OFF THE SHELF

Lost Japan

Alex Kerr
(Lonely Planet; 269 pages)

Purist that he is, the American-born writer Alex Kerr was reluctant to translate his original Japanese version of Lost Japan into English, letting the award-winning text remain a stranger to his first language until friends found a translator he could trust. Most of Kerr's life has been spent trying to reconcile his attraction to and anger against his adopted home. Having first moved to Japan with his family after his father, a navy officer, was transferred in 1964, he later purchased and spent years restoring a centuries-old farmhouse on the grounds of a shrine outside Kyoto. The life-style not only steeped him in traditional Japanese craftsmanship, but also mired him in local culture and the issues of modernization in a way that his Asian studies at Yale and Oxford could not.

He left this rural existence to live and work in Tokyo during the "bubble years" of the 1980s--a chance to experience the city "at the center of almost every form of dynamic cultural activity." These writings stem from the ensuing series of articles he wrote for a Japanese magazine, examining his passionate/vehement relationship with the country. He concedes to having lived in "a dream of ancient Japan" as a youth, lyrically evoked when he contemplates a tea bowl, for instance, or discusses his passion for Kabuki theater. But get him onto the subject of what he sees as the loss of this rich cultural heritage, and he turns as scathing as Prince Charles confronted by a modern block of buildings. He repeatedly rails against the physical and spiritual "uglification" he sees around him, making Japan "one of the world's ugliest countries" and its architects guilty of sins like turning Kyoto into a "historical theme park."

So why stay? Like the greedy Kabuki heroine, Kasane, who pulls her lover into the grave, Japan's "ghostly fingers reach out and pull me back." The Japanese edition stirred controversy in Japan even before winning its prestigious Shincho Gakugei literary prize--the first work by a foreigner to do so--and the English translation won the Asian Pacific Publishers Association Gold Prize for 1997. In either language, it's an opinionated and thoughtful read.