A Japanese Wilde

Page 17 November–December 2007 B O O K R e V i e W s A JAPAnese Wilde David Galef This is an account written by a successful narcissist. The aMerican diary of a JaPanese Girl Yone Noguchi Edited by Edward Marx and Laura E. Franey Temple University Press http://www.temple.edu/tempress 224 pages; cloth, $64.50; paper; $23.95 What is the nature of a diary, and why should it matter to someone other than the diarist? As Cecily in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) describes her journal: “You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication .” In other words, a diary is often a bit of a front, a double game of private and public, and occasionally even an impersonation job, which brings us to Yone Noguchi, the author of The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, though he would seem to be the wrong sex and age to have written such a work. Noguchi’s Diary, first published as a book in 1902, follows the adventures, or rather fairly placid encounters, of a young Japanese woman named Miss Morning Glory as she travels in the US. She pays visits, goes shopping, poses for a portrait, attends a tea party, and even makes a brief run at managing a tobacco shop.Accompanied on and off by her whimsical uncle, a chief secretary for the Nippon Mining Company, she journeys from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Chicago (“no place for a lady”) and New York. Yet the account is a romp, a series of disingenuous observations in the zui-hitsu or spontaneous “following the brush” style of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. Noguchi wrote it in English, with a sprightly, idiosyncratic diction that occasionally (and no doubt deliberately) trips over itself, as in “I sticked a stick at each corner” or “I elaborated a nosegay.” More often, however, the prose displays the exactitude of some novel usage. As Morning Glory describes a sleepless night at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco: “MyAmerican bed acted like water, waving at even my slightest motion.” Or, as she sums up a gastronomic mishap: “The red pepper garmented the whole thing.” The diary is also interspersed with Japanese terms like ohayo (“good morning”) and what philologists call eye-dialect, which is spelling a word the way it sounds—or at least the way it sounds to Morning Glory, who writes of “Meriken Kenbutsu” (American sightseeing). At times, the effect is of Gertrude Stein: “Dream is no dream without silliness which is akin to poetry.” And since Noguchi absorbed a great deal from Anglo American literature, Morning Glory is no cultural naïf, with references to John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Keats, and many others. In any event, the diary’s humor lies mainly in its sharp social observations, epigrams, and elegant sum-ups. In fact, the tone at times bears more than a passing resemblance to Wilde. Describing someone as not unique, she qualifies the point: “Uniqueness, however, has become commonplace.” At a tea party that a certain MissAda is giving in her honor, Morning Glory declares, “None of them was so pretty asAda. Beauty is rare, I perceive, like good tweezers or ideal men.” Given that Morning Glory has previously exchanged kisses with Miss Ada—not to mention rolling around on the floor with her, et cetera—a certain amount of bisexuality is at play here, though she seems most in love with an artist named Oscar Ellis, who paints her portrait and who becomes the addressee of her most poignant letters. She also admires , at some length, a married poet named Heine (in real life, a writer friend of Noguchi’s, Joaquin Miller). Other highlights include Noguchi’s impersonation of an impersonation when Morning Glory spies a scholarly-looking squirrel and writes what his diary must be like, though, with lines like “I think I must learn to swear for a pastime” and a reference to George Eliot, it sounds a great deal like M. G. herself. At other times, the short sections make a miniature...