interesting is that it's somewhat of a memoir disguised as fiction. Mishima's protagonist here, who goes by the name Richie, philosophizes on super stardom and later comes to a conclusion that life is pretty much meaningless. He is regularly sent love letters from his young admirers, and he too adores his godlike status, telling us that the "worst" thing is to see his promotional poster face down on the street after a gust of wind. Towards the end, Richie mulls over the idea of killing himself, and sees an older celebrity, whose age he'd never hope to reach. Reading these parts it's hard not to think Richie is Mishima, suffering with thoughts of ending his life back then, a decade before he performed seppuku on a balcony at the Ichigaya Camp in 1970.

After watching Afraid to Die and reading Star, I read through a bunch of bits and pieces about Mishima online and discovered that he'd been raised in an area three blocks away from the office building where I work, in the Yotsuya area of Shinjuku. So on my lunch break I walked down there (like down into a valley) to see if I could find the address, realizing of course that the actual place where he'd grown up had very likely been torn down long ago and replaced with something else.

At the address was a lackluster three- or four-story apartment building, maybe with six flats at most. Behind it was a tiny art gallery with a damp concrete, basement-like or garage-like feel. This was just inside a little side street that dead-ended at a house on the slope of a rather steep hill. It really felt like I was at the bottom of the neighborhood, in this otherwise hilly area not quite between Yotsuya-sanchōme Station and Akebonobashi Station but a few blocks closer towards Shinjuku proper.

There's a graveyard down there too and a lonely park with a five-foot weathered totem pole for whatever reason. Anyway, I went into the gallery since the sliding door was open and I figured somebody would be inside and behind the hanging curtain, and they might be able to confirm I was at the right location. There were a couple dozen framed photographs on the wall, nothing striking. Sumimasen, I said, and then said it again, hoping whoever was in charge would appear from behind the curtain.

A timid woman stepped out and then stood leaning away from me as if I were about to leap at her or make off with one of the dull pictures. I asked her in Japanese if she knew if this was the spot where Yukio Mishima had lived as a boy. Despite my best Japanese, she gave me a quizzical look, as though I'd stuffed a sock in my mouth before asking an odd question. Long story short, she had no idea if someone named Yukio Mishima had lived there or lived there now. No idea. Arigato gozaimasu, I said with a quick bow. Shitsureishimashita. And up out of that gloomy deep neighborhood I went, back to my office. It was a lovely day for a walk, though. And the sun felt warmer once I'd left what may or may not have been the place where Mishima dreamed as a child.

Afraid to Die

Afraid to Die (Japanese: (からっ風野郎, or A Man Blown by the Wind) is a raunchy potboiler of a yakuza movie directed by Yasuzo Masumura and with Yukio Mishima in the lead role.

Mishima's character, yakuza member Takeo, gets out of prison for the attempt of murder of a rival mob boss. He doesn't want to leave the slammer because he feels safer inside. When he gets out, he resolves to kill the man he had maimed before that man finds and kills him. At the same time, he contemplates leaving "the life," as does one of his associates. This associate is dating a pharmacist who wants to move to Osaka and take him with her. She somehow got her hands on a drug for cancer that had been in the trial stage of development. The drug killed three people during testing, and the rival yakuza gang has a box of the stuff, which they plan to use to blackmail the company that developed it.

Takeo is forced by yet another mob boss to make peace with the man he's been trying to snuff out, but there's a lackadaisical asthmatic hit-man, known up north as "Asthma Masa," who has been paid to take out Takeo.

Meanwhile, Takeo shows off his misogynist side (the film portrays yakuza as misogynistic so much so that the film seems misogynistic itself at times), and he tries to trick his girl into taking some German medicine to induce an abortion, telling her it's for morning sickness and will make her feel good.

The end is a bit like Carlito's Way (1993). Takeo in a white suit is determined to leave the yakuza life, and perhaps the misogyny that's suggested as being part and parcel of the role, and so he'll try to get out of the city to care for his girl and their as-yet-to-be-born child.

I've seen lots of better yakuza movies but this one has it's moments. Mishima made a solid effort to play a young punk gangster. I wanted to watch the movie before I read Mishima's novella Star, which has been translated into English and was released in April of this year, and is a fictionalized account of his experience working on the film. More on this in the next blog post . . .