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\nLast year, Ian Buruma succeeded Robert Silvers as Editor of the\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/i>. The long journey that brought him to that position began in his native Netherlands and passed, for six years from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, through Japan. Though he went there in his early twenties, the period constituted something more than a youthful detour: \u201cJapan was the making of me\u201d, he declares towards the end of his new memoir\u00a0A Tokyo Romance<\/i>. He launched his writing career \u2013 which has widened in geographical and historical purview over the decades \u2013 by interpreting Japanese culture for a Western readership.<\/p>\n
Buruma\u2019s contribution to the tradition of the Westerner-in-Japan memoir marks the first essential addition since John Nathan\u2019s\u00a0Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere<\/i>\u00a0a decade ago. \u201cNathan lived in Tokyo in the glorious 1960s, where he had distinguished himself far more than I ever had\u201d, writes Buruma. But despite considerable accomplishments \u2013 becoming Tokyo University\u2019s first American student of Japanese literature, translating Yukio Mishima and Kenzabur\u00f2 \u00d2e \u2013 Nathan was always haunted by \u201cthe possibility that I possessed the wherewithal to distinguish myself only as an exotic foreigner in an insular island country\u201d.<\/p>\n
The even-tempered Buruma has fewer bouts of self-doubt and despair to relate, but his experience in Japan has much in common with Nathan\u2019s, including directing a trilogy of television documentaries about Japan for broadcast in his homeland. Nathan took as his subjects an urban family, a rural family, and the samurai film star Shintaro Katsu; Buruma chose the Japanese army, a Yamaha motorcycle factory worker, and a young woman\u2019s intensive training to become a department-store \u201celevator girl\u201d. At first, Buruma confesses, \u201cI watched this spectacle with the sniggering attitude of a typical Westerner, reaching for the clich\u00e9d image of Japanese as human robots. But Hiroko was very far from being a robot. Hers was a performance, and she took pride in it\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n