Ian Buruma's Reading List

"I could have chosen many others, but personally I’m very interested in that period of the occupation by largely American troops just after World War II. It’s one of the most extraordinary episodes in modern history. It was the first time that Japan was occupied in its own history, and the world that was created at that time shaped post-war Japan. I think the author, John Dower, has caught that period – with all its complexity and its absurdity and its benevolence and its dark sides – better than anyone else, even, as far as I know, in Japanese. It’s not only a great work of history, but it’s beautifully written. I think history writing at its best should be, and can be, a form of literature and this would be a good example. That’s not really the way he approaches it. He analyses it really as a…confrontation isn’t quite the word, but a very peculiar meeting of two very different cultures and civilisations. Even though Japan had already been influenced by the United States as well as Europe for almost 100 years, in 1945 it was still an extraordinary meeting of cultures that was sometimes a confrontation and sometimes a happy mix."

"It’s not a full biography, but about two-thirds of the book is a biographical sketch by Seidensticker, who was a formidable translator and Japanese scholar. He was one of the translators of The Tale of Genji , and a very literary scholar – he had a wonderful style. Nagai Kafu is perhaps not the greatest Japanese writer who ever lived, but he is one of the more interesting ones and somebody for whom Seidensticker felt a great love – something I share. Kafu came from a well-educated family and was sent, in the late 19th century, to America – first to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to study and then to New York, where he spent most of his time hanging out in Chinatown, indulging his passion for prostitutes and opium dens. He then went to Paris, which he liked better than he did America. He came back to Japan very well versed in French literature and became a professor of French literature in Tokyo. But he quickly turned his back on the academic or even the respectable literary world in Tokyo and spent most of his life in the more raffish neighbourhoods of eastern Tokyo, where the red-light districts were. “It was the first time that Japan was occupied in its own history, and the world that was created at that time shaped post-war Japan.” He liked nothing better than to sit backstage at strip shows (and that kind of thing) and he described that world almost always in a nostalgic way. Because, of course, Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in 1923 by the earthquake and then again in 1945, and, in any case, when it wasn’t destroyed by bombs or earthquakes it was changing very fast through redevelopment. So it was always a city that was disappearing – or at least changing radically – and he was the great chronicler of what had faded and what was no longer. So memories of a Tokyo that was no longer there, or the little bits that were still there and reminded him of the old days, are very much his material. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He was a short story writer, really, a writer of novellas more than novels and a great diarist and an extraordinary, eccentric figure – one of the few, by the way, who during World War II was resolutely against the ultra-nationalism that many other Japanese writers at the time embraced. Yes, I like his writing style and I like the subjects – I share his interest in the demi-monde of Tokyo, and the old districts, and I think he was a very fine writer of short stories. Not so much of his work has been translated, but the most famous stories have been."

"Ozu’s world is very different from that of Nagai Kafu. His best films and his most famous films were made after World War II and are largely about the Japanese upper-middle class. They’re beautiful, profound films about people coming to terms with life, and coming to terms with the limits of human existence. They are films that have been stylised to show the essence of life rather than lots of action. And I think the writer who has conveyed the style of Ozu, the beauty of his films and the cultural context of them best is Donald Richie, who has written a lot about film, and, unlike many film scholars, is a very good writer. I read his books on Japanese film before I went to Japan and before I’d seen many of them – and even then you felt you had learned a lot, not only about film but about Japan itself. The most famous one is Tokyo Story , but there are many other fine ones – Late Autumn, Early Summer . Yes, the films are set in that period. Ozu started his career in the 1920s, and his films go all the way through to the 1960s: he died in 1963. A lot of them are family dramas, Tokyo Story being one of them, made in the 1950s. They show the changes of Japanese life and Japanese family life at a time of fast economic development."

