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the beloved dog commemorated in Tokyo's most famous statue, was not
entirely disinterested. Yet most of his regrets are those of a disappointed
lover. The central thrust of his narrative and the city it describes is the
gradual shift of power from Asakusa to Shinjuku, and, by extension,
from the atmospheric demimonde that fascinated Kawabata and Kafu, to
an odorless, bureaucratized, impersonal world where poetry is foreign.
Though this is a lament one might equally hear from a long- time
resident put out by the gentrification of Greenwich Village or Covent
Garden or Montmartre, Seidensticker infuses it with a peculiarly Japanese
kind of sadness. Like Tanizaki in his famous hymn to shadows, or
Mishima railing against the treacheries of modernity, Seidensticker is
describing a Japan that seems almost to be becoming a simplification of
itself, a country, one might say, that sees itself always on television. In
some respects, he suggests, the problem is not that Edoites are becoming
too American, but rather too Japanese; at the same time, however, they
are beginning to import some decidedly Occidental moral qualms (where
the old pleasure places were frankly open to the world, love-hotels now
encourage furtiveness and even guilt).
Indeed, perhaps the greatest of all the book's redeeming virtues is
that Seidensticker preserves a staunch - and very Japanese - refusal of all
prudishness, based on his unswerving belief that sensual pleasure and a life
of principle are far from incompatible. If there is anything he scrupulously
opposes, it is moralism, and if there are any villains here, they are only
planners, policemen, and puritans . After prostitution was banned, he
notes with relish, there was a sharp rise in the number of prostitutes, and
he measures Tokyo governors by the juiciness of the scandals they pro–
duce. Unapologetically opposed to everything suburban, Seidensticker
lingers over the golden age of street-walking, extols the comic mono–
logue, and laments "the absence of women from recent annals of crime."
His view, in short, is that of the most exacting of aesthetes. In that, as in
his conoisseurship of pleasure, and in the pleasure he finds in melancholy,
the old professor proves himself an ideal successor to the writers he has
always served and loved - Kafu, Kawabata, and Tanizaki - and in
Tokyo
Rising
he has fashioned a tribute to them all in what is the most elegant
and evergreen ofJapanese forms, the pleasure-loving elegy.
PICO IYER
