The Inland Sea

242 Pages·2002·0.9 MB·English

by  Donald Richie

The Inland Sea
Donald Richie
Introduction by Pico Iyer
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by Stone Bridge Press
P.O. Box 8208 • Berkeley, California 94707 tel [phone] • fax [phone]
[email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
Text copyright © 1971, 2002 Donald Richie.
Introduction © 2002 Pico Iyer.
All rights reserved.
Front cover design by D. S. Noble.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Richie, Donald.
The Inland Sea / Donald Richie; with an introduction by Pico Iyer.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-880656-69-8.
1. Inland Sea Region (Japan)—Description and travel. I. Iyer, Pico. II. Title.
DS894.79.I542 R53 2002
915.2'18044—dc21
2002026820
“A Call from the Mist”
Introduction by Pico Iyer
THE FOREIGNER IN JAPAN, more than anywhere, stands at the edge of an
intimacy that is closing slowly in his face. He walks along a beach, perhaps, as
darkness falls, with a young, a beautiful girl, and they talk of loneliness, and all
the places he has seen, the nights. The girl offers to introduce him to a local inn,
where he will be taken care of, and they walk together up to a private room and
sit by the window, looking out at the sea. Then he touches her arm, and the spell
is broken. Giggling, she makes her diplomatic retreat. The next morning, when
he rises to leave the small town by boat, sailing away into the mist, he sees her
there, on the pier, with two friends, waiting for him with presents and goodbyes.
It is a haunting moment, and one that stands for a lifetime of such moments
for those of us who find ourselves on this island of half-opened doors. It is made
more touching by the fact that the girl knows she will never see the places that
she dreams of; all her days will be spent in this forgotten town. And it is made
more plangent by the fact that the foreigner confesses to himself (and to us) that
the encounter is perplexing to him because he is “innocent despite experience”—
and innocent not only because he sees no point in guilt. The plumbing of
innocence and loneliness, the incarnation of a deeply Japanese freedom from
cynicism and openness to wonder, the attentiveness to all the fine print,
emotional and otherwise, in every fleeting moment are part of what make
Donald Richie the most lasting and graceful foreign writer on Japan since
Lafcadio Hearn (and before). He apprehends Japan (in all senses) on its own
terms, yet puts it in a larger picture. He catches the sound of the sea through the
mist, the fisherman’s no-nonsense explanation of how it will bring him a living,
and then the sense of loss that is what the sound, and the explanation, mean.
Japan keeps its visitors permanently enchanted—and vexed—Richie has told us,
through its teasing mix of intimacy and distance; it is that same mix, brought to
us through a companionable yet solitary traveler, utterly unguarded but always
discreet, that gives his own prose its particular strength and beauty. The writing
is open, unpretentious, immediate; yet entirely poised, unhurried, at peace with
mystery.
For such a large presence, which attracts so many votaries and critics from
abroad, Japan has been strangely ill-served by its foreign writers. There is never
any shortage of books purporting to lay its secrets bare through a microscopic
scrutiny of its business practices, its political structures, or its neon lanes; yet all
of them, in the end, say the same thing (about how well Japan manages to keep
its public face intact). And faced with the girl on the beach, many foreigners are
apt to dilate on sexual mores in Japan; others to start anthropologizing about the
persistence of rural custom; still others to talk about the rigid status quo that
keeps the girl on the island. Donald Richie is the only one I know who will
follow the experience through to where explanations fall away, confide his own
clumsiness to us, and not even begin to attempt larger formulations or grand
summations. It is, he knows, just an encounter, all but inexplicable, between one
stranger and another.