"I suppose what all these books have in common is that they are written not by novelists but by scholars – all of whom are interesting for their literary style, as well as their scholarship. Barthes again, unlike many of his followers, was himself a very fine writer. His followers took the jargon but didn’t have the style, and Barthes, of course, invented a lot of the jargon of cultural studies. “ One thing that interested him about Tokyo was the fact that nobody really knows anybody’s address – it’s a not a city of addresses.” He went to Japan without really knowing anything much about it. Yet I think it’s one of the most intelligent accounts of Japan. He had never been to Japan before, and did not go there as a scholar, or as a researcher, or to go deeply into a particular subject. He simply let the impressions of Japan sink in and made something of them. And what he made of them is still of great interest. In fact I think he says, at the beginning of the book, ‘This is not about Japan, it’s about an imaginary country I call Japan’ – so it’s very much his take, based on random impressions. He was such an intelligent and observant man, that they’re still very much worth reading, even to someone who knows Japan well. Well he was a semiotician, and semioticians look for signs and symbols. So, for example, one thing that interested him about Tokyo was the fact that nobody really knows anybody’s address – it’s a not a city of addresses. If you go somewhere for the first time, your host or hostess has to give you an accurate map or description – for example, you turn right at the greengrocers and left at the tobacconist and then you go straight on, and so on. And if you don’t have those directions, then no taxi driver will be able to take you there. He found that fascinating. So he looked at a map of Tokyo and the geography of Tokyo and extrapolated from that a particular way of thinking, an attitude towards urban space which was unusual and interesting."

"This book was written at a time when there was a sense of malaise in Europe – people felt that Western civilisation was on its last legs and didn’t have much to contribute any more. There was a lot of fear of nuclear war and it was also the time when people began to say that the Orient had a certain wisdom to impart. We’d reached the limits of rationalisation and the Enlightenment, and the spiritual traditions of Asia had something special to teach. So he went to India and to Japan to test this idea, and he clearly liked Japan better than he did India, even though he was critical of many aspects of it. For example, he had a rationalist’s distaste for a lot of the mumbo jumbo about Zen archers hitting the target with their eyes closed, and so on and so forth. Again, it’s like Barthes, in that he didn’t know much about Japan. He went there, he stayed there longer than Barthes did, let things sink in, and he reflected on them and came up with interesting insights. He wrote at the end of the book that it made him feel more at home with the figure perched on the back of the bull, Europa. But he also said that if he had to choose any other place to live in the world, if it couldn’t be Europe, he would choose Japan. Quite why he said that he doesn’t really explain…"

"This book came like a bolt of lightning, because in the seventies – despite the fact that the Cultural Revolution was still going on – many China watchers were starry eyed about Maoism as a wonderful experiment. Those who went to China saw what they wanted to see, and usually came back with glowing accounts of a New China, and a uniquely collective and altruistic human being not driven by material desires. Chinese Shadows was a completely different take. It’s a collection of essays in which he totally demolishes the romantic myth of the Maoist experiment. This was especially devastating in France, because Paris was the centre of intellectual Maoism. Leys is a wonderful essayist – very sharp and funny – and he demolished the reputations of famous writers on China like Ross Terrill. It was not well received at all at my university. Some of my professors were inclined to see in China at the time something that might not work in the West, but which was a unique product of an ancient high civilisation. Leys really put the cosh on that. Yes. And don’t forget that a lot of this has to do with the history of the Left in the West, regardless of China. In the sixties and seventies, most of the new left were very disillusioned with the Soviet Union, and Maoist China took the place of their notion of left wing experimentation. There was a lot of third worldism as well, with Raymond Williams at the forefront – the non-Western world as the rural rebellion against the Western metropole, a kind of neo-colonial struggle. And China became the focus of that."

"It’s about the friendship – in the end thwarted by the colonial situation – between an English teacher living in India and his Indian friend. Friendship is about relating to one another as equals, and as long as colonial rule existed, an Indian and an Englishman could not do that, so their friendship was impossible. That’s the underlying theme. Its description of India – not only of the landscape but of the relations between Indians and Europeans – makes it one of the great colonial novels. There are also subplots with ladies discovering their own sexuality, playing off the theme of the sensuousness of the East. One of the novel’s strengths is that it’s not polemical. It’s very clear that Forster disapproved of colonial rule, but he doesn’t paint a caricature of brutal Brits and Indian victims. It’s much more subtle than that. The character of Cyril Fielding, the young Englishman full of goodwill, is true to life in that a lot of British people in India at the time did a lot of good – but in the end it was the system that was the problem. Yes, I think it is. Those other countries are much more plugged into a global youth culture than India is. I think people in their twenties have probably been much more exposed to Chinese, Japanese and Korean popular culture than to Indian culture. The closest most people in Britain get to India today is having a curry or watching the cricket. Japanese anime or Korean pop music is better known even than Bollywood films."

