***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Ian Buruma Chapter One The last thing he said to me, before I closed the door of his smartly decorated loft apartment in Amsterdam, was to stay away from Donald Richie''s crowd. This was in the summer of 1975. I can''t remember the name of the man who offered this advice, but I have a vague memory of what he looked like: close-cropped grey hair, hawkish nose, an elegant cotton or linen jacket: mid-sixties, I guessed, a designer perhaps, or a retired advertising executive. He had lived in Japan for some years, before retiring in Amsterdam. Donald Richie introduced Japanese cinema to the West. I knew that much about him. That he was also a novelist, the author of a famous book about traveling around the Japanese Inland Sea, much praised by Christopher Isherwood, and the director of short films that had become classics of the 1960s Japanese avant garde, I didn''t know. But I had read two of his books on Japanese movies, and was instantly drawn to the tone of his prose: witty, in a wry, detached way, and polished without being arch or prissy.

Reading Richie made me want to meet him, always a perilous step for a fan that can easily end in sharp disillusion. There was not much biographical information on the cover of his books, but his 1971 introduction to Japanese Cinema was written in New York, so I assumed that he was an American. In any case, I was still in Amsterdam, and Richie was, so far as I knew, in the US, or possibly in Japan, where I was bound in a month or two, for the first time in my life. My Pakistan International Airways ticket had been booked. My place at the film department of Nihon University College of Arts in Tokyo was secure, as was the Japanese government scholarship that would pay for my living expenses. The thought of moving to Tokyo for several years was intensely exciting but alarming too. Would I be isolated and homesick and spend much of my time writing to people six thousand miles away? Would I come back in a few months, humiliated by moral defeat? I had a Japanese girlfriend, named Sumie, who would move to Japan as well, but still. One of the most appealing features of Richie''s books on Japanese cinema was the way he used the movies to describe so much else about Japanese life.

You got a vivid idea of what people were like over there, how they behaved in love, or in anger, their bitter-sweet resignation in the face of the unavoidable, their sense of humor, sensitivity to the transience of things, the tension between personal desires and public obligations, and so on. Richie''s fond picture of Japan through its movies was not particularly exotic. But then exoticism had never been Japan''s main attraction to me anyway. Nor was I interested in traditional refinements like Zen Buddhism, or tea ceremonies, let alone the rigors of the martial arts. The imaginary characters in the movies described by Richie seemed recognizably human, more human indeed than characters in most American, or even European films I had seen. Or maybe it was the common humanity of figures in an unfamiliar setting that made it seem that way. Perhaps that is what excited me most about Japan, which was still no more than an idea, an image in my mind: the cultural strangeness mixed with that sense of raw humanity that I got from the movies, some of which I had seen in art houses in Amsterdam and London, or at the Paris Cinémathèque, and some of which I had only read about in Donald Richie''s books. I actually stumbled into Japan by accident.

Asian culture had played no part in my childhood in Holland, even though The Hague, my hometown, still had a nostalgic whiff of the "Orient", since people returning from the East Indian colonies used to retire there in large 19th century mansions near the sea, complaining of the cold climate, missing the easy life, the clubs, the tropical landscapes, and the servants. I liked Indonesian food, one of the few reminders of the recent colonial past, and the peculiar Indo-Dutch variety of Chinese cuisine: fat oversized spring rolls, thick and oily fried noodles with a fiery Indonesian sambal sauce made of chilies and garlic, the delicacy of the original coarsened by the greed of northern European appetites. My father''s elder sister had the misfortune of being sent out to the Dutch East Indies as a nannie just before World War Two, so she ended up spending most of her time in a particularly grim Japanese POW camp. So no nostalgia there. Asia meant very little to me. But ever since I can remember I dreamed of leaving the safe and slightly dull surroundings of my upper-middle-class childhood, a world of garden sprinklers, club ties, bridge parties, and the sound of tennis balls in summer. As a child, I was fascinated by the story of Aladdin, rubbing his magic lamp. It is possible that the mix of enchanted travels and faraway lands (he lived in an unspecified city in China) left a mark.

