Osamu Dazai's Short Novel "The Flowers of Buffoonery" by Tosh Berman

 

Osamu Dazai's Short Novel "The Flowers of Buffoonery" by Tosh Berman

Kazuki Tomokawa's Memoir "Try Saying You're Alive!" by Tosh Berman

 

ISBN: 9781953691033

Kazuki Tomokawa's Memoir "Try Saying You're Alive!" by Tosh Berman

January 14, 2021

 

January 14, 2021

I'm always in my writing studio at midnight, and I don't finish until the sun rises. Once inside, I don't have a clock, nor do I look at the time, because the sun coming up tells me what the time is. As I approach the studio, I, at times, don't have a thought in my head. I'm surrounded by my books, and often what triggers my desire is an old travel guide to New York, which reminds me of specific physical, and therefore spiritual pleasures. By nature, I'm a performer.  I feel writing is a performance in itself. Although great moments are spent between me addressing words on a page yet, I have to act for me to get to this point. "My' act' has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act."

"I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit." As I sit here smoking and viewing my cat sleeping by my side, I realize "the most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult state to live in." It's a strange irony that the tobacco I'm smoking is named "Peace." One can only buy this brand in Japan, and, ironically, the company started in 1946, at the height of the post-war years of Japan. Raymond Lowey designed Peace's logo and then eventually created the Lucky Strike package in 1952.

I slowly smoke as to extend the thoughts in my head. I only drink green tea at this time of the night, and I hardly drink alcohol. It's only when I see the boys that I may have either a beer more likely or, if in the mood, whiskey on ice. When I see a fellow, I think, "perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood." Before leaving the bar to go to my studio, I pay attention to these young men's attendance chatting among themselves. "Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everyone else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done."

 I sometimes take the public bus back to the studio or arrange for a car to pick me up. I feel empty. This is not a bad state to be in, but more of realizing the existence that we or I should say, I, live in. "We live in an age in which there is no heroic death." I put the pen on paper and write, "possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth." Writing is clarity in a zen-zone landscape. I just hear the pen scratching the Japanese paper, and "when silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning."

I get up to stretch my legs and torso for being in a position for so long. In the back of my head, an angel (or Satan) tells me to move around the studio. I have a pattern, and "I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…"

-Tosh Berman (after Yukio Mishima on his birthday).

Tosh Talks Podcast: Terayama Shūji's book "When I Was a Wolf" (Kurodahan Press)

Tosh Talks Podcast: Terayama Shūji's book "When I Was a Wolf"

Kurodahan Press website:  Kurodahan Press

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma on Tosh Talks

Over the years, and especially going back and forth from Japan, I have read many books by fellow Americans and some British citizens on their time spent in Japan. A lot of them are crap. The ones that stand out are the ones that wrote about Japanese cinema and literature. The girls or guys who went there to get a job as an English teacher are usually not that interesting, but alas, those who are devoted to a specific Japanese artist or thinker, then yes I very much enjoy that type of book. There are two writers that I love when they write about Japan - Donald Richie and the other fellow is Ian Buruma.

Buruma wrote a fascinating book called "Behind the Mask," which is an excellent book on some of the darker elements of Japanese literature and the arts. His new book "A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir" accounts for his time spent in Japan to study cinema, but mostly the theater arts of Kara Juro, an avant-garde playwright, with his theater group in Tokyo. Similar to temperament but not precisely in style as Terayama Suiji. Buruma knew both men, and it's his unique point-of-view, due that he was a foreigner, being involved with Kara's theater group. A lot of foreign writers have written about the oddness of one being part of Japanese society, or living in Japan, and finding it alienating. But then again I think that's the nature of the Western fellow or girl. We're raised to be apart than together, and therefore lies the situation of such countries in Asia and elsewhere.

What makes this book unique for me is that I share Buruma's interest in the Japanese arts, and spending time there as well, I can identify in what he writes about, in regards of living there and appreciating the same sort of artists/writers. Also, the book is full of fascinating figures, some know and some entirely new to me. Donald Richie is a writer I know quite well through his writings in various articles (mostly in the Japan Times) as well as reading his books on Japanese cinema. His Journals are without a doubt, the classic work by him. He is a guy who knew everyone from Ozu to Mishima, and also a gay man living in Tokyo. His insights into the Japanese culture, but also his somewhat detached views are excellent observations of life around him. In that sense, he reminds me of Paul Bowles' travel writing. Buruma shares the same interest as Richie, and is also, a fantastic prose writer. His commentary on Richie, who sort of led him through Tokyo when he first arrived, is a fascinating tour of the metropolis. The second personality of interest is the Actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She started her career during the war years making a propaganda film in China, where she was identified as a Chinese actress. But alas, no, she's Japanese and eventually went on to star in the American Film "House Of Bamboo" directed by Sam Fuller. The book doesn't mention it, but she was also married to the artist Isamu Noguchi. Yamaguchi eventually became a member of the Japanese parliament for 18 years and had a TV show where she focused on and interviewed such characters as Mao, Idi Amin, and Kim Il-sung.

"A Tokyo Romance" is a book full of fascinating people, and Buruma himself is interesting because he is also an individual who is half-Dutch and half-English, so he's very much a bi-cultural, or maybe at this point, since he lives in New York City now, a tri-cultural figure. With his background, he has an understanding of what it's like to be in a culture that is very singular in focus and design. A classic book on Japan, but also a rare text in English on the world of Terayama and Kara Juro.


-Tosh Berman

"The Life of a Stupid Man" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

On of the three little Penguin books I bought in Tokyo for the plane trip back home.  Here are 3 small selections of the works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the king of the Japanese decadent writers, as well as the famous prize given out every year to a contemporary Japanese writer.   Oddly enough, I never read his works, but I knew of him as the iconic writer of his time.  Strongly influenced by the French writers and poets of the 19tth century (he was born in 1892 and died in 1927), there are traces of that type of impressionistic dynamics in his work.  The longer piece "The Life of a Stupid Man" is a poetic commentary of a young man going under.   Romantic and death obsessed.  What writer could resist such a figure. And readers, an enticing adventure(er) to another world.  Of course, I'm going to seek out and purchase a bigger collection of his stories.   And I do have some of his books in my library.  But untouched by my eyes at this moment....

Tosh Berman