A Tokyo Romance

A Tokyo Romance (2018) is Ian Buruma’s memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 at the age of 23, studied cinema at Nichidai in Ekoda, and met figures such as Donald Richie, Akira Kurosawa and Yoshiko Yamaguchi, along with a hodgepodge of artists and avant-garde performers, as he refined his spoken Japanese.

Buruma covers an array of topics here, including the “role” of the gaijin in Japan and the question of whether an outsider can truly immerse themselves in Japanese culture or is destined to remain on the periphery.

That distance, he suggests, can also offer a kind of radical freedom.

The opening chapters are imbued with nostalgia as Buruma recalls a more raucous theater scene and a much edgier Tokyo. I came to Japan about twenty years after he did and also lived and worked around Ikebukuro, and while our experiences were quite different, 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 even dabbles in their performances. He writes about bizarre carnival acts, roman porno films, fashion photographers, tattoo artists, and his short documentary on the work of a department store elevator girl.

I read a review that described the book as a journey into Tokyo’s underworld, but outside of the arts it isn’t quite that. While Buruma brushes up against that world, he never fully enters it. He avoids moving to the “plebeian shitamachi,” leaves the cabarets to others, and keeps his distance from those with closer ties to yakuza groups or the Japanese Red Army. Even so, his involvement with experimental theater troupes and itinerant performers—worlds already insular in their own way—feels like a notable feat for a foreigner.

Buruma paints a vivid picture of a Tokyo that has changed dramatically over the past four or five decades, particularly its avant-garde theater scene, and seems to lament the city’s shift in nightlife and fashion centers from east to west.

He references a number of important Japanese and French films, though whenever Richie appears I got the sense Buruma was reluctant to dwell too much on cinema here, perhaps out of deference to Richie and his domain.

One thing that surprised me is that Buruma lived in Japan for only six years. I read The Missionary and the Libertine in 1996, the year it was published and about the same time I moved to Tokyo, and it shaped many of my early impressions of the country and of East-West relations. I had always assumed he’d spent decades here, given the depth of his knowledge. At the end of A Tokyo Romance he explains why he left after those years and how the experience stayed with him long after—continuing to shape his thinking and writing, and his sense of cultural distance.