This freedom from an ax to grind and an agenda to pursue is what has helped
him to write beautifully and variously on every facet of a culture he has absorbed
and loved, from an unsafe distance, for more than fifty years now. It is what has
allowed him to write, with a man of culture’s impenitence, about its Zen customs
and its sex clubs, its emperor and its film industry. Sidestepping special interests
and provincialisms, he simply roams around and tells us what the place looks
and sounds and feels like: the archetypal Richie scene, as represented here, finds
him walking up a hill to a shrine, telling us some of the folklore and history that
surround the place, noting how the people move and talk (or don’t talk) in this
ostensibly holy place and then coming out again with some gentle rumination on
Japan’s relation to silence and worship and time. In The Inland Sea, it’s striking
that he travels with no design grander than to wander; and to record an older,
less affected way of life before it dies. The place comes alive to us because he
simply talks to people—kids, old women, gangsters and bargirls—and lets them
tell their stories. Often, their stories have no ending, or leave him with a question
he knows he cannot answer.
An ease with incompleteness, then, is part of what lights up his wandering
meditations, and a refusal of all pomp and cant. At one point here he begins to
talk about what the Japanese love of Turkish baths says about their relations
between male and female; then he stops because, he realizes, the Japanese would
make nothing of it at all. At another moment, he briefly congratulates himself on
being able to identify a pavane from Fauré—only for the woman at his side to
hum along with the melody and tell him where he’s wrong. He has left Tokyo,
one senses, because the big city is less and less itself (and, what is much the
same thing, is taking itself more and more seriously, as a modern Western
capital); and he seeks out the forgotten places of the Inland Sea partly because
they still have an unselfconscious candor. And yet where other foreigners in
Japan regularly write books on “looking for the lost,” or mourning the beauties
that are dying, only Richie manages, first, to find the lost, and then to
acknowledge that loss, as much as anything, lies partly in the eye of the
beholder. He can afford to be a self-styled “romantic” only because—like the
country around him—he is so pragmatic.
The reader fortunate enough to join him on his quiet, wistful journey will
quickly see that unselfconsciousness and candor are what distinguish the
narrator, too. And she will likely find herself carried away by the watercolor
beauty of the prose, touched by what Tanizaki, praising shadows, called a
“pensive luster” (it’s no surprise to learn that Richie is an accomplished painter,
as well as musician, actor, and filmmaker). “All in sea or sky is tint rather than
color,” as Lafcadio Hearn wrote, describing the “sober and delicate beauty” of
Japan, an “all-temperate world where nothing is garish.” Indeed, I would venture
to say that there is not a graceless sentence in the book. Richie has no time for
artifice, but, we quickly see, he is a serious admirer of craft. His book, then,
flows with an easy, natural charm, and yet, at its end, as if by chance we get a
long-awaited letter, a searching reflection on the author and his relation to the
place where he’s chosen to live, and a silvered epiphany on the sea.
The other thing that hits one, reading Richie, is that he is a great writer on
Japan partly because he is interested in everything outside Japan; the least
dogmatic of foreign observers, he is also the least narrow in his focus. Often, he
is able to explain the place because he can set it next to Munich, or Calcutta, or
Lima, Ohio; and its very particular way of being and aesthetic he makes familiar
to us, and close, by referring to Flemish war paintings, say, or Seneca. It is this
background of learning and refinement, I think—this interest in painting and
music and books—that helps Richie be merely amused by what rouses anger in
many others, and to see what others call “hypocrisy” as a deeply sincere
upholding of a public role.
And yet for all the worldliness, he is still able, after twenty years in Japan, to
be moved—largely because he draws no artificial borders. Horace Walpole and
Beckford are invoked in the same passage that begins with a discussion of
Barbarella; Mickey and Minnie, that talismanic pair so easy to mock, he sees as
invested with what future generations will regard as “that implacable air of
mystery which we now find in pre-Columbian sculpture or the artifacts of
Etruria.” In his reveries of a solitary walker (he would not mind, I think, the title
from Rousseau), he can make Confucius apprehensible through Calvin, and so
begin to tell us how Japan has “found means to call a truce, if not halt, to the
great war between aspirations and actuality” and how, not unrelatedly, in Japan
“you can change your mood as you can change your mind.”
