BOOKS
167
Bright Lights, Bad City
TOKYO RISING. By
Edward
Seidensticker. Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$24.95.
Nostalgia, say the wags, isn't what it used to be. But the deeper prob–
lem, in Edward Seidensticker's eyes, is that the very possibility of nostal–
gia - the future of nostalgia - is increasingly a thing of the past. Modern
Tokyo is more a place of fact than fancy. And in his yeasty new book,
which traces the history of the Japanese capital from 1923 to the present,
the distinguished scholar and translator delivers a highly idiosyncratic
ubi
sunt
to all the city's vanished delights, describing how the geisha house
has given way to the golf course as a place for business and for pleasure.
The emeritus professor from Columbia begins his book by taking pains
to point out that the title of his preceding volume (on Tokyo from
1868 to 1923) was
Low
City, High City,
and for him the low must always
take precedence over the high.
All
the aspiring virtues of modern Tokyo
- high fashion, high finance, high-tech and high-rises - he deplores; all
the smaller things - based around the low-roofed low-life of "the flower
and the willow world" - he exalts.
In
that sense, his zesty and twinkling
new book might almost be called
Tokyo Declining.
What Seidensticker
loves about his adopted home are its byways and back alleyways, its
curlicues and curves - the maze of its irregularity - and that is what he
reproduces too: his book is a kind of discursive ramble around the
pungent side streets, the crooked corners, the curious nooks of Tokyo's
past. After years of translating Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, and even
Genji,
Seidensticker the prolific scholar has earned the right to a holiday,
and this is a book, for and about, diversion.
For all his observation of the academic's old-fashioned proprieties
(not a single "I" in three-hundred forty-five pages of strikingly personal
prose), Seidensticker remains very much his own man, "a quirkish man"
at that, like his beloved Kafu ("the Scribbler"), blessed with a healthy
appetite for all things savory and unsavory. Not the least of the pleasures
of his book, in fact, comes from the sight of the raffish old professor
training his scholarly eye on the outre and the risque - diligently
tabulating the number of whores in every district, solemnly assessing the
virtues of "a spider man and a woman who smoked through her navel,"
performing a rigorous
explication du texte
on a map of a red-light district
where "complete nudity and the most wanton of dances prevail." When
he sorts through old demography charts, it is to tell us that, less than
forty years ago, there were barely a dozen hotels in all Tokyo, as against
4,000 inns,
3,000
of which were devoted to amorous couplings
