A wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.
An enticing memoir of a young Western artist in 1970s Japan.
Now a veteran author and editor of the New York Review of Books, Buruma (Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War, 2016, etc.) was a restless youth anxious to escape his middle-class life. He was a devotee of the local art theater, especially a bizarre performance by a Japanese theater group (“like squinting through the keyhole of a grotesque peep show full of extraordinary goings on….It brought back old memories of magic boxes, lit from the inside, full of strange objects I had concocted with a child’s morbid imagination”). Following college (major: Chinese), the author obtained a scholarship to a Japanese film school and set off, arriving in 1975. Film school proved a disappointment, but Buruma had come to experience Japan and perhaps explore his own budding sexuality. Readers familiar with the tea ceremony, martial arts, and ancient temples will receive a jolt as the author immerses himself in the art scene of a nation with a tolerance for grotesquery, including depictions of violence and sex, that puts America’s to shame. “I had never lived in a country where the culture of advertising, popular media, and entertainment was as drenched in erotic fantasies as Japan,” writes the author. “The pornographic imagination was not furtive and marginal, as in many countries, but entirely upfront.” While some autobiographies pay close attention to the facts, this isn’t necessarily the case here, but most readers will accept that what Buruma chooses to remember takes priority over what actually happened. He vividly describes a naïve youth plunging into a fantastical foreign culture, taking readers along on an entertaining journey of self- and cultural discovery.
A wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98141-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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