How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Francis King
A CIRCLE ROUND THE SUN: A FOREIGNER IN JAPAN by Peregrine Hodson Heinemann, £16.99, pp. 307 In this wonderfully observant book, Peregrine Hodson writes of two totally dif- ferent Japanese worlds. The first is the world of remote shrines and temples, of gay bars and strip clubs, of hot-spring resorts, cherry-blossom-viewing and the kind of landscape which inspired Basho and Hiroshige. The second is the world of the hard-working, ambitious, often devious Japanese sa'ariman, whose days, and some- times even nights, are spent sitting or standing between rows of computer termi- nals in an attempt to make himself rich and his firm and country even richer. As Hod- son himself puts it, listening to the sound of water trickling into a pool and watching the shapes and colours of mountains emerge in the early morning light is one Japan; talking with people in banks and discussing money and politics in expensive bars and restaurants is another.
Of the first of these two Japans, many English writers, myself among them, have written at length, in love and admiration; few have written about the second. It is, above all, for this reason that Hodson's book is to be welcomed.
Previously employed in the Japanese department of a European bank in London — as a Japanese speaker, he was supposed to develop business in Japan — he sudden- ly found himself seconded to the bank's office in Tokyo. There, his superiors and colleagues, both Japanese and Western, seemed averse to giving him anything to do; and he himself, to judge from his narra- tive., was more interested in commenting on events and people into a small tape- recorder than in getting out, acquiring clients and making his bank some money.
This tape-recorder provides a problem for both the reader and, to a greater degree, for his immediate boss and fellow employees. Did Hodson really, the reader must speculate, speak his impressions into a tape-recorder when walking down the street, attending a party, eating in a restau- rant or travelling in an overcrowded com- muter train? Or is this merely a literary pretence to make a largely first-person narrative seem even more immediate and therefore vivid? If the tape-recorder did indeed accompany him everywhere, then it is easy to see why his colleagues get miffed. Indeed, at the close of the book, one of them, an Italian woman, gets so miffed that she hurls a glass at him in her office, screaming 'Get out, get out, get out!' No doubt she, along with the rest of them, is by now under the impression that he is some kind of spy.
In turn, Hodson himself seems to be suf- fering from paranoia, leaving hairs between the pages of books or pellets made of dust and fluff between the door frames of his apartment, in an attempt to discover whether his colleagues are spying on him. Eventually he decides that they are, after he hears ominous clicks on his telephone before he can dial. Such a possibility cer- tainly cannot be ruled out, since most of the people at the bank are (if one is to believe him) so treacherous and nasty; but it is odd that he should have started taking his precautions almost as soon as he arrives.
Hodson's delineation of his businessmen, in their Aquascutum raincoats, Austin Reed jackets and Hermes ties, constantly talking about money when they are not engaged in making it, is a chilling one. Having seen the price of a stock which he recommended go up by ten per cent, one of them, an American, says: 'Can you imag- ine what it feels like? Orgasmic. It's better than sex. It's power.' Such characters seem to bear as little relationship to real people as the plastic models of food exhibited in the windows of Japanese restaurants bear to the meals served up inside. No less chill- ing are Hodson's evocations of those public exhibitions of sex, heterosexual and homo- sexual, which Japanese businessmen offer to foreign visitors in the same spirit of hospitality as they offer them visits to a geisha-party, kebuki or sumo.
Hodson describes everything he sees with remarkable vividness, contrasting a world of bond-dealers, dainty but ruthless women who say 'Bulls-hit', meals of bifu-baaga (beefburger) in the local Makudonarudo, with another world — is it perhaps now no more than a myth, albeit a myth in which the Japanese still believe, he asks near the close — of such things as the moon rising over a shrine, the tea-ceremony in some quiet corner of a temple, soaring moun- tains, wooded valleys, thatched dwellings. As in a Japanese sumie painting, there are lacunae in his narrative, particularly when he describes his emotional life with a series of women, European and Japanese; but paradoxically this fragmentariness only
gives more force to the eventual design.
In the end, Hodson leaves Japan disillu- sioned. One of the foreigners whom he meets in Tokyo tells him: 'Living in Japan is a mind-over-matter experience. They don't mind and you don't matter.' This is, in effect, also Hodson's own conclusion, at least as far as the bank is concerned. `Looking for the real Japan was like trying to catch the moon's reflection in a tea-pot, since it existed only in my imagination,' he sums up. There is no code or secret lan- guage, as he once imagined, to reveal the kokoro or heart of the country to him; the koan (Zen riddle) is really meaningless.
Fortunately, in his fruitless search for the answer to that koan, he found much else with which to beguile, astonish, shock and amuse the reader.
Previous page
