The Molten Notebook

In the interest of more posting and less agonizing, I’m going to adopt a zuihuitsu — follow the brush — style. Think stream-of-consciousness, if not quite automatic writing. (No tender buttons here, sorry.) The results should be more conversational, if less polished, and will help me return to writing as often as I work out, which is to say, daily. My only hope is that the pen proves mightier than the bicep. Twenty pounders, woe is me. Twenty books, I can do — especially if the Metro delays continue.

At any rate, my latest read was The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, by cultural historian Christopher Benfey. It’s less a straightforward history than a series of lives, some famous, some less so. You’ve got Henry Adams trawling Japan for models for a gravemarker after his wife’s suicide; Melville casting Japan as the mysterious other in Moby Dick, although his own whaling adventures never quite made it there; Teddy Roosevelt, a childhood weakling who was determined to learn jujitsu in the White House.

Most of these figures meet and inspire each other at some point, or just miss each other despite strikingly similar journeys. More than an erudite Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, this synchronicity seems intended to unify an otherwise disparate series of portraits. Benfey splices the journey of Melville with that of Kakuzo Okakura, a shipwrecked sailor who becomes a favorite of the Boston Brahmins and spokesman for Japanese culture. The two come and go within months of each other. Ernest Fenellosa’s notebooks of poems translated from Chinese, which his widow gives to Ezra Pound to edit, influence Pound’s poetry in turn, and that of his friend T.S. Eliot. These encounters bridge what is essentially a series of essays on, say, jujitsu, the art of a weaker fighter using his opponent’s strength against him, and whether that strategy was employed by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.

The Great Wave combines traditional research in diaries, newspapers, biographies and other primary documents with narrative techniques like suspenseful plotting and leitmotifs. For instance, Lafcadio Hearn’s novel Chiquita, in which a typhoon leaves a child adrift with his mother, becomes a metaphor for his past as an abandoned child. This approach certainly makes for a readable book. I sped through it in five days, four of which I didn’t get home until 10 pm. The pleasures of the “lives” format reminded me, of course, of Plutarch. The miniatures didn’t seem to add up to conclusions; they were simply close-ups of, say, a lonely, wealthy Bostonian turning to Buddhism, or the charismatic Japanese man who could fulfill her desire for attention and the exotic.

A note on this and future choices of books: I’m reading around the period after Reconstruction and just before World War I in search of a place to hang my research hat. The dramatic changes of that era are pretty obvious. The American population and geography doubled, became more urban. Electricity came home; so did telephones and elevators and electric lights. Film. Robber barons. Industrial Revolution. The assassination of three presidents. Connections to Asia, through worlds fairs and immigration restrictions and protests. The country we know today — its academic and business institutions, its bureaucracy and technology — has taproots in this era. (My masters thesis focused on this period, specifically on increasingly highbrow attitudes toward classical music.) Institutions and policies that are getting a shakedown today, especially newspapers, arts and culture organizations, university disciplines, publishing, and immigration policy — and motorcars, for that matter — were taking on new, even first forms then. I do see contemporary connections, although I don’t want to push the relevance bit too far. Will I find an anchor amidst these wild generalizations?