One late evening in 1970, the scholar Geoffrey Bownas was working with the writer Yukio Mishima on their anthology "New Writing in Japan." The noted author excused himself, and when he returned, the scholar noticed with alarm that he had stripped down to his loincloth and was carrying a sword.
Positioning himself in front of his collaborator, Mishima drew himself up and, with his weapon, posed in a Kabuki-like mie. "Those three theatrical minutes," remembers Bownas in his entertaining recollections, "were like years. I was scared -- an almost naked man with a drawn sword, no one else in the room!"
After a time, the noted author calmed down and announced, apparently in explanation, that Japan's culture faced a challenge more threatening than ever before. Then he put his clothes back on and they continued anthologizing.
That perceived threat, nonetheless, continued and Mishima had already organized his private army, the Shield Society, a group of youths dedicated to the samurai code of Bushido. Later on in these recollections, Bownas, perhaps giving as good as he got, shares with us the interesting information that the price paid for uniforms of rank and file was 26,000 yen a piece, but that Mishima's own commander in chief suit ("multi-colored and so styled to make me look as much like Napoleon as possible") cost 90,000 yen.
Later Bownas joined Anthony Thwaite for more anthologizing, "The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse," an equally excellent volume during the completion of which the noted British poet remained fully clothed.
Bownas himself over the last half century has become widely known for his translations, broadcasts and commentaries related to Japan. He pioneered teaching in this field both at Oxford and Sheffield and was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1999 and the CBE in 2003.
Of particular interest in these recollections are his memories of Kyoto in 1952, the year of his arrival, back when black-market rice was still a necessity. He then went to live and work in Tenri ("the heart of Yamato"), a connection with which he kept all of his life.
From there it became apparent that his Japan expertise was appreciated in business as well as academic circles, and he found himself in "fields including advising on investment into new venture businesses." At the same time, he felt himself drawn deeper and deeper into university administration.
This he found "not satisfying, not the reason why I had become an academic." Early retirement provided a solution and he was able to "hand the reins to a fresh mind who could open up new avenues." Also, "some of my colleagues could not wait to get shut of me -- all my colleagues, in fact, were a generation younger than I."
Born in 1923, Bownas, now 83 years old, may regard a long and distinguished career with satisfaction, and can offer his reader a superior degree of literary acumen. He makes clear, for example, that Mishima's single finest role was that of critic. (Here is the celebrated author on a famous Tokyo governor, once himself a writer: "His style is a hotchpotch of rough-hewn brevity and romantic babble . . . .")
Bownas writes most interestingly of the structure of Japanese literature, "linear . . . with vertical values"; of translation, "allow that a poem is untranslatable. I would never risk Basho's pond and frog"; and makes new and useful definitions. For him the famed quality of aware (pathos) is contained in the sound of the oboe -- and particularly in the music of Frederick Delius, that "composer of regret for time past."
Such apercu adorn a considered and practical text, making Bownas' "Writings and Recollections" one of the most interesting of recent compilations.
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