Our National Living Treasure

“Great American writers,” Gore Vidal wrote of Paul Bowles’ collected short stories, “are supposed not only to live in the greatest country in the world but to write about that greatest of all human themes: The American Experience.”

Vidal’s comment, meant to chasten us for provincialism in having ignored Bowles (who was effectively out of print until two small U.S. presses, Ecco and Black Sparrow, spearheaded a mid-late 1970s revival), also raises the question: What is “ The American Experience”? Is it circumscribed by cultural life within our borders?

If the great 20th century American literary project was the rediscovery, reclamation and celebration of the indigenous American voice, the husking of American grain--the raising up of Faulkners and Thoreaus, the erection of canonical cathedrals to Whitmans and Melvilles--what are we to make of the nagging truth that so many pivotal American literary figures spent much of their writing lives away, abroad, elsewhere, often taking “exotic” non-American experience as their subject? Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, Bowles, William S. Burroughs, James Baldwin: full-or part-time expatriates all. (If we include writing on the internal margins, minority voices often exiled from inclusion, the literary map of “The American Experience” shifts radically.)

The fact is that American writing has in great measure always found its reflection in The Other. No tendency could be more “American.”

The release of a new collection by an American writer who has long lived and written abroad offers an occasion to ponder the expatriate strain in American writing. Donald Richie--film critic, novelist, travel writer, memoirist, essayist, reporter--has spent most of his life in Tokyo. Long enjoyed and admired for his film criticism and writings on Japan (and treasured for his style by a coterie of writing peers that includes Michael Ondaatje, Pico Iyer and Tom Wolfe), Richie’s best writing artfully transcends the object of his steady gaze: Japan.

The expatriate writer is like the odd, roaming uncle in the family who isn’t quite like the others, who travels and lives abroad, has different interests and proclivities, operates somewhere slightly beyond the pale. Yet the mystery of this permanent stranger is set against domestic, stationary life as a figure plays against ground.

“In Rio, Dreaming of New England/In New England, Dreaming of Rio,” wrote American poet Elizabeth Bishop. For some writers--those to whom a cultural missile shield defense system does not produce comfort but claustrophobia--the expatriate view is the best seat in the house: neither quite here nor there, yet in both places at once, sort of. As Richie puts it, describing the artistic and personal liberation he finds living in a culture not his own: “The act of comparison is the act of creation ... I am at home in Japan precisely because I am an alien body.”

Now in his late 70s and still busy working in Tokyo, Richie has lived a life of singular devotion--to writing, to film, to a life in a distant place. A permanent, unapologetic outsider who has “come to regard freedom as more important than belonging,” he widens our view of what the American experience is or can be. With the publication of “The Donald Richie Reader,” a compendium of more than 50 years of work, the pleasures of this American expatriate writer’s company no longer need be confined to cinephiles and Japanophiles.

Countries accumulate literatures of entry, tracks laid down for the visitor by writers before them: Malcolm Lowry, B. Traven and D.H. Lawrence mediate Mexico; Bowles and Isabel Eberhardt host North Africa; Richard Burton, Freya Stark and T.E. Lawrence unveil the Middle East; Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux split Patagonia.

Japan has amassed great groaning shelves of foreigners’ literature. Every writer, it seems, wants to try his or her hand at the West’s favorite Inscrutable Other. When I first arrived in Kyoto as a young man to teach and write for two years, I plowed through Lafcadio Hearn, Arthur Koestler, Ruth Benedict, Nikos Kazantzakis--to name but a few internationally known writers who’ve chimed in on the subject; yet these barely skim the surface of the vast Japanalia that awaits.

Of them all, it was Richie’s work that best described the Japan I actually beheld. His acute, unfailingly graceful commentary in the Japan Times--where he still holds forth as film reviewer and cultural reporter--steered me through the thickets of exoticism that ensnare the typical visitor: the sense that one has landed on Mars. Instead, Richie turns strangeness into a virtue, an entry point. “Imagine,” he said in a recent interview, “the freedom of looking at something and not knowing if it was edible or not. My first view of wagashi, Japanese sweets. Or not knowing if it were a shoe or a tool. My first view of a geta [Japanese shoe].” Later I’d read his tender, wise 1971 novel-cum-travel odyssey “The Inland Sea” (sections of which are included in the “Reader”), in which intimate knowledge gleaned about Japan and himself--the two are never far apart in his work--is on display. It’s hard to imagine a better guide into Japan than Richie.

