312
I'AI~
TISAN REVIEW
crything, and you makc hcr laugh. And thcn you suggest dancing.
Beforc you leave, you tcll her that if you do not sec her again, you
will bccomc very ill, you will be hospitalized. Whell she hears that,
she will give you her phone nUlllber. That is the first Illeeting."
Such is the folkore you pick up in the first month in Japan, and Alec
never gets beyond it. At the end, he is no more than a frequent flyer who
gets his ticket punched in all the fashionable places. That isn't just because
he is a very young man or because Japan is hard to know, but because he
has bad manners, and without good manners you are condemned to re–
main on the outside ofJapanese life, your face pressed to the
sl/(~ii
screen
as you try
to
imagine what passion and mystery arc sequestered on the
other side.
While the thoughtless, self-absorbed hero is a stapk of contemporary
fiction,
I'm
not sure that Schwartz intended Alec to be quite so callow or
unmannered. People take care of him and he utters not a word of grati–
tude, not even a simple
dO/llo.
He lives with the Hasagawas, who feed
him, shelter him, and provide him with family and friendship, but if Alec
ever expresses an ounce of gratitude, I fail to find it. So [,r as I can tell, he
never presents a gift, and for a
.I!a;;ill
to live in Japan oblivious to the rule
of gifts is to live up to the most derogatory connotation of that word:
barbarian.
(Ca(iill
docs not in [ICt translate well into English: neither
"foreigner," "alien," "outsider," nor even "barbarian" quite captures the
condescension implied in the word.
Ca;;ill,
however, translates perfectly
into Yiddish:
goy.)
The women in Akc's life should have taken heed. Alec has a brief
affair with Masako, whom he meets in a bar. They bathe together and it
all seems cheerful and erotic until she falls in love with him. "I rubbu
you," she says in her poor English,
to
which he replies coldly in Japanese,
"Love is complicated."
In
seconds he is out the door. His treatment of
Kiyoko Kawashima is no better. He seduces her :1I1d then stops speaking
to her for ten days while finishing up a report
Oil
trade policy for
Compucon. Japanese husbands are notorious for such neglect, but
American young men arc supposed to have more romance in them than
that. Alec is short on romance. A business school graduate, he has an ac–
countant's soul.
I wish I could offer a better report on Jay McInerney's novel
Rallsom,
since Mcinerney, unlike the others, is a gifted and ambitious writer who
has affection for Japan and, as a sometime student in a
kar(1f£'
d(~io,
a stur–
dier relation to its culture. To turn to
RallSOlll
after the other two novels is
to encounter the work of a writer with a sardonic wit, a flair for social in–
congruity, an instinct for the comic fringe of culture, and an exacting ear
