As I walk along the shores of Shinobazu no Ike I now think of the many times I met Seidensticker there, as he slowly wandered about, looking (though fatter) much like a latter-day Kafū himself. And when we talked about literature we always talked about Kafū. One of his regrets, he said, was that he had never met the great author. He knew Kawabata and Tanizaki, Mishima and others, but he had never met Kafū, the author he most admired.
Since Kafū was also my own favorite Japanese author, he became one of the things that Ed and I had in common. We also both favored a certain kind of English author who, like Kafū, had an immaculate style and an anomalous taste for the past: authors such as Thomas Love Peacock, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ronald Firbank.
And Jane Austen. We were both besotted with her six novels, read them all the time, even formed an unauthorized Jane Austen Society of Japan (along with Shulamith Rubinfein and Sheelagh Cluny), just for ourselves. Such tastes might be thought narrow but they had admirable results. Whenever I reread Seidensticker’s Genji, I see that the tone, the mood, the feeling of this translation—its lightness, its rightness—owe much to his admiration for Jane Austen. She is standing there, just behind Murasaki Shikibu.
Sometimes in my evening walks around Shinobazu I would discover Ed on one of the benches, sitting there, regarding the pond. Sometimes he had been drinking (he liked shochu), sometimes not. Whichever, we always talked about the same things. I remember one such conversation. “I am delighted to see you,” he said. “For I have something to tell you. My afternoon was spent with Abe Kobo and we spoke of his style, and he said that critics always said that the influence was Franz Kafka, but they were absolutely wrong. The real influence was Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t that nice? Lewis Carroll!”
But then Seidensticker’s physical problems began. He conquered his liking for shochu, but he had two hip replacements and could never properly walk after that. I would sometimes see him hobbling about Shinobazu of an evening, but gradually he stopped coming—he fell down too often. Instead we would meet, once a week or so, at an Ueno Indian restaurant we both liked and which he could reach by taxi.
Having much criticized Showa Japan while we were still in it, he was now praising the immediate postwar years because he found so much wrong with Heisei Japan. During our later meetings it was the contemporary young that irritated him the most with their laziness, their rudeness, their narcissistic ways. He remembered how much nicer the young people of Showa Japan had seemed, those he had formerly criticized just as bitterly. And we often (like Kafu, like all old people) remembered a kind of beauty which, whether or not it had actually existed, lived on in us.
Seidensticker was not only a bunjin and a splendid translator, he was also a man who (like Kafū) had the highest standards and was honest enough to criticize what he loved. He cared deeply for Japan, more so than many another foreigner, more so than many Japanese. Perhaps that was why he was on the shores of Shinobazu Pond on the day of the accident, April 26, 2007. It had been an unusually warm spring day with sun and the promise of summer. Now, as evening approached and the long shadows spread across the waters, it was perhaps because of a wish to enjoy this that he left the taxi and walked as best he could through the park on his way to the Indian restaurant and dinner with me and our friend Patrick Lovell.
Now when I take my stroll around the pond I always pass the small staircase down which he fell that day and fractured his skull. It is very short, just five steps, but falling from the top one was enough to put him into the coma that lasted four months to the day, ending with his death on August 26.
And then as I continue around the pond I see in the distance that some one is sitting on the bench where we used to sit. It has grown dark now—it is twilight, a star or two has appeared. I walk nearer to the seated person. I know that it is not my friend, Edward Seidensticker, but I wish it were.
Donald Richie
Used with permission of International House of Japan. This material originally appeared in the IHJ Bulletin and is an expanded version of an obituary which appeared in Japanese in the magazine Ueno, a publication for which Seidensticker regularly wrote.
BOOK ONE
LOW CITY, HIGH CITY
Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
When young, I did not dedicate books. Dedications seemed over-blown and showy. It is too late to begin; but if this book carried a dedication, it would be to the memory of Nagai Kafū.
Though he was not such a good novelist, he has come to seem better and better at what he was good at. He was his best in brief lyrical passages and not in sustained narrative and dramatic ones. He is the novelist whose views of the world’s most consistently interesting city accord most closely with my own. He has been my guide and companion as I have explored and dreamed and meditated upon the city.
I do not share his yearning for Edo, the city when it was still the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns and before it became the Eastern Capital. The Tokugawa Period is somehow dark and menacing. Too many gifted people were squelched, and, whether gifted or not, I always have the feeling about Edo that, had I been there, I would have been among the squelched ones.
I share Kafū’s affection for the part of the city which had its best day then. The twilight of that day lasted through the succeeding Meiji reign and down to the great earthquake. It is the Shitamachi, the plebeian flatlands, which I here call the Low City. Meiji was when the changes that made Japan modern and economically miraculous were beginning. Yet the Low City had not lost its claim to the cultural hegemony which it had clearly possessed under the Tokugawa.
Many exciting things have occurred in the six decades since the earthquake, which is slightly farther from the present than from the beginning of Meiji. Another book asks to be written, about those decades and especially the ones since the surrender. Perhaps it will be written, but it would have to be mostly about the other half (these days considerably more than half), the hilly High City, the Yamanote. That is where the artist and the intellectual, and to an increasing extent the manager and the magnate, have been. If there is less in this book about the High City than the Low City, it is because one is not drawn equally to everything in a huge and complex city, and a book whose beginnings lie in personal experience does have a way of turning to what interests and pleases.
Kafū was an elegist, mourning the death of Edo and lamenting the emergence of modern Tokyo. With such a guide and companion, an elegiac tone is bound to emerge from time to time. The departure of the old and the emergence of the new are inextricably entwined, of course. Yet, because the story of what happened to Edo is so much the story of the Low City, matters in which it was not interested do not figure much. It was not an intellectual sort of place, nor was it strongly politi cal. Another consideration has urged the elimination of political and intellectual matters: the fact that Tokyo became the capital of Japan in 1868. A distinction may be made between what occurred in the city because it was the capital, and what occurred because it was a city.
So this book contains little political and intellectual history, and not much more literary and economic history. The major exception in literary matters is the drama, the great love of the Edo townsman. The story of what happened to Kabuki is central to the story of the city, and not that of the capital. The endeavor to describe a changing city as if it were an organism is perhaps not realistic, since cities change in all ways and directions, as organisms and specific institutions do not. The subject here is the changing city all the same, the legacy of Edo and what happened to it. To a much smaller degree is it the story