How Japan Stacks Up : American Writers Find Volumes of Heartbreak and Joy

“ ‘ It’s not easy to arrive in a new country and feel comfortable . . . ‘ Alec said. ‘Not that easy for me, anyway. Not here, where things are so different. I mean, I knew it would be different. But it’s . . . ‘ He paused. Nothing came to him. ‘I don’t know. It’s just really different.’ ”

--”Bicycle Days,” by John Burnham Schwartz

According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, 516,259 Americans visited Japan last year. By most indications, a good many of them wrote books about the experience.

Now, as this literary tsunami sloshes up on America’s shores, reviewers are beginning to compare Tokyo to Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s: It is becoming the hip place to go and consider the meaning of life.

There are differences, though, between Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation and the one slurping sake and noodles in Tokyo.

Paris, for example, was mere background for the Hemingway crowd’s moveable feast of the mind. The new expatriates make Japan a main course. Confronted with such an odd cultural

and literal cuisine, many of them leave the country with something akin to intellectual indigestion.

Times, too, have changed. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, went abroad as an ambulance driver, wanna-be bullfighter and budding knockabout. John Burnham Schwartz, whose novel “Bicycle Days” is the latest expatriate effort to hit America, went to Tokyo as a budding investment banker .

“I hold this romantic notion that people went to Paris wanting to write and wanting to be Writers. I think that the times are different and we are different,” Schwartz said of the new expatriates. “We don’t see ourselves as a movement. We see ourselves as individuals going to Japan to take a good job. And then we write about it.”

Spiritual Pilgrimages

Western fascination with Japan is hardly a new phenomenon. As recently as 30 years ago, Beat poets such as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg made pilgrimages to the land of the rising sun to seek spiritual satori.

But the new seekers are more interested in the wisdom of Sony and Suzuki than the sound of one hand clapping. For these poets, novelists and nonfiction writers, Japan--the land of economic miracles, the land of the future--is a Zen koan: a deep, contradictory riddle to be pondered and meditated upon until it offers up some transcendental truth.

Poet Mary Jo Salter found in Japan “a strangeness that almost defied writing about.”

Explains Michael Shapiro whose “Japan, In the Land of the Broken-Hearted” was released earlier this year, “It doesn’t add up. It looks like home but it’s not like home, looks like the West but isn’t at all like the West. It’s an entity unto itself. Were it not so important, so strong, it would be a quaint place that’s overlooked. But the fact is, it can’t be overlooked.”

Attractive Contradictions

These contradictions are part of the attraction, he said. “It’s so hard. Every time you think you’ve got your hands around it . . . something happens that either mesmerizes you--Mt. Fuji emerges from the clouds, for instance--or repels you.

“So it remains mysterious. These are the qualities that writers look for in characters,” Shapiro said, “And my God, this is a country. “

But the inability to get a solid grip on what one is grappling with can be maddening. Reduced to excessive simplicity, Westerners who land in Japan tend to split into two factions, the Japan bashers and the Japan lovers, whom Shapiro terms enthusiasts, or “Chrysthanthemums.”

Some people can maintain the feelings they bring to Japan against all contradictions. Others, initially infatuated, become disillusioned when the aura of freshness wears off--for them and their hosts.

Shapiro, who puts himself somewhere in between, tracks the “enthusiast” strain back 100 years to Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote 11 books about Japan and the Japanese, falling in and out of love with the country over the course of his stay.

“When he was in love, he wrote lavish, rapturous prose,” Shapiro explains in “Brokenhearted.” “But when he was disappointed, he railed, and his damning attacks were of the sort punctuated by veins protruding in the forehead and occasional sprays of spittle.”

Slight Restraint

The real or fictional gaijin (foreigners) in the new expatriate books are only slightly more restrained as they immerse themselves in the culture, as if into the progression of increasingly hot tubs at Japan’s public baths.

Inspired by sake and beer and surging hormones, the expatriates find initial impressions clattering through their Western minds like a hailstorm of pachinko balls:

The Japanese eat weird stuff for breakfast!

The fruit is more expensive!

Girls hide their mouths when they giggle!

They confuse their English r’s and l’s!

Children point at gaijin and shout ‘Herro! Herrro!’

They work 14 hours a day!

Then drink themselves silly then get up and sing!

Their subway system works!