Arriving in Japan in 1946 as a typist for the U.S. Occupation Forces, forbidden to mix with “indigenous personnel,” Richie sneaked into the Kabuki and cinema when MPs weren’t watching, and soon became a film critic for the Army’s Pacific Stars and Stripes. After studying English and film at Columbia University, he returned to Japan in 1954 and established himself as film critic, author (his books on the Japanese directors Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa are considered among the finest ever written on directors) and essayist on things Japanese. In 1968 he returned to New York to become curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art for several years, then resettled in Tokyo for good, becoming an interlocutor among cultures, a central figure in the world’s knowledge of Japan.

Richie has written more than 30 books, scores of essays, hundreds of book and film reviews. (His “Japan Journals, 1947-99” will be published posthumously.) He has written variously about movies, tattoos, gardens, food, gods, folk art (mingei), pop culture, Zen, sex and music. His life and work bear witness to a massive historical shift: from Tokyo’s bombed-out postwar Ginza (“a burned wasteland, a vast and blackened plain where a city had once stood”) to today’s sleek anime (animation), manga (comics) and high-tech arcades. Richie has seen it all and rendered it all, indelibly.

“When I write,” Richie has said, “I don’t use Japan as a sort of psycho-theater. I don’t use it to dramatize myself. I really try to get out there and observe and record.”

Richie’s style is simple, clean, unforced, his erudition lightly worn. His unassuming exactitude, sharply rendered descriptions and sudden insights attempt to, in his formulation, “redeem reality” by following the precepts of one of his heroes, the director Ozu: “If you use your eyes and ears properly you will understand; if you do not, no amount of explanation will inform you.... Ozu is interested in showing, not explaining. He implies; you infer. He builds his half of the bridge; you build yours.”

Resolutely refusing to “interpret” Japan, Richie holds to the view that in Japan, appearances are reality: There is no seething subtext waiting to be unearthed. “Reality is skin deep because there is only skin. The ostensible is the truth. There is no crack between the mask and the face because the mask is the only face anyone ever has--that crack, which contains irony and wit as well as cynicism, does not exist.” In Japan, Richie asserts, style and substance are one and the same.

Beauty, sharply observed, is never far away. Writing of a Kyoto garden, Richie notes the sozu, the piece of cut bamboo that fills with water then tilts on its pivot and dumps it “with a resounding clack....The sound cleaves, the air closes, and the silence is the more deep from having been rent. Like an articulated emptiness, a space is formed by its confines.”

In Japan, the visitor is a gaijin, a foreigner, always and forever. There is no respite save departure. Richie has always been refreshingly clear-eyed about this. His unvarnished, aphoristic descriptions of being foreign include matters of the flesh: “... travelers the world over are known for their attempts to pick other people up. It is not that they want sex so much as it is that they want something to fill the emptiness that their very freedom has created.” And: “The freedom to lose yourself, one of the great attractions of the sexual encounter, is based, after all, upon the assumption that you have first found yourself.” “Sex,” Richie points out, “makes, in its way, the ideal souvenir.” In an essay on Japan’s booming sex industry, he gives us the lowdown on love hotels, virtual sex salons (“the ultimate in safe sex”) and gay bars. Says Richie: “... to the Japanese (as to the Greek) an appetite is an appetite. When he is hungry he eats, when he is drowsy he sleeps.”

Witness for more than half a century to the play of change and permanence, emptiness and fullness, Richie’s lively, attentive voice betrays a creeping tone of elegy at what is being destroyed in Japan’s rush to modernization. “What has gone missing? One, and of course it’s irretrievable, is the beauty of the country. It was the most beautiful country I’d ever seen.”

Finally Richie comes to understand that “[c]hange is in Japan put to use, in the most pragmatic of manners. It alone is permanent and hence a steady source of power....” He quotes the priest Kenko, who nearly 700 years ago wrote: “What if man lingered on ... how things would then fail to move us. The finest thing in life is its uncertainty.”

Reading Richie, you will learn about Japan, yes; but you will learn more about yourself. “What had terrified me,” he writes after dancing and chanting all night at a village Festival of Darkness, “now consoled me.” Ably compiled and lovingly assembled by editor Arturo Silva, “The Donald Richie Reader” serves as port of entry to Richie’s books and other writings, and as its own rich reward: an eclectic, fulsome American-style sampler of the man and his indispensable work.