PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

Brinkely-Rogers was a 19-year-old member of the US Navy in 1959 and his ship was the USS Shangri-La. It roamed the Western Pacific and one of the ports it periodically stopped in was Yokosuka, Japan, where a major US naval base is located. While in port there, Rogers meets a bar girl who, seeing him carrying a book into the bar, asks him what he is reading. Turns out it's a book of poetry (Dylan Thomas) and from there a relationship blooms. Yukiko (not her real name, which Rogers never reveals) turns out to be literary herself and teaches him much that he doesn't know, not only about literature but classical Japanese cinema and more. She believes in him, tells him he must go to college, get an education, and become a writer. He credits her with the fact that he did do all that -- although the writing turned out to be reporting for various news outlets as he traveled the world. 

Yukiko is more than ten years older than Paul and her history is a history of the trauma of Japan at the end of the war. She was born in Manchuria at the time Japan occupied it and was repatriated after the war but lost both her child and her father. She subsequently lived in Hiroshima and had a relationship with a gangster (yakuza) but we never learn her whole story, as Rogers himself did not know it. 

 

But the center of the story is their relationship. It is chaste -- she seems to want it that way and he doesn't ask why. But it is also passionate. Now, decades later -- the book was published in 2016 -- Rogers has only Yukiko's letters to refresh his memory of their time together, but they are enough to recreate their love from so long ago. 

The memoir evokes not only the youth of Brinkley-Rogers but a whole era. On the Shangri-La, ironically, are atomic weapons -- weapons such as were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fourteen years earlier. Paul and Yukiko are aware of the irony of their love, and that of many other service members who in fact consummated their relationships and perhaps married their Japanese girlfriends -- girlfriends they would never have met but for the war and American victory. 

Later in his life, Paul returned to live in Japan as a reporter for a couple of years. He tried to find Yukiko but couldn't. But what he knows is that his life was fulfilled because of the encouragement of a bar girl he met by chance when he was still a teenager.

And we, as readers, can experience a long-ago time and its mark on one of those who lived through it thanks to Brinkley-Rogers' efforts.

Male and Female Memoir: Part II

I finished two memoirs about Japan recently -- Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING.

Granted, these writers went to Japan at different times -- Iyer in the 1980s and Rizzuto in 2001 -- and for different reasons.  Iyer didn't have any family connection with Japan at all but had been fascinated with the country ever since a brief stopover with his mother when he was young.  And his interest in Zen led him to choose Kyoto for his stay as well as to contact many people practicing Zen. He even lived in a temple himself for awhile.  From my point of view, I have to say, I think his interest was much too intellectual to really lead anywhere, but nonetheless it was a focus for him. 

Rizzuto went for completely different reasons.  She is half-Japanese and she wanted to explore the impact the bombing of Hiroshima had on Japanese Americans who were caught up in that event.  Perhaps these unfortunate people were visiting relatives in Japan at just the wrong time or had left the States rather than live in a relocation camp.  Naturally, she chose Hiroshima as her base.  She didn't know people personally ahead of time but she had several connections, and she had also received a grant to write a book based on her research -- a novel that seems to have been abandoned in favor of the memoir she finally published.

But, although these differences are very real, what strikes me more is the difference in tone.  I have been trying to pin this down, to put in words this difference which I've noticed again and again in memoirs of men and women, and maybe I'm getting close.  I think it is that the main question around which men form their narrative is, "How did this experience change me?" while the main question women ask is, "How did this experience help me discover who I really am?"

Maybe this seems like a subtle difference but, really, I think it makes all the difference.  It seems that men, as a rule, already assume that they know who they are.  Their experience, especially in a foreign country, will add to who they are and perhaps cause them to reconsider things they have always considered true, but the self who is having those experiences is never basically in doubt.

But with women, the result seems almost always to be, "I thought I was this sort of person, but through this experience I have now discovered that I am not that person I always thought I was: I am a quite different person, or maybe I am someone I have not yet completely discovered."  So, for example, with Rizzuto, she went to Japan leaving her family in New York, but her research into the effect of the bomb on the lives of survivors could not be separated from the effect of those she interviewed on her own personal life.  She had thought she was one kind of wife and mother but before long began to question the roles she had played so naturally up until that time.

