Books: Rising Sun and Shady Nights

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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