By Jonathan Clements.

Poor boy that I am, when I arrived in Japan I did so knowing nobody and nothing – author Ian Buruma turns out to have the Hollywood director John Schlesinger for an uncle, and an oil-business bigwig with a Tokyo mansion for a “distant relative” in 1975. He also already has a Japanese girlfriend ready to up stakes and return to her homeland with him – poor Sumie Tani is relegated to the margins of a book called A Tokyo Romance – barely mentioned in the first 40 pages, as Buruma bums around town meeting people who boast they knew Yukio Mishima.

Eventually, he gets around to talking about the woman who must have played a major role in luring him to Japan in the first place, grudgingly ticking off her family history, and observing, with a trenchant eye, that the supposed harmony of multi-generational Japanese family life was utter bilge, and that having seen Sumie’s parents and siblings bickering with her grandfather, he could totally understand why so many modern Japanese ran gratefully for the isolation of suburban tower blocks. But there is little more of her in this book, and a couple of chapters later, she is discarded as easily as Pinkerton casts aside his Butterfly. At the very end, she wanders back in, still without anything to say, to marry him, although he mentions within a sentence or two that they would also get divorced.

A Tokyo Romance is not about that sort of romance. It’s about the young Buruma’s deluded, whimsical obsession with a distant land to which he, like many expats, flees because of the privilege it offers him for being different – a rebellion, he confesses, not against Japan, but against the home he left behind. It all starts for him with a screening of Francois Truffaut’s Bed & Board (pictured), in which he falls in love with the character of Kyoko, “willowy, with long shiny black hair and dark eyes set in a pale moon face... I wanted a Kyoko in my life, perhaps even more than one. How happy I would be in a land of Kyokos.” Continue Reading