Sadako Sawamura was one of Japan's leading character actresses. Though she often performed on stage, she is best remembered for her movie roles -- Naruse's 1954 "Late Chrysanthemums," Ozu's 1960 "Late Autumn." Plain yet cultivated, she specialized in traditional roles -- the older geisha, the worldly aunt, the "okamisan" at the elegant eatery.
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Later in life (she died in 1996 at the age of 87), she developed another talent: She became an author. Her first autobiographical work, "The Song of a Shell," was published in 1969 and her second, this book of recollections of Asakusa, won the 1977 Japan Essayist's Club Prize.
Writing was for her spontaneous. "It is amazing how many things I still remember," she once wrote. "It is as though they had been biding their time, heaped one on top of another, holding their breath at the bottom of my mind." When she sat down to write her weekly reminiscence (these short essays were originally serialized in the Kurashi no Techo), the downtown of long ago, the Asakusa of the Taisho period (1912-1926) came to life again.
Children played in the back alleys, and Sawamura remembers the songs they sang. The street-sellers had their own ways of selling, and she puts down the patter of the banana seller. Apprentices had a holiday only once a year, and how they dressed and what they did during this precious time is duly recorded.
She recalls a New Year "hatsumode" when, "in their livery coats, dashing young men from the sushi shops clasped their large hands in prayer"; she remembers the docile wife of an actor who "would have kept staring straight ahead for three years if told to do so"; and that "Asakusa women from respectable household rarely used cosmetics."
Often these observations turn into anecdotes. Asakusa women rarely used cosmetics because the men liked it that way. "Yet these same men flagrantly caroused with the overly made-up women who worked in the district."
Sometimes, too, the story is carried into the future. Sawamura remembers the Sanja Festival and the fact that if, perchance, a girl touched one of the "sacred" palanquins a great fuss would arise. "Someone would shout, 'A girl has touched the "mikoshi." It has been desecrated. Bring some salt to purify it quick!' "
When she goes to the festival now, however, she sees girls helping to carry the palanquin, wearing the same kind of coat as the men, the same kind of sandals. "Oh," writes the aging author, "I wish that I could have done that."
Indications that time improves things are rare, but there is little lament over so much vanishing. Even 25 years ago, when these reminiscences were written, there was little left of old Asakusa. Now of course there is even less -- the place has been gentrified, which means taxidermized. Sawamura, however, accepts change gracefully. At the same time, she wants to chronicle what was lost. Her gentle will is to preserve.
Reasonable, if a bit stubborn, she awakens each memory and records it plainly and sensibly. So do her translators, who adopt a fittingly homely style. "Mother was full of pep," they have her write, and this old-fashioned slang, this directness of discourse, seems right. It is sensible, unaffected.
I wonder, though, what Sawamura would think of the excessive and pedantic annotation to which her simple text has been subjected. Not only is there an elaborate glossary to cover things like sake and sashimi, but the text is studded with references and asterisks. It is as though the editors believed Japan to be so mysterious to the rest of world that every last word must be examined and explained.
This runs quite counter to the approach of Sawamura herself, who believed that similarities were more important than differences, that people were more or less alike and that context can explain a lot.
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