"Donald Richie, who died earlier this year, was a great friend and mentor of mine. He first arrived in Japan in 1947, when Japan was still occupied by the United States, and he stayed there, as a journalist and a writer, more or less until his death. He introduced Japanese cinema to the West through his books. The Inland Sea, which was written in the sixties, is his love poem to Japan as he viewed it – which is quite romantically. It’s about a trip he makes around the Inland Sea, a very beautiful part of Japan filled with small islands. The landscape is extraordinary. He travels there just as Japan is modernising very fast – the cities are transformed as the old Japan disappears, as is happening in China now. So he goes to the part of Japan which to him is the least spoilt. It shows his love for a certain idea of Japan that’s disappearing – which is always the romantic view. Much of literature consists of describing a vanishing or a vanished world. Many of them are small fishing villages, where people still have a very rural, traditional way of life. Even though he’s describing reality, he infuses it with a kind of poetry. It’s as much a product of his own romantic imagination as it is of life in Japanese fishing villages in the 1960s."

"In a way this is a bit like Passage to India, although it was written earlier, at the very beginning of the 20th century. It’s a very early example of a novelist who saw the futility of colonialism, and how a small number of Europeans – in this case the Dutch rulers of the Dutch East Indies – thought they knew what they were doing. Like Forster, he’s not being polemical. But he does describe, very sympathetically, the illusion the Europeans had that they would control these countries forever. Even then they didn’t have as much control as they thought. The story is about the wife of a Dutch colonial civil servant who has an adulterous affair, and she’s punished in a sort of supernatural way by visitations. Sexually it’s an extraordinarily explicit book, certainly for its time. There is a whole depth to the culture of the Dutch East Indies which the Europeans barely understood if at all, and that was undermining their sense of omnipotence everyday. This is associated with certain supernatural occurences, which Couperus uses as a metaphor for a whole world that the West simply didn’t see or know existed. That’s the hidden force. It’s about the illusion of Western omnipotence. Yes it has, but what Couperus saw was that no amount of bullying will in the end lead to mastering countries which one doesn’t understand. It’s interesting to think how many literary masterpieces Western European colonial rule of Asia has produced. There’s not that many, because very few were so clear sighted. Forster and Couperus were, without having a political agenda. They just saw more clearly and more profoundly than most people did at the time."

"The Quiet American is much more about America than it is about Indo-China. The titular character is an idealistic young man in Indo-China, probably working for the CIA, whose well-meaning actions cause havoc. That is a sort of microcosm for what has actually happened in various parts of the world because of American intervention. The Dutch and the British colonial enterprise was largely a commercial one, or in both cases it certainly began as a commercial enterprise, by traders. But the American attitude towards the non-Western world, from the late 19th century onwards, has been of a different kind. The Americans of course see themselves as being on the side of the anti-imperialists, as they fought an anti-colonial war themselves with Britain. So they couldn’t think of themselves as imperialists, even if they were – specifically in the Philipinnes, which they ran as their own colony. But there has been a strong sense of misguided idealism. This is something to do with the missionary spirit, and the Americans have been very active in that sense. But it’s also to do with the way in which Americans see themselves as having a mission to bring their concept of freedom, equality and democracy to the rest of the world. That’s rather akin to France, and both are Western democracies born from revolution. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are two conflicting tendencies. One is to see West and East as two totally different worlds – that they must all be different to us. But it’s equally a mistake to think that we’re all the same and share all the same values – that there is no distinction. The thing to get rid of first is the notion that there is such a thing as the East. Because there isn’t. The differences inside what is geographically Asia are vast, so there is no such thing as the East really. There are certain things that so-called Confucian cultures have in common, and other things that they don’t. There are certain things that the Muslim world has in common, but then again the differences between Iran, with its Persian tradition, and other Arabic nations are considerable. I think the idea of East and West has become defunct. You have to look at the world more closely. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I certainly think they’re less common than they were. The world has become smaller. For many people in their twenties, it has become a matter of course that they go to Asia for their holidays, or to work, or study. But different misconceptions occur, like the notion that the [success of the] Chinese model shows a kind of super efficiency on the side of the Chinese. Some people tend to idealise the Chinese model. The notion of oriental cruelty may not yet be completely dispelled. There are bound to still be misconceptions. Then again, there are clichés among European countries that are still at play. It’s about what happened when World War Two was over – about the consequences, and how a new world was created out of the ashes. The world that my generation grew up in is now rapidly coming to an end – I mean the institutions or ideals of a united Europe, the United Nations, the welfare state and so on. But it’s also about what happens when wars devastate societies, and how you put them together again. We’re never in an entirely new era. One of the fallacies of cataclysmic years is that somehow the whole world starts all over again from year zero – which is the title of the book and how 1945 was known in Germany, Stunde Null. But of course it’s never really Stunde Null, because you inherit a great deal from history. Some things change and others don’t."