![]() Were I to name the writer who has struck the deepest chord with me in this respect, it would be Izumi Kyoka. One cannot avoid seeing and thinking of it, though, at times judgmentally, at times sympathetically, but never with indifference. What I was looking for and have found, heartbreakingly, here is a dark and unsettling truth that, once one touches it, one cannot but recoil-in horror, in disgust, and, above all, in sadness. While I did feel the initial attraction for the quaint and pretty vanishing Japan of the Western exotes-Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, Wenceslau de Moraes-it soon struck me as stereotypical, remote, outdated. Something I cannot fully explain but that is at once universal and unique, as is the hallmark of all great art. ![]() It was in certain Japanese writers, in their words and images, that I have found something which resonates deeply within me and with which I have played hide-and-seek ever since. Yet, at the same time, mine was always a Japan of the mind, because fundamentally mediated by literature. I was never one to seek company among groups of expats, be they struggling academic researchers or well-off Roppongi types. ![]() ![]() My view of Japan was always from the ground, between the country and the city, working, living among Japanese people. Of what once brought me here, of what awoke the passion-and, later, the disappointment. ![]() In time of departures, thinking of beginnings. ![]()
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