You’ve started with Embracing Defeat: why is that first on your list of books on Japan?

I could have chosen many others, but personally I’m very interested in that period of the occupation by largely American troops just after World War II. It’s one of the most extraordinary episodes in modern history. It was the first time that Japan was occupied in its own history, and the world that was created at that time shaped post-war Japan. I think the author, John Dower, has caught that period – with all its complexity and its absurdity and its benevolence and its dark sides – better than anyone else, even, as far as I know, in Japanese. It’s not only a great work of history, but it’s beautifully written. I think history writing at its best should be, and can be, a form of literature and this would be a good example.

Occupations normally don’t work. Does he analyse why in this case it did?

That’s not really the way he approaches it. He analyses it really as a…confrontation isn’t quite the word, but a very peculiar meeting of two very different cultures and civilisations. Even though Japan had already been influenced by the United States as well as Europe for almost 100 years, in 1945 it was still an extraordinary meeting of cultures that was sometimes a confrontation and sometimes a happy mix. 

Your next choice is by Edward Seidensticker, Kafu The Scribbler. I believe it’s a translation of some of Kafu’s stories as well as a biography?

It’s not a full biography, but about two-thirds of the book is a biographical sketch by Seidensticker, who was a formidable translator and Japanese scholar. He was one of the translators of The Tale of Genji, and a very literary scholar – he had a wonderful style. Nagai Kafu is perhaps not the greatest Japanese writer who ever lived, but he is one of the more interesting ones and somebody for whom Seidensticker felt a great love – something I share.

Yes, tell me a bit about Nagai Kafu, because even people who have lived in Japan haven’t necessarily heard of him.

Kafu came from a well-educated family and was sent, in the late 19th century, to America – first to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to study and then to New York, where he spent most of his time hanging out in Chinatown, indulging his passion for prostitutes and opium dens. He then went to Paris, which he liked better than he did America. He came back to Japan very well versed in French literature and became a professor of French literature in Tokyo. But he quickly turned his back on the academic or even the respectable literary world in Tokyo and spent most of his life in the more raffish neighbourhoods of eastern Tokyo, where the red-light districts were. 

He liked nothing better than to sit backstage at strip shows (and that kind of thing) and he described that world almost always in a nostalgic way. Because, of course, Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in 1923 by the earthquake and then again in 1945, and, in any case, when it wasn’t destroyed by bombs or earthquakes it was changing very fast through redevelopment. So it was always a city that was disappearing – or at least changing radically – and he was the great chronicler of what had faded and what was no longer. So memories of a Tokyo that was no longer there, or the little bits that were still there and reminded him of the old days, are very much his material. 

He was a short story writer, really, a writer of novellas more than novels and a great diarist and an extraordinary, eccentric figure – one of the few, by the way, who during World War II was resolutely against the ultra-nationalism that many other Japanese writers at the time embraced.

So you like him because of the snapshot he gives into that bygone era, but also because you find him fascinating as a person?

Yes, I like his writing style and I like the subjects – I share his interest in the demi-monde of Tokyo, and the old districts, and I think he was a very fine writer of short stories. Not so much of his work has been translated, but the most famous stories have been. 

Let’s go on to your next choice, which is by Donald Richie, about Yasujiro Ozu, the film director.

Ozu’s world is very different from that of Nagai Kafu. His best films and his most famous films were made after World War II and are largely about the Japanese upper-middle class. They’re beautiful, profound films about people coming to terms with life, and coming to terms with the limits of human existence. They are films that have been stylised to show the essence of life rather than lots of action. And I think the writer who has conveyed the style of Ozu, the beauty of his films and the cultural context of them best is Donald Richie, who has written a lot about film, and, unlike many film scholars, is a very good writer. I read his books on Japanese film before I went to Japan and before I’d seen many of them – and even then you felt you had learned a lot, not only about film but about Japan itself.

What would you recommend as the first film of Ozu’s to watch, if you haven’t yet seen any?

The most famous one is Tokyo Story, but there are many other fine ones – Late Autumn, Early Summer.

It must be amazing to get a sense of Japan at the outset of that period of rapid modernisation and the country’s economic miracle…

Yes, the films are set in that period.