Читать книгу History of Tokyo 1867-1989 - Edward Seidensticker - Страница 8

PREFACE

Now that my friend of some fifty years is no more, I often think of him as I walk along the shores of the Shinobazu no Ike, near where we both lived, he up the hill in Yushima, me in Ueno by the pond. Shinobazu made a good meeting place because it was familiar to both of us and because the whole area had associations we liked.

These associations were mostly literary. Natsume Soseki had lived in the neighborhood when he wrote I Am a Cat, and Mori Ogai’s house was still there (though now turned into a hotel) while Ed himself lived at the top of the steep street which Otama in Ogai’s Wild Geese daily climbed.

Ed found the neighborhood still somehow literary and thought of himself as one of the last local bunjin. Not only did he concern himself with past literature, as in his translation of the Genji Monogatari, but also he loved the past for its own sake, as he demonstrated in his splendid, two-volume history of Tokyo. Yet he entertained a certain ambivalence toward the past, one he shared with us in the finest of all of his works, Kafū the Scribbler.

Just as Kafū disliked Meiji Japan until Taisho Japan turned out even worse, giving him then something to like about vanished Meiji, so Seidensticker disliked much of modern Japan until newer manifestations indicated something worse was on its way, at which point he would become nostalgic about what he had formerly disliked.

He collected these opinions in his feisty columns for the Yomiuri Shimbun, published in English as This Country, Japan, a title with a double meaning. It could be read simply as “this country” (kono kuni), or as “this country!” indicating an extreme degree of exasperation with Japan. His opinions and his way of arriving at them were so close to those of Kafū that is not surprising that Kafū the Scribbler is both an extraordinarily perceptive literary history and also a completely personal identification.

As I walk along the shores of Shinobazu no Ike I now think of the many times I met Seidensticker there, as he slowly wandered about, looking (though fatter) much like a latter-day Kafū himself. And when we talked about literature we always talked about Kafū. One of his regrets, he said, was that he had never met the great author. He knew Kawabata and Tanizaki, Mishima and others, but he had never met Kafū, the author he most admired.

Since Kafū was also my own favorite Japanese author, he became one of the things that Ed and I had in common. We also both favored a certain kind of English author who, like Kafū, had an immaculate style and an anomalous taste for the past: authors such as Thomas Love Peacock, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ronald Firbank.

And Jane Austen. We were both besotted with her six novels, read them all the time, even formed an unauthorized Jane Austen Society of Japan (along with Shulamith Rubinfein and Sheelagh Cluny), just for ourselves. Such tastes might be thought narrow but they had admirable results. Whenever I reread Seidensticker’s Genji, I see that the tone, the mood, the feeling of this translation—its lightness, its rightness—owe much to his admiration for Jane Austen. She is standing there, just behind Murasaki Shikibu.

Sometimes in my evening walks around Shinobazu I would discover Ed on one of the benches, sitting there, regarding the pond. Sometimes he had been drinking (he liked shochu), sometimes not. Whichever, we always talked about the same things. I remember one such conversation. “I am delighted to see you,” he said. “For I have something to tell you. My afternoon was spent with Abe Kobo and we spoke of his style, and he said that critics always said that the influence was Franz Kafka, but they were absolutely wrong. The real influence was Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t that nice? Lewis Carroll!”

But then Seidensticker’s physical problems began. He conquered his liking for shochu, but he had two hip replacements and could never properly walk after that. I would sometimes see him hobbling about Shinobazu of an evening, but gradually he stopped coming—he fell down too often. Instead we would meet, once a week or so, at an Ueno Indian restaurant we both liked and which he could reach by taxi.

Having much criticized Showa Japan while we were still in it, he was now praising the immediate postwar years because he found so much wrong with Heisei Japan. During our later meetings it was the contemporary young that irritated him the most with their laziness, their rudeness, their narcissistic ways. He remembered how much nicer the young people of Showa Japan had seemed, those he had formerly criticized just as bitterly. And we often (like Kafu, like all old people) remembered a kind of beauty which, whether or not it had actually existed, lived on in us.

Seidensticker was not only a bunjin and a splendid translator, he was also a man who (like Kafū) had the highest standards and was honest enough to criticize what he loved. He cared deeply for Japan, more so than many another foreigner, more so than many Japanese. Perhaps that was why he was on the shores of Shinobazu Pond on the day of the accident, April 26, 2007. It had been an unusually warm spring day with sun and the promise of summer. Now, as evening approached and the long shadows spread across the waters, it was perhaps because of a wish to enjoy this that he left the taxi and walked as best he could through the park on his way to the Indian restaurant and dinner with me and our friend Patrick Lovell.

Now when I take my stroll around the pond I always pass the small staircase down which he fell that day and fractured his skull. It is very short, just five steps, but falling from the top one was enough to put him into the coma that lasted four months to the day, ending with his death on August 26.

And then as I continue around the pond I see in the distance that some one is sitting on the bench where we used to sit. It has grown dark now—it is twilight, a star or two has appeared. I walk nearer to the seated person. I know that it is not my friend, Edward Seidensticker, but I wish it were.

Donald Richie

Used with permission of International House of Japan. This material originally appeared in the IHJ Bulletin and is an expanded version of an obituary which appeared in Japanese in the magazine Ueno, a publication for which Seidensticker regularly wrote.