Iyer's outcome is more modest.  There is no doubt that he has been affected deeply by his experience -- and especially by the "lady" with whom he became involved -- but he goes home with his basic "self" in tact.  Of course, if he'd taken Zen more seriously, that might not have been the case, but one doesn't usually find what one doesn't know one is looking for, and Iyer does not seem to have thought he was looking for a deeper, truer self. 

Journey of a Lifetime

I'm just starting HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a memoir about six months in Japan than changed the author's life.  She writes:

"I knew I was leaving, but if I had known how thoroughly my life would shatter over the next six months, into gains just as astonishing as the losses; if I knew I was saying goodbye to the person I was that night, that decade, that lifetime; if I understood I was about to become someone new, too new . . . too different to fit in here . . . would I have still gotten on the airplane?"

I myself was twenty when I went to Japan for a year that turned into two as love and Buddhism intermingled in a tale no one could possibly have made up.  We just have no idea where our blind choices will lead.  No one who has gone abroad for an extended period, especially in the crucial years of young adulthood, comes away the same person.  This is what is interesting to me about the genre I've chosen to emphasize in this blog -- journeys inner and outer.  Usually an outer journey precipitates an inner one, but it might also be said that the sojourner is ready for change or s/he would have stayed home.  So my answer to Rizzuto's rhetorical question is, "Yes, probably."

Novels, memoirs and Pico Iyer in Japan

I finally started reading Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK.  Despite my having lived in Japan for two years plus a summer, I put off reading this story set in Japan because I thought it was a novel and some critic I read (maybe just an Amazon reader) said that Iyer hadn't lived in Japan long enough to really understand it. 

But when I actually got the book in my hands, I found that it was not a novel but a memoir.  And that makes all the difference.  So I'm asking myself why it would be OK to me if someone misrepresented Japan in a memoir but not in a novel.

I think it's because if I read a novel, I know the characters and plot are more or less made up, but I expect the setting to be realistic (unless it is fantasy, of course).  If a novel takes place in a specifically named location, I expect that the manners, the relationships between the sexes, the street scenes, etc., to be realistically drawn.  I expect even that, through reading a fictional story about a place, I will learn something about it I didn't know before .  The author, in a sense, sets himself or herself up as the authority whom I expect to give me a trustworthy vision of what life is like in that place. 

Strangely, I don't have those expectations of a memoir writer.  I expect that a writer, when using his own voice, is providing a personal point of view.  I allow that the writer had such and so experience in a given place, and that others who go there might have a very different experience and point of view.  The author, in that instance, is the authority only for his own experience.  So even if a given writer's experience in Japan is different from mine -- and from what I've read so far, Iyer's experience, especially in Zen temples, is very different -- I cannot even call it "misrepresentation" because it isn't supposed to be a general portrayal of "how things are."

Iyer's memoir is vague about the time it takes place, but it feels like the 1980s.  At the beginning of Chapter 4, Iyer says that he moved into a guesthouse in Kyoto named I.S.E. -- and suddenly, I am there -- because in fact, I myself lived during the summer of 1984 in that very guesthouse!  Wouldn't it be a remarkable to learn these several decades later that I, unknowingly, once had Pico Iyer for a housemate?

So the streets he describes in this chapter are the same streets I walked along.  I remember especially my first encounter with a talking vending machine where, parched, I made my purchase of a can of beer after coming home late on a stifling summer evening from teaching English in Osaka.  Domo Arigato Gozaimasen -- "Thank you very much!" -- the machine said after I made my purchase. These days it is commonplace for machines to talk to us, but I remember how startled I was that first evening when, breaking the silence of the night, the machine offered its appreciation of my patronage!

Through reading Iyer's account of these streets, though, I also realize how very much I failed to notice.  Iyer has eyes to see and the words to describe what he sees.  And it doesn't matter if the eyes he sees through are different from those of someone else -- certainly they are different from a Japanese but also from other foreigners -- because a memoir is meant to be specific to the writer -- at the same time as it lets us into a world we can now share.