| Alex Kerr, a 44-year-old American, has lived a life devoted to scholarly pursuits and the refinement of his aesthetic sensibilities. This is his story so far, told in a personal, hands-in-the-pockets way. Originally written in Japanese and awarded a prestigious literary prize, rendered into English it is completely engaging. The thread running through the book is that while the countryside of Japan twenty years ago was one of the most beautiful in the world, it is now replete with concrete retaining walls and power pylons and what's more, Japan's unique culture, austere and allusive, has been all but lost. But this is not really a book about paradise lost.
Kerr is extremely well up on the arts of Japan and China, but he wears his erudition lightly. He studied Japanese at Yale (too much Meiji history, he notes sourly) and Chinese and Tibetan as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where in his last year he was taken under wing by John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, a college so elevated it doesn't take undergraduates. (He also enrolled for a year at Keio University in Tokyo, but found the lectures so boring he stopped going after a few weeks.) Kerr gracefully acknowledges that he learned a great deal about viewing and buying and selling art from another polymath foreigner, David Kidd, who lives in a magnificent old house outside Kobe - enough, at any rate, to go into the art business himself.
Kerr has organized his life so the world of fluorescent lighing and mass-marketed fruit juices barely intrudes, not because he is afraid of it but because he prefers to live to his own rhythm, and in this is is an inspiration to all sentient beings. He says "In Kyoto in the late 70s many foreigners were living in a dream of ancient Japan, because in those days it was still possible to believe in the dream." Propelled by this dream, he bought and heroically restored two old houses, ruthlessly excluding anything he was not completely comfortable with. When he had a problem with mosquitoes, he bought and installed a set of antique silk mostquito nets, which he eventually lent to the Kabuki theater to provide a period touch, after his friend Tomasaburo, the famous kabuki actor, told him the theater couldn't find any old nets themselves.
...this is not really a book about paradise lost...
But the book, though in large part a fascinating commentary on Japanese aesthetics, is not so otherworldly it is bloodless. Kerr tells of his experiences in Tokyo representing the interests of Trammel Crow, the huge American real-estate operation, at the time of the bubble economy. He has angry things to say about the mindless destruction of Kyoto and the seeming inability of the national government to bring about the smallest significant change. He warms to the rough humanity of Osaka, where he discovered places to buy used underwear and one shoe. One chapter is a loving travelogue of Nara which makes that city seem the best of all possible places.
I've decided to give this book as a Christmas present to those old friends of mine back home who still write me letters wondering why I choose to live in Japan. A good part of the answer is here.
Reviewed
by Stella Regalia
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