A Tokyo Romance

October 15, 2017

A leading public intellectual and the author of numerous award-winning titles, Buruma has succeeded Robert B. Silvers as the editor of the New York Review of Books. And if that weren't the case, this memoir would still be fascinating. Buruma reports on his arrival in Japan as a naive young man who felt out of place back home and was seeking something different in Tokyo: the scarily forthright and visceral sense of humanity he found in the Japanese theater performances and films he had encountered in Paris and Amsterdam.

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January 1, 2018
A delicious if squirm-inducing memoir of a young Western artist in 1970s Japan.Now a veteran author and editor of the New York Review of Books, Buruma (Year Zero: A History of 1945, 2013) was a restless youth, anxious to escape his middle-class life, and a devotee of the local art theater, especially of a bizarre performance by a Japanese theater group. Following college, where he majored in Chinese, he obtained a scholarship to a Japanese film school and set off, arriving in 1975. Film school proved a disappointment, but Buruma had come to experience Japan and perhaps explore his own budding sexuality. Readers familiar with the tea ceremony, martial arts, and ancient temples will receive a jolt as the author immerses himself into the art scene of a nation with a tolerance for grotesquery, including depictions of violence and sex that put America to shame. "The pornographic imagination was not furtive and marginal, as in many countries, but entirely upfront." Perhaps more sophisticated but no less explicit than U.S. productions, one hard-core film made it to the Cannes Film Festival. Although an autobiography should pay attention to facts, this is a memoir, so readers must accept that what Buruma chooses to remember takes priority over what actually happened. He describes a naive youth plunging into a fantastical foreign culture, so readers must pass over the casual admission that he arrived with a Japanese girlfriend and left with her six years later.The reward is a wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.

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Starred review from January 22, 2018
New York Review of Books editor Buruma reflects on his immersion in the artistic underworlds of late 1970s Tokyo in this lucid, engrossing memoir. A bored university student from the Netherlands, Buruma was intrigued by the exotic Japan of film and stage and moved to a country caught between dizzying economic growth and the student uprisings that followed. On his way to artistic maturity, Buruma befriended gay expat aesthetes, fashion photographers, Buto dancers, and underground theater troupes, his fluent Japanese providing access to milieus few Westerners ever encountered. Throughout the narrative, readers learn nearly as much about Buruma’s occasional male lovers as they do about a Japanese girlfriend he lived with (and later married). Bisexual and half “Anglo-German-Jewish,” Buruma had always felt remote from his Dutch countrymen, and he felt even more displaced among the Japanese. Of course, it was exactly his difference that made him intriguing to the fiercely tribal artistic enclaves he explored; as Buruma freely admits, having John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) for an uncle proved quite helpful in encounters with luminaries such as film directors Ju¯ro¯ Kara , Akira Kurosawa, and Shu¯ji Terayama. Yet even as this far-from-typical gaijin enjoyed the benefits of his ambiguous status, he came to understand that he would never be fully accepted. Buruma makes the archetypal quest for home in a foreign land both uniquely personal and deeply illuminating. Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.