The Hague was in any case not where I intended to end up. Perhaps I was prejudiced from an early age against my native country. My mother was British, born in London, the eldest daughter in a highly cultured Anglo-German-Jewish family, which in my provincial eyes seemed immensely sophisticated. My uncle, John Schlesinger, whom I adored, was a well-known film director. He was also openly gay, and his milieu of actors, artists, and musicians added further spice to the air of refinement I soaked up vicariously. Like many artists, John was both self-absorbed and open to new sensations, anything that stirred his imagination. He wanted to be amused, surprised, stimulated. And so I was always eager to impress, giving a performance of one kind or another, mimicking mannerisms, styles of dress, or opinions that I thought might spark his interest.

Of course, despite the posturing, I never felt I was being interesting enough. And recalling my efforts in retrospect is a little embarrassing. But in fact performance came naturally to me. I grew up with two cultures: lapsed Dutch Protestant on my father''s side, assimilated Anglo-Jewish on my mother''s. I could "pass" in both, but never felt naturally at ease in either. My destiny was to be half in, half out--of almost anything. Passing was my default state. In the meantime, there was never any doubt in my mind that glamor was always somewhere else, in London, especially in my uncle''s house, when I was still living in Holland, but preferably somewhere farther afield, where I didn''t have to choose.

By the time I was finally liberated from school and set out to live for a year in London, being "into Asia" had become a fashionable attitude: hippie trips to India in a Volkswagen bus, a superficial acquaintance with Ravi Shankar''s sitar music, the cloying smell of joss sticks in tea shops selling hash paraphernalia and Tibetan trinkets. I got to know some Indian hippies in England, who made the most of their mysterious eastern provenance and were far more successful with impressionable European women than I could ever have hoped to be. One of them, an Assamese Christian from Bangalore, named Michael, was as much of a performer as myself, and he used his exotic allure to the fullest advantage. The first Japanese I ever met weren''t even really Japanese. In 1971, instead of heading east in a Volkswagen bus, before settling down to study at university, I travelled west, to California. I was nineteen. I stayed at the house of a friend of my uncle''s in Los Angeles, an alcoholic brain surgeon (his hands were steady during operations, I was told). He introduced me to an intense young man named Norman Yonemoto.

Slim, tall, with large myopic eyes, which bulged alarmingly when he got excited, Norman bore some resemblance to Peter Lorre, the German actor, in his role as Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective. Like so many young men who drifted to LA, Norman had movie ambitions. For the time being he was making gay porno films. The money was OK. But Norman took gay porno seriously. He was an artist. Norman was a third generation Japanese-American, raised in what is now Silicon Valley, where his parents cultivated flowers.

There was no talk about Japan, however, when Norman acted as my guide in Los Angeles, zooming around the freeways in his Volkswagen, usually in the company of Nick, his Nordic-looking boyfriend. We cruised along Santa Monica Blvd., where handsome young hustlers who hadn''t made it into the movies hung back casually against parked cars scanning the road for a pickup. We went downtown at night, where Mexican girls were paid by the dance in dark halls with broken neon lights. Transvestites trawled for drunken truck drivers in menacing little bars stuck behind the once glamorous art deco movie houses. The alcoholic brain surgeon took us to a miniature Western town, a kind of erotic theme park, named Dude City, with saloons entered through swinging doors, where naked boys in cowboy boots danced on the bar tops. An olive-skinned young man in a white T-shirt kissed me on the lips. The surgeon chuckled and whispered that he was Taiwanese.

This was Norman''s world, and it seemed a very long way from Japan. I was in a state of fascinated culture shock: Southern California was more exotic to me than any place I had ever seen, or would yet see in later years, stranger in its way than Calcutta, Shanghai or Tokyo. Whatever vestiges of a disjointed Japanese upbringing Norman might still have had up in the flower gardens of Santa Clara County, they had long been shed in favor of his California dream of rough sex and making movies. He embraced LA in all its tawdry glamor. R.