Gradually, though, the authors begin to look beyond Tokyo’s neon sheen, checking things out not just as gaijin --but as individuals, peering through lenses tinted with their own romanticism or cynicism. But the act of observing is complicated by cultural differences.

“Down to the conception of the individual, you’re constantly dealing with different structures of perception,” said David Mura, a 37-year-old Japanese-American, who spent a year in Japan on a fellowship and completed a book of poetry there. As a result, gaijin constantly find themselves saying, “ ‘I have to shift perspectives.’ ” he said.

Idealized Vista

In Jay McInerney’s 1985 novel “Ransom,” the namesake character goes out of his way to avoid the local McDonald’s, because, a young woman chides, it spoils his “idealized Japanese vista--pagodas and misty mountains.”

On street corners, though, he runs into men holding shopping bags that read, in English: “Groovy Cat: Guys tough, check out the scene, love to Dancing with Funky Babes.”

In Brad Leithauser’s “Equal Distance,” perhaps the most critically acclaimed work of fiction produced by the new expatriates, two Americans from similar backgrounds perceive Japan from disparate perspectives.

Danny, a law student, struggles to meet the country on its own terms. Greg, a self-proclaimed, “ ‘80s-style Hemingway expatriate (“ . . . which means I still drink too much but I don’t box and I don’t suffer in silence”) sees Japan as “a humorous mirror . . . a country that beats America in a one-on-one Crassness Competition, in Mammon-chasing, in the pursuit of ugliness.”

Litter in Gutter

In “Pictures from the Water Trade,” John David Morley’s autobiographical character, Boon, sees an old woman removing litter from a gutter with chopsticks and suddenly adopts a pointillist view.

“Discarding those large-scale expectations which the city failed to live up to, he set about exploring Tokyo with the old lady’s chopsticks. He ignored the general and searched for the particular, in time discovering that for the loss of a spectacular urban panorama he was richly compensated by an inexhaustible fund of detail. It was a city made interesting solely by its people, customs and the terrific vitality of its street life.”

Befriended by a wealthy Japanese businessman, Boon finds himself with an entree into the Japanese “water trade,” the realm of bars and brothel-like establishments that he and most of his expatriate brethren find at once inviting and bizarre.

Boon wrestles with Japan with an academic intensity. He finds insights in the work of Japanese psychologists and in the practice of Japanese calligraphy. Ultimately, though, Japan’s essence eludes him, as it does most of those who try to pin it down in writing. A disenchantment sets in, when he perceives that the kindnesses extended to him as a gaijin, are “hollow, a masquerade.”

The Racial Wall

Mura said that he didn’t run up against the racial wall some gaijin face. But he did see it. Another friend, a third-generation Japanese-American, or Sansei, was introduced to some Japanese farmers by a Caucasian who had been working with the Japanese for three years and spoke the language fluently. The farmers took aside the Sansei , who spoke little Japanese, and confided that they felt closer to him.

“Americans and Europeans occupy a slot as foreigner,” Mura said. “It takes . . . a special individual to become part of fabric of Japanese life.”

Few do. Shapiro, for one, distinguishes himself from the brokenhearted expats he writes about because he sees that the problem is his own: “Some get terribly embittered (and wonder) why don’t they accept me? The answer is, because they don’t.

“Why isn’t Japan a free-trader? Because it isn’t. Why isn’t it a real democracy? Because it isn’t.”

Leila Phillips lived from 1983 to 1986 in the southern Japanese village of Miyama, where she apprenticed herself to a master pottery maker, recording her experiences in “The Road Through Miyama,” released this year.

“I had my own share of romantic notions when I went. They sure broke apart quickly,” she said. For example, “I’d read a lot about Zen, then I found that the young people (in Japan) were more materialistic than anyone I’d ever met in this society.”

Islands of Diversity

But she thinks all the talk about the uniqueness--the inscrutability--of Japanese is rubbish, whether espoused by the expats or the Japanese themselves.

“We hear so much about the Japanese, as if it’s really a homogeneous culture,” she said. “I believe the more you look at it, the more diversity you see. I think we do a disservice to look too much for one image of the Japanese that fits the whole country. People in Tokyo can’t even understand the language of people in Kagoshima.”

One popular vehicle for examining both Japan and the experience of gaijin in Japan has been to examine the mutually shared national pastime of besuboru --or baseball as it is called in the United States.

