A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible.
Tokyo was an astonishment. Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, and cabarets. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War II veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free.
A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the cultural excitement of 1970s Tokyo, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual.
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Ian Buruma. (2018). A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir. Unabridged Books on Tape.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Ian Buruma. 2018. A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir. Books on Tape.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir. Books on Tape, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Ian Buruma. A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2018.
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- bioText: Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in God's Dust, A Japanese Mirror, and Behind the Mask. He has also written Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, and Anglomania. Buruma is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities in Washington, DC.
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- A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's
When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible.
Tokyo was an astonishment. Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, and cabarets. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War II veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free.
A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the cultural excitement of 1970s Tokyo, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual. - reviews
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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.
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- content: Dutch writer/editor (THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS) Ian Buruma was stumbling around Japan long before sushi went onto international dinner plates. In arch tones, Buruma narrates his own audiobook, describing his coming-of-age in Japan in the 1970s. We close our eyes and listen deeply in order to reconcile the fact that the cultured voice drawing us into his past once belonged to an unsophisticated boy. Buruma explains in an ironic tone the rise of "being into Asian" as a global phenomenon. For those who are fans of Buruma's work as a chronicler of major events in Asia, this will be a personal encounter with his sexual and cultural awakening. For those unfamiliar, his performance here may lead to investigating more of his writing. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
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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.
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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.
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When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible.
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