Review | Memoir offers insight into 1970s Tokyo, through the eyes of a foreigner

A Tokyo Romance
by Ian Buruma
Penguin Press

4/5 stars

Ian Buruma may have started his academic life as a Sinologist, but it is Japan, he writes, that “was the making of me”. A Dutchman (with a British mother), he arrived in Tokyo in 1975 eager for experience, and in his six years there he studied its people and culture, allowing him to begin explaining Japan to the rest of the world.

His mentor, Donald Richie, who introduced Japanese cinema to the West, helped with connections, although just being a Westerner gave our young subject unusual access to luminaries, especially in film and theatre (among them filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, in whose 1980 movie Kagemusha, both men appeared as Portuguese missionaries).

The pair had met through John Roderick, a veteran American reporter who spent part of the war in China with Mao Zedong’s Communist guerillas. Just as Buruma vicariously enjoyed the escapades of Richie (who loved discussing his gay sex life), readers should delight in this sepia-toned snapshot of Tokyo at a specific time, through the lens of a gaijin (foreigner) who, like Richie, doesn’t fight his outsider status.