August 1, 2018
"Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet," writes New York Review of Books editor Buruma. In his mid-20s in 1975, the Dutch-born Buruma, who is half English and half German Jew, arrived in Tokyo to study film at Nihon University College of Art. Being Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger's nephew provided Buruma with his initial entrée to the film world. Beyond academia, his participatory education took him onto sets and stages as he explored multiple artistic expressions--film, theater, dance, photography--in raw, uninhibited manifestations. That Buruma is both author and narrator here--reading in a languid British English combined with Japanese fluency--proves he's his own ideal presenter. His encounters range from inevitable--meeting famed expat Donald Richie who "introduced Japanese cinema to the West"; to outrageous--sporting a "tiny scarlet jockstrap" onstage, then dropping his dance partner; to sublime--appearing in a whiskey ad with Akira Kurosawa. VERDICT Readers expecting cherry blossoms and tea ceremonies will be shocked; deep satisfaction awaits audiences prepared for an unflinching, explicit memoir of a stranger-in-a-strange-land's cultural and sexual maturation. ["Buruma's meditations on his place as a foreigner in Japanese society achieve some depth, but the descriptions of the various personalities and the lurid slices of 1970s Tokyo's underground scene are this memoir's strongest feature": LJ 2/15/18 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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.
August 1, 2018
"Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet," writes New York Review of Books editor Buruma. In his mid-20s in 1975, the Dutch-born Buruma, who is half English and half German Jew, arrived in Tokyo to study film at Nihon University College of Art. Being Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger's nephew provided Buruma with his initial entr�e to the film world. Beyond academia, his participatory education took him onto sets and stages as he explored multiple artistic expressions--film, theater, dance, photography--in raw, uninhibited manifestations. That Buruma is both author and narrator here--reading in a languid British English combined with Japanese fluency--proves he's his own ideal presenter. His encounters range from inevitable--meeting famed expat Donald Richie who "introduced Japanese cinema to the West"; to outrageous--sporting a "tiny scarlet jockstrap" onstage, then dropping his dance partner; to sublime--appearing in a whiskey ad with Akira Kurosawa. VERDICT Readers expecting cherry blossoms and tea ceremonies will be shocked; deep satisfaction awaits audiences prepared for an unflinching, explicit memoir of a stranger-in-a-strange-land's cultural and sexual maturation. ["Buruma's meditations on his place as a foreigner in Japanese society achieve some depth, but the descriptions of the various personalities and the lurid slices of 1970s Tokyo's underground scene are this memoir's strongest feature": LJ 2/15/18 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.