Rising Sun and Shady Nights

By Paul Gray

Some three months after arriving in Tokyo to study the Japanese language and culture, an Englishman in his mid 20s happens upon a restaurant where he thinks he can find some pizza and beer. After checking his coat, he is horrified to be presented with a cloakroom tab for more than the garment is worth. While he tries haltingly to talk his way out of this mess, he is rescued by Ichimonji, an older and evidently much wealthier man. This patron takes the young foreigner under his protection and guides him through an evening of serious drinking at a succession of night spots, culminating at a hole in the wall where a pretty barmaid agrees to dance naked for just the two of them. The student hears the term mizu-shobai for the first time and later learns what it means: the water trade, the fly-by-night world of bars, baths and brothels to which Ichimonji has given him an introduction. The next morning, the visitor wakes up with the woozy feeling that "overnight he had arrived in Japan."

Judging a civilization on the basis of its raffish after-hours entertainments poses certain problems. There may be aspects of the British, for instance, that are not clearly visible from a strip joint in Soho. But John David Morley, 37, never pretends to have found all there is to learn about Japan. He simply notices, as have others, that the drinking behavior of Japanese males is looser than the polite but evasive demeanor they customarily display. The Westerner who can inconspicuously swim along with these schools of nightly revelers will almost certainly see much that is barred to casual or sober tourists. Morley did so and managed to keep his head clear enough to bring back a number of shady moments from the land of the rising sun.

He records the behavior of some Japanese friends in a Tokyo cabaret, how they "sat down with the hostesses they had been assigned and almost at once reached out for their breasts as nonchalantly as they helped themselves to fruit on the table." He observes the clownish scenes that take place each night at subway stations as impeccable railway attendants try to steer hordes of drunks toward their trains. He hears sad stories that would never have escaped without the lubricant of booze. At one bar, a fellow drinker confides that his wife is pregnant and his salary insufficient to support a child. Ultimately, Morley is invited to sleep off the hours before daybreak at this man's apartment. At breakfast the next morning, the host's confessional manner has vanished: "Sober now, restored to the real world, he probably felt ashamed."

For all Morley's "studious dissipation," Pictures from the Water Trade is more than a besotted travelogue. The author assumes that what happens at night to "millions of ordinary married men" must somehow be connected to the lives they lead each day. He asks questions and is repeatedly answered with the term uchi. This word essentially means "home" or "household," but it can also expand to encompass any group that commands an individual's loyalty. These units may range from a person's immediate family to his employer and corporate colleagues to, when confronted with the world outside, the entire nation of Japan. And an uchi, whether tiny or huge, is no place to have fun. Morley meets one man who remembers a childhood spent harvesting rice with relatives. When someone went away, no matter how briefly or how valid the excuse, he carried the guilty sense of increasing the load on everyone who was left behind. The man's conclusion: "The idea of pleasure thus came to be associated with physical separation from the uchi, and this way of thinking still holds good today." That, Morley decides, may help explain the nightly spectacles he has been privileged to observe. "The water trade was a valve. This was where the strain of Japanese society was borne."

The strain of this life takes its toll upon the narrator as well. For one thing, Morley refers to himself throughout his book in the third person, using the fictional name Boon. He never explains why, but this studied avoidance of the first-person pronoun may reflect the self-effacement that speakers of Japanese habitually display. Moreover, the better Boon gets at imitating the talk and manners of his hosts, the more he feels his identity as a Westerner fading away. Into his third year in Japan, he finds himself bowing ritually to a voice on the telephone and decides it is time to go home. He now lives and works in Munich.

The attempt by Morley/Boon to merge with an alien culture constitutes an intriguing psychodrama. Had he become any more Japanese, he might have succumbed to discreet silence. Pictures from the Water Trade subvert platitudinous assumptions about the oneness of human nature. The people in this book, even in their cups, would have little to reveal to outsiders were it not for the intercession of a sympathetic interpreter. Fortunately, Morley was on hand when talk and sake flowed. He offers some out-of-the-way but essential trails in the ongoing stampede to understand Japan. --By Paul Gray