BOOKS
309
just emerged frolll the Great War: a generation of men had been slaugh–
tered in the trenches, f:lmilies were broken, economies shattered, and
nerves shot. George Bernard Shaw didn't call Europe "Heartbreak
House" for nothing. Moreover, because the French currency was de–
pressed, artists and writers from around the world could afford to gather
there and live
la "ie de
boh(~lIIe
while inventing the various modernist lan–
guages th3t h3ve dominated the 3rts in the twentieth century.
The background to the modern Japanese experience is a touch less
tragic; not 3 war, but a trade surplus and what the J3p3nese call
elldaka,
the
rise of the yen. And
la "ie de hohellle
of Paris has given way to
la "ie bOllr–
geois
of high-rent Tokyo. Paris attracted artists and writers: Japan attracts
its share of missiol1;)ries,
hllto
students, :lnd martial-arts zealots, but the
overwhelming number of Americans there at the moment arc bankers,
traders, computer jockeys, and English teachers. They may be pursuing
side interests in
shodo
("the way of writing," or c;)lligraphy) or
Sill/lie
painting, but they arc b;)sically in J;)pan in pursuit of opportunity. If
Europe in the twenties was Heartbreak House, J3pan in our time is
Kal/el/wchi
Castle, "kanemochi" meaning wealthy individual; where the
age of modernism has given way to the age of yen. And it is in that spirit
that Ale c Stern , for example, the hero of Schwartz's
Bicyrie Days,
has gone
to Japan, not to sLHve for his :lrt but to become an executive trainee in
computers . Similarly, the hero of Leithauser's
Eqllal Distallce
is taking a
year off from his law studies at Harvard to work with a Japanese law
professor on a problem of international law.
This fi-cquent-flyer literature has enjoyed brisk sales, and it is worth
taking a look at how these novels have used Japan I want to stress the
word "used" here , for on the whole they prefer to exploit Japan rather
than cOll1e to terms with it. And since the rest of us are most likely to
experience Japan as frequent flyers, their Japan threatens to become our
Japan as well, the place where we disembark prepared to sec what our
writers have seen for us, if only because theirs arc the visions that most
readily come to hand. The three novels by Leithauser, Mcinerney, and
Schwartz, arc remarkably of a piece; soggy laments of flight, quest, and
initiation, as post-adolescent
Bildllllgsrol//alls
usually arc. They all find
young male heroes lurching bcrween a traumatic past and an uncertain fu–
ture, seeking some identity for themselves in a place where they believe
(wrongly, as it turns out) that the past cannot touch them and that the
future holds out the hope of renewal. This distinctly middle-class fiction
features characters who have provisionally jettisoned the advantages of
birth for the charade of being down on their luck, in order to assume the
moral advantages of elective poverty. Of course they get over it, since, in
the social niche they inhabit, trauma usually means minor heartbreak and
