The Inland Sea
by
by
Pico Iyer (Introduction)
Creative Obituary for a Lost Culture
As an expatriate, I understand Richie’s feelings toward Japan. Paradoxically only a foreigner can appreciate what the native takes for granted. And those who are culturally changing aren’t in the position of a non-native to articulate or appreciate the changes they’re experiencing. Richie’s admiration for Japan is tempered by his recognition that the post-war ‘economic miracle’ of Japan already had had serious cultural consequences when he wrote in 1971. Almost an half century later, after the financial collapse of the Japanese economy in the 1990’s, it has become clear that if anything he underestimated the social consequences of rapid growth, urban migration, and the loss of traditional family and civic relationships.
But The Inland Sea is only nominally about Japan and its changing culture. It’s more enduring commentary is really about the author himself. Richie is an interesting and attractive character, whose responses to the people and places he encounters in Japan are wonderfully detailed biographical revelations. He is droll, charming, sensitive, discerning, exceptionally articulate, impatient with aesthetic flaw, tolerant of the dirt and muck of human toil, wonderfully opinionated, urbane but with a dislike of modern urbanity, and acutely self-aware. It is no stretch at all to interpret The Inland Sea as referring at least as much to Richie’s own internal psychic inventory as it is to that finger of the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and its people. Both, I find, are equally fascinating.
Richie’s prose reminds me of that of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in whom I find the same engaging ambiguity of objective place and subjective person. When Richie says, for example “Words make you visible in Japan. Until you speak, until you commit yourself to communication, you are not visible at all,” he simultaneously refers to himself and the country. He makes no secret of the congruity he finds between himself and Japan as the reason for his affection for the country: “Japan, then—to answer this perennial question—allows me to like myself because it agrees with me and I with it.” Of course he is projecting himself into the culture and interpreting what he finds there creatively. But why not? What better way is there to be able to understand, or to communicate, oneself than to project oneself onto the big screen of such a refined civilisation in order to investigate the result? And, of course, to mourn and to repent of one’s own mistakes.
As an expatriate, I understand Richie’s feelings toward Japan. Paradoxically only a foreigner can appreciate what the native takes for granted. And those who are culturally changing aren’t in the position of a non-native to articulate or appreciate the changes they’re experiencing. Richie’s admiration for Japan is tempered by his recognition that the post-war ‘economic miracle’ of Japan already had had serious cultural consequences when he wrote in 1971. Almost an half century later, after the financial collapse of the Japanese economy in the 1990’s, it has become clear that if anything he underestimated the social consequences of rapid growth, urban migration, and the loss of traditional family and civic relationships.
But The Inland Sea is only nominally about Japan and its changing culture. It’s more enduring commentary is really about the author himself. Richie is an interesting and attractive character, whose responses to the people and places he encounters in Japan are wonderfully detailed biographical revelations. He is droll, charming, sensitive, discerning, exceptionally articulate, impatient with aesthetic flaw, tolerant of the dirt and muck of human toil, wonderfully opinionated, urbane but with a dislike of modern urbanity, and acutely self-aware. It is no stretch at all to interpret The Inland Sea as referring at least as much to Richie’s own internal psychic inventory as it is to that finger of the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and its people. Both, I find, are equally fascinating.
Richie’s prose reminds me of that of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in whom I find the same engaging ambiguity of objective place and subjective person. When Richie says, for example “Words make you visible in Japan. Until you speak, until you commit yourself to communication, you are not visible at all,” he simultaneously refers to himself and the country. He makes no secret of the congruity he finds between himself and Japan as the reason for his affection for the country: “Japan, then—to answer this perennial question—allows me to like myself because it agrees with me and I with it.” Of course he is projecting himself into the culture and interpreting what he finds there creatively. But why not? What better way is there to be able to understand, or to communicate, oneself than to project oneself onto the big screen of such a refined civilisation in order to investigate the result? And, of course, to mourn and to repent of one’s own mistakes.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ June 07, 2018
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