Forthcoming in Japanese Studies, May 2007

REVIEW

Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion

Angles, Jeffrey and J. Thomas Rimer (eds),

Berkeley, California: Whereabouts Press

xxii, 232 pp.

ISBN 978-1-883513-16-0 AUS$25 pb.

This is an excellent collection of autobiographical essays and short stories. The stories are chosen to be evocative of some of the ways that people in various locations around Japan have lived, paying attention to its diversity, and this admirably achieved. Three of the stories, by Tada Chimako, Takahashi Mutsuo and Maruya Saiichi respectively, are newly translated (the former two by one of the editors, Jeffrey Angles).

“This collection guides the reader through the complexity that is modern Japan.” So begins the blurb. In this and other ways, the stories that make up the collection are framed as pathways to knowledge, and it is mainly this aspect that I will comment on. In his foreword, Donald Richie reassures the reader that the diversity of lives reflected in the various stories “affirms, among other things, the nature of Japan.” (p.xi) This sentence is repeated in the blurb on the back cover. The explicit motivating force behind the book is to give the reader a sense of Japan as a physical location - at least, the parts of Japan that are “beautiful and compelling”, since a subsidiary goal is to sell Japan as a destination, in imagination if not in the literal sense.

Though it borders on hyperbole, it is actually refreshing to read Richie insist in the foreword not merely that Japan is not homogenous, but indeed that in comparison with Japan America seems homogenous. On the other hand this is partly undone by his nostalgic romanticism, according to which the diversity that so differentiates Japan from most other countries is being extinguished by “TV, e-mail, and the Internet(sic)”(p.ix). It is further undone by the absence from the collection of writers born in the last sixty years, as if proving that, indeed, writers of the baby boom generation and later lack the environment to tell stories of the same diversity.

The sort of conservatism that Richie expresses, and which feeds his dissatisfaction with the effects of modern technology, must be seen as the inevitable result of the view that it makes sense to talk about the “nature” of Japan, or of any culture, as Richie has a tendency to do. A “nature” implies a deep structure that is relatively static in the face of fads and fashions, and that allows one to make a kind of overall sense, in some way to understand, the everyday behaviours and attitudes of “the people”. Fortunately the very diversity of the stories included in the collection undermines the sense of any such thing.

Finally, the editors have not thought it necessary to distinguish between factual essays and works of fiction. This is not explained, but my sense is that this is partly a marketing decision. The labels “short story” and “essay” have something of a high brow connotation, and this book is clearly intended for a wide audience, some of whom may be put off by them. At any rate, each piece tends to be introduced as simply as a “story”. In some cases this may be harmless and in many cases it is obvious, but by and large it is frustrating not to have some indication. Travellers can also be expected to have more than usual interest in whether the events described did or did not happen, especially given the book’s self-proclaimed role as a “guide”.

Only one female writer, Tada Chimako, is included in the collection. Tada’s story focuses on the life and death of her family dog, Miki. Her writing draws you close and gives you the sense of being welcome into her home. Part of magic of autobiographical writing is not that it is informative, but rather that it is inviting. That is what any traveller craves and is what, in the end, makes this collection well worth having.

John O’Dea

University of Tokyo