Reminiscences of Donald Richie

On Jan 20, 2021, notice of the obituary of Mary Smith (1930-2020), former wife of Donald Richie, was posted on the Writers in Kyoto Facebook public page. This prompted discussion of the renowned Japanologist, which led to personal reminiscences by Alex Kerr and Everett Kennedy Brown.

John Dougill initiated the discussion: Donald Richie once recommended me to read his former wife’s portrait of him in a novel called A Romantic Education. I only got round to reading it last autumn, and was surprised by the unflattering characterisation. Brutally honest is how I would describe it, and you could say there are one or two passages in The Inland Sea too that hint at awkward truths. Now comes word that Richie’s former wife has died, apparently on Christmas Day last year. She had an obituary in the NY Times on Jan 10.

There followed comments about Richie’s sexuality, to which Alex Kerr responded as follows:

Donald Richie was a complex character. He was a scholar and intellectual who played harpsichord, read widely in all the literature of east and west, and devoted himself to the craft of writing, publishing dozens of books as well as a book review column in the Japan Times for years. At the same time, he was indeed sex obsessed, and his kinks included not only voyeurism, but a kind of exhibitionism, in which he delighted in showing people the grungy side of his own nature – which is why he wouldn’t have been offended by his wife’s book. He loved to shock, and was amused when proper people found his comments offensive. He reveled in the contrast between his Dr Jekyll literary self, and his Mr Hyde sexual adventurer. As a gay man with a curious bisexual side, his adventures were as complicated as he was.

Donald followed in the footsteps of French intellectuals such as Proust and Genet, who loved the “nostalgie de la boue” (nostalgia of the mud). In Japan, he was fascinated not by “high culture” like Noh, Kabuki, tea ceremony etc, but the low life, the soft underbelly of society, which he described like no other. He used to take me and other friends on his personal “Tokyo tour” of slums near Ueno, Shinjuku, and other places, where he was fascinated by gangsters, homeless, sex workers, foreign laborers from Iran, and so on. Nobody has written more eloquently about this seamy, usually well-hidden, side of Japanese life.

Finally, there’s another aspect to Donald Richie, which was his love of the Japanese avant garde of the 1950s through the 1970s. That led him to champion Japanese film, become a close friend of Mishima, a supporter of Butoh’s Hijikata, and many others. Few foreigners – nay no other foreigner in the 21st century achieved the kind of friendships that Donald had with the leaders of what was at the time, “counter-culture.” The Japanese avant-garde of those days was sexually liberated but also truly bizarre and kinky (see the writings of Ian Buruma, who was one of Richie’s disciples). Donald was fascinated by the way Japan ran against all the accepted life-trueisms of the West, with sex especially, but with everything else. He remained a Western intellectual to the end of his days, but he was also a product of Japan.

Everett Kennedy Brown then wrote….

I found Donald Richie very forthcoming with his stories of his experiences with gay culture in Japan. It was particularly interesting how he would describe the qualities of young men from different regions of Japan in epicurean detail. I asked him to write these stories down, maybe not to be published while he was alive, but for posterity. I don’t know if he ever did that. We first met at his apartment overlooking Ueno. He wanted to show me photos he had of Yukio Mishima standing in the snow, nude and beautiful with a samurai sword in his hand. The photos were taken by Tomotsu Yato, a talented photographer and former flamenco dancer who lived with Donald Richie and Meredith Weatherby in a fine old house near Roppongi crossing. The house and garden became the setting for many of the nude male photos Yato took during his short career.

Alex Kerr: That house belonged to Meredith Weatherby, founder of Weatherhill Books, which published some of the great books about Japan. Urasenke’s Tankosha bought out Weatherhill and also the house which was later torn down. I used to stay there some times.

Everett Kennedy Brown: Donald and I worked on a project to make Yato’s work known. He entrusted me with Yato’s negatives to make prints that we published in the 44th edition of Kyoto Journal. Donald wrote a fine essay that I recommend anyone interested in this subject to read.

I printed the photographs in the days before negative scanners were available and I deeply regret that I did not refuse to give those negatives back to Donald. Those negatives are now gone. Nobody knows of their whereabouts. A fascinating chapter of Japanese history is again being forgotten.

Alex Kerr
What a pity! Donald talked a lot about those negatives, and I was wondering where they had gone.

**********************

In respect of the above, John Einarsen, managing editor of Kyoto Journal, was kind enough to provide a link to a conversation with Donald Richie from the April 2014 edition, in which Richie describes himself as a self-revelatory writer. There is a strong sense of Lost Japan about the interview.

Quote: “Japanese have many times told me that they consider Tokyo to be a very cold city, compared to, say, Osaka. Of course, the coldest city is Kyoto. It’s like Boston unless you are well-connected there. This is true, not particularly of foreigners, but of the Japanese themselves. Unless they’re born there, they simply don’t want to live in Kyoto. So if Kyoto is zero degrees, we get up to a sort of livable heat in Osaka, then someplace in between is frigid Tokyo.”

Also thanks to John Einarsen for drawing our attention to Notes on Tamotsu Yato, pictured below, the photographer mentioned by Everett Kennedy Brown. The feature appeared in Kyoto Journal, no. 44.