It is, in fact, an injustice to call Richie a writer on Japan; really, he is a writer
on artifice and time and death, on being human. And most of all he’s a writer on
the particularly modern art of learning how to be a foreigner. As universal travel
has propelled more and more of us to lives very far from the places where we
were born (and brought the Other to every neighborhood), the writers of the past
few decades have often been chroniclers of Abroad. Paul Bowles takes us into
the skins of those half-innocents abroad who so seek out a foreign mystery that
at last they are consumed by it; Graham Greene gives an almost theological
quality to the lonely orphan far from home, reaching out for a friend who turns
out to be corrupt, or doomed, or both; and Jan Morris has taken into the modern
world the image of a universally sensitive writer, traveling alone, taking in
everything with a sympathy made deeper by the fact it’s undeluded. Donald
Richie belongs in their company as much as any, and in the company of
Maugham, say, touring around the human landscape with a tolerant acuity. And
he has more to say than anyone I know on the expatriate condition, the freedom
of the man abroad, and the poignancy that underwrites it. He needs to be read by
people with no interest in Japan, and by those who never plan to visit that far-off
island.
•••••
THE ONLY PROBLEM with Richie’s writing, in fact, is that it’s never been
easy enough to find around the world, in part because people, knowing him to be
a writer in Japan, assume that he’s a writer on Japan. And as a pure, reflective
writer of a kind that seems all but antique, he has done nothing to sell himself to
the world or to dress himself up with gestures or high concepts (indeed, part of
the beauty of his prose is that it has the unforced, unmistakable sound of
someone thinking, honestly and rigorously, to himself). Stone Bridge Press
began to rectify this absence with its publication of The Donald Richie Reader
last year; but the best place to get him all in one place, and in one uninterrupted
narrative, is The Inland Sea.
I will not spoil the pleasure of meeting these pages for the first time by writing
at length about my own favorite moments (the sound of the lepers’ bells from the
beautiful island where even the healthy are imprisoned); and I will not belabor
the point (as is made in the Afterword) that the places he saw fading in 1971 are
now thirty years closer to extinction. I will not even bother to note that the
Japanese you meet here, being individual and true, are not at all like the people
you have heard about: they get up late and dislike perfection and are not, he tells
us, uniquely clean. Many of the people he encounters are virgins, in every sense,
and he goes out of his way, almost, to see those places where the Japanese take
siestas. Of all the writers who bemoan the passing in Japan, Richie is the only
one I know who’s Japanese enough to see that in their passing lies a good part of
the beauty of most things.
All I will say, rereading this book now, after fifteen years in Japan (and
finding, as all of us do, that everyone who writes on the place writes in Richie’s
shadow and his debt), is that there’s something in the mizu-shobai, or water-
trade (as the Japanese call their night world), that seems to touch the core of him.
The cheerful celebration of illusion, the acceptance of human folly with a
surprising, engaging innocence, the very delight in evanescence and the sadness
and beauty it accompanies—all seem the essence of both author and subject. “I
heard the cicadas,” as he writes, “the moment they ceased.” In the floating world
Richie finds his perfect image of a pleasure that remains just around the corner,
and of a beautiful, made-up world that gives you everything you want, and by
virtue of that giving, leaves you just a little bit unsatisfied.
Richie writes, hauntingly, immortally, about the Japanese feeling for sadness,
their gift for being pleased, their thoughtfulness, and (as he puts it, elsewhere, of
Kurosawa) their “knowing tranquillity,” and at some point one begins to realize
that he’s writing of himself. This most gracious of guests has found his kindred
spirit in this most gracious of hosts. The Inland Sea (and the title seems no
coincidence) refers, as much as anything, to that watery, wistful, half-vanished
place inside himself. If you need to understand this better, I suggest you turn
now to the epigraph, and read it, and read it again.
Nara, Japan
March 2002