A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) is Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories which received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993. There are seventeen in total, each narrated by a different Vietnamese immigrant living in Louisiana after the Vietnam War. All are about fourteen pages long except for the roughly eighty-page "The American Couple" which I thought was the best of the bunch. It digs deeper into the characters and depicts a woman's perspective of veterans, one of whom is her Vietnamese husband and the other an American. These men meet while they and their wives are on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and their intense relationship, firmly tied to their past wartime roles, triggers an extraordinary and extreme role-play in which they playact a sort of bitter capture the flag game. And this happens where the 1964 film The Night of the Iguana was shot—a place we're told looks similar to beach and mountain areas in Vietnam.

As for the other stories, some I liked and others I've forgotten. Cultural differences, a major theme in most if not all of them, for me made the book a good read. What felt awkward, though, was they're not actual accounts from Vietnamese people but instead the creations of a white American fiction writer. With so much diversity among the authors being published today, I doubt Butler would win a Pulitzer for the collection if it were to come out this year. But he did serve in Vietnam and was a translator there, and his writing and the detail convinced me that he genuinely understands and has a great appreciation for the Vietnamese people. And I respect him for the backbone and empathy he'd need to express what he believed were in a way true perspectives of men and women of a culture so unlike his own.

A Tokyo Romance

A Tokyo Romance (2018) is Ian Buruma's memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 when he was 23 and studied cinema at Nichidai in Ekoda, then met author and film historian Donald Ritchie, director Akira Kurosawa, Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi, and a hodgepodge of other artists and avant-garde theater performers as he refined his spoken Japanese. Buruma covers an array of topics, including the "role" of the gaijin in Japan and also immersion of the outsider into Japanese culture (or inevitable failure to achieve this and resultant disillusionment) versus remaining on the periphery as a sort of voyeur, which he describes as a radical type of freedom.

The first chapters are imbued with nostalgia as Buruma recalls a more raucous theater scene and much edgier city. I came to Japan about twenty years after Buruma and also lived and worked around the Ikebukuro area, and while Buruma's experience was much different from mine, parts of his memoir brought me back to the wilder Tokyo of the 90s.

Buruma shares anecdotes about outrageous times with eccentrics and outsiders, and dabbles once or twice in their performances. He writes about bizarre carnival acts, romance porn films (roma porn), fashion photographers, tattoo artists, and his short documentary on the training and work of a department store elevator girl. I read a review that referred to the book as a journey into Tokyo's underworld, but outside of the arts it's not. While Buruma encountered underworld figures, he didn't enter their realm; he rather brushed by it occasionally—his preference it seems. He didn't move to the "plebeian shitamachi" (lower city) despite part of him wanting to, he left the cabarets to acquaintances, and he met a few who were perhaps connected to yakuza crime families or the Japanese Red Army but didn't hang out with the underworld figures himself. Nevertheless, his relationships with those in experimental theater troupes and traveling players, belonging to a weird world of their own, would have been quite a feat for a foreigner.

Buruma paints a vivid picture of a Tokyo that has changed over the past forty to fifty years, particularly its avant-garde theater scene, and seems to lament the city's east-to-west shift of its nightlife and fashion hubs. He mentions a number of important Japanese and French films, but each time Donald Ritchie's name popped up, I got the impression Buruma was reluctant to delve into Japanese cinema in this book, perhaps because that was Ritchie's area of expertise.

Something that surprised me was Buruma lived in Japan for only six years. I read his The Missionary and the Libertine in 1996, the year it was released and the same year I moved to Japan. This collection of essays shaped many of my initial views of the Japanese and relationships between East and West. At the time and since then, I've thought Buruma lived in Japan for decades because of his wide understanding of its history and culture. At the end of A Tokyo Romance he explains why he had to leave after those six years and how the experience shaped him and made him who he is today.

Rashomon

Rashomon. Among the most influential of all films, this 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic is better after the first experience. I first watched it in the 90s and although scenes stuck with me, something was missing. It's contradictory accounts of the rape and murder, told by four characters, felt unresolved on the whole. Movies and TV shows I'd watched growing up used what's called the "Rashomon effect," but the true version of events was always revealed in the end, as in a detective interviews four witnesses to a crime, each with a different story, and then, after a strike of Holmesian intuition or Columbo detective work, peels away the falsities to give us the truth. This formula was still rooted in me as I tried to suss out the liars and red herrings and awaited the reveal I'd been conditioned to expect. But in Rashomon what actually comes is anagnorisis of a different sort; the search for truth and morality is in part the film's object, not the truth itself.

The second time I watched Rashomon was around eight years ago in the countryside near Joetsu, Niigata—stretched out on tatami mats as cricket chirps came through the door screens with the summer breeze. And this time Rashomon felt right since my expectations had been quelled. What struck me was the contrast between light and dark, the shadows of leaves on faces, the camera shot straight up at the sun followed by the dagger slipping from the wife's hand, the woodcutter running through dense woods, and the bandit's (Toshiro Mifune) gazing at the clouds before his version is told. These images and scenes are unforgettable but were refreshed.

The third time, yesterday, I laughed watching it, which I can't recall doing before. The woodcutter's story shows Tajomaru helplessly in love with the wife, and the farcical inelegance of the bandit and samurai is laughable, as is the wife's untimely shriek afterward. Also this time I was mesmerized by the medium, who delivers the dead samurai's account. When she collapses, it's uncanny how her tied hair seems to bend and keel over.

It's remarkable that Kurosawa had a hard time getting money to make Rashomon and that he had to make do with a fairly lean budget yet created something so visually memorable and incredibly influential. Everyone from Francis Ford Coppola, Fellini, Bertolucci, Spielberg, and Scorsese to George Lucas, Kubrick, Miyazaki, Bergman, and Polanski have talked about how greatly Kurosawa influenced them. Spielberg said, "I have learned more from him than from almost any other filmmaker on the face of the earth." And Scorsese: "Let me say it simply: Akira Kurosawa was my master."