Buruma casts an emollient eye over the multiple and overlapping ways that he felt like an outsider in Japan. He often received special treatment as a gaijin, but just as often it was made clear to him that he would never get as close to this culture as he wanted ... Buruma is a keen observer and the owner of a well-provisioned mind. There are smart little junkets in this book into everything from Japanese movies...to the country’s tattooing culture ... His prose is unflaggingly good ... For a book that is largely about extreme experience, in terms of art and life, he is perhaps overly discreet about his own emotions and behavior. Whenever you sense he is about to open a door, he instead drops you at the curb.
Buruma, who went on to have a brilliant career as a journalist, succeeding Robert Silvers last year as editor of The New York Review of Books, where he was a longtime contributor, is an unusually lucid writer ... While the book occasionally gets bogged down in excruciating detail about movies only the most ardent cinephile would care about, Buruma paints a vivid portrait of his often mind-boggling encounters with the motley collection of artists, expats and eccentrics he befriended over his six years in Tokyo. And his honesty is disarming.
With the insight and curiosity of someone on the outside looking in, Buruma describes a transformational moment in the making of modern Japanese culture.
Sometimes the entertainment on show or under discussion is seedy, sometimes it is sensational, but always it is interesting ... Hectic and hedonistic, 'theatrical, even hallucinatory,” Tokyo ends up bowling us over as it did Buruma all those years ago ... This is a thoroughly engrossing memoir about a young man in a strange land. Buruma explores it, discovers its art, and along the way finds himself.
A Tokyo Romance is a vivid account of what it is like to create your truest self by moving away from all that is familiar to embrace a foreign culture and country ... The years of glittering surfaces, of living as a foreigner who’s invited behind closed doors, have given him much. A Tokyo Romance is also about what to do when the romance ends, when it’s wise to take the plane out, turning to see a last glimpse of Mount Fuji from the window.
It is a triumphal narrative of how determination, charm, readiness and linguistic fluency allowed the author to penetrate one of the world’s most insular societies, beginning as an enthusiast for the country’s avant-garde culture and ultimately becoming part of that culture ... There is a touch of the erotic throughout his exegesis, but there is also a feeling of linguistic and cultural diligence, of the author’s effort to learn this new place ... he treats his old self with a sort of avuncular geniality, as though to say, 'Yes, we are foolish when we are young, but oh, how lovely it all was.'
Readers familiar with the tea ceremony, martial arts, and ancient temples will receive a jolt as the author immerses himself into the art scene of a nation with a tolerance for grotesquery, including depictions of violence and sex that put America to shame ... The reward is a wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.