In “You Gotta Have Wa,” ( wa meaning “team spirit, unity, the ball club always comes first”), Robert Whiting uses the sport to illustrate Japan’s business savvy, its sociological makeup and something of its essential character, as one team’s motto has it, after all, “The Way of Baseball Is the Way of the Human Being.”

Separated by Culture

More than anything, though, the book shows how human beings can be separated by culture. American major leaguers, lured to Japan to play baseball for more money than they could hope to make here, find themselves confronted with a game philosophy and a people unlike anything they’ve known.

To a point, Japanese fans, loonier in their devotion than Cub fans even, worship gaijin stars as heroes. But when the foreigner oversteps certain boundaries--boundaries that are all but invisible to outsiders--they feel more like scapegoats than stars.

Whiting, who has written five books in Japanese, said that the idea behind his acclaimed “Wa” is to show Americans how hard it is to understand a culture like Japan. “Americans tend to think the world should be run on their own terms. But understanding this culture is really hard work.”

Besides learning the language, gaijin also must study Japan’s culture and politics and history and psychology, said Whiting, who has a degree in Japanese politics from Sophia University in Tokyo. “Maybe if they read my book and some of the other books that have come out they’ll lower expectations; if they expect cultural conflict, they won’t be so disappointed.”

Major League Star

Maybe they’ll merely be confused, as was major league star Bob Horner, who said: “I don’t know whether the Japanese system is good or not. I just don’t understand it.”

Other long-time expats, however, sneer at the more recent breed that has come in and confronted Japan and flown away confused.

The idea that Japan can’t be understood “is a very easy conclusion to reach, and it’s the one they want to reach even before they start writing,” Donald Keene, an authority on Japanese literature, said from Tokyo, where he lives the three seasons of the year when he’s not teaching at Columbia University. “A person will come with ideas about how he’d like to be among the simple Japanese. When he finds that the country isn’t like that, he writes about it not in terms of his own failings but in terms of the failings of Japanese culture.”

Besides, he said, most foreigners don’t stay long enough to get a grasp of the basic culture, let alone to infiltrate the areas of life where cutting edge ideas are debated. “People who come here and expect that they’re going to find their way into the intellectual society here without speaking Japanese are completely deluded,” he said.

Different Views

For Leithauser, Japan was so different it forced him to see things in a fresh way. But he never presumed to do more than record his own impressions of a country he enjoyed so much he wants to live in it again, he said. “I was hoping to get in a lot of the smells, the sights, and hoping thereby to write a richer novel, one that was more interesting and lively. But I wasn’t planning to plumb the soul of East and West.”

Those who have taken a stab at plumbing Japan’s soul come at it from all directions, from the journalistic (as in David Halberstam’s “The Reckoning,”) the scholarly (as in Karel Van Wolferen’s “Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation,”) and the jocular (as in Gary Katzenstein’s “Funny Business, an Outsider’s Year in Japan” and Robert Collins’ series, “Max Danger: Adventures of an Expat in Tokyo.”)

But it’s the many Bildungsromane --the rite of passage novels--written by the new wave of expats that put off many of the Westerners who have lived in Japan for a long time.

Write and Leave

For the most part, “these people write and go home,” said Donald Richie, who has lived in Japan since 1945 and has written four novels about the country. “If they want to pass into adulthood here, that’s just dandy . . . But they don’t stay here long enough to get any depth,” he said. “They’re only using the Japanese to bounce off their own sounding boards of self. They’re also small-minded--so interested in what the experience can give them in the way of self-revelation, they don’t look at (Japan) on its own terms.”

And as often as not, they don’t find what they’re looking for in themselves any more than they do in the country.

For Schwartz, at least, the three and a half months he spent in Tokyo were transformational. “Bicycle Days” was his senior thesis for Harvard’s Asian studies department. He and the faculty both thought it would be a scholarly examination of the business customs and economics--the sort of thing that would help him on the path to success in international banking. It wasn’t.

The act of writing drew Schwartz away from rationality and into emotions, he said. “That is the antithesis of how I’ve come to view living in Japan or Japanese society in general.”

Waning Fascination

He knows that Japan is increasingly important “politically, economically, even socially.” Still, “my fascination with Japan has waned every day.”

He has cast off his aspirations of becoming an investment banker. Now he sees himself as a budding novelist.

“When you’re writing, it’s the emotional responses that pull you by the leash and lead you somewhere,” he said.

Next month they’ll lead him to another expatriate life. This time in Paris.