Nicolas Bornoff, who died of cancer in London on Oct. 30, was my predecessor as a film critic at The Japan Times, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for nine years. His style, in contrast to fellow reviewer Andy Adams' slangy journalese, aimed for the elevated and authoritative, which made me, as a frequent reader, imagine him as professorial and tweedy. It also made me want to argue with him when we disagreed about films, which was fairly often. (I had a similarly distant and contentious relationship with my then idol, Pauline Kael.)
In 1984, I started to write occasionally for The Japan Times myself, and in 1985, I joined a team the newspaper sent to cover the Summer Universiade — the college student version of the Olympics — in Kobe. Nick was the only other non-Japanese in the group — and turned out to be totally different from my image of him.
Born in 1949 in London to parents of Anglo-French backgrounds (with an opera-singing Jewish grandfather in the mix), Nick grew up bilingual in English and French. After being expelled from one British prep school, he managed to graduate from another, more progressive academy — and ended up in France, studying filmmaking under critic Noel Burch. He was also adept at drawing, particularly caricatures (as I later had occasion to observe while we were out drinking).