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You know how it is. It’s the mid-seventies, you’re an upper-middle-class Anglo-Dutch student, and you’re macho-posing in a red jockstrap to Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” in a seedy theatre behind Kyoto station while a topless dancer writhes around you.

The music and the dance reaches its climax, and you forget the one thing you’re there to do: catch the dancer.

Like I said, you know how it is, or you would if you were Ian Buruma. 

Buruma’s memoir is by turns vivid and vague, his time floating through Japan’s artistic otherworld taking on a suitably dreamlike quality on the page, no matter how crisp the prose or specific the recollection. 

These days a distinguished man of letters, with many works of history and culture behind him, Buruma freely admits he kept no journal at the time, and many of the figures written here are long dead. 

But even if he occasionally lies, either by omission or because memory is a plasticine dream, he still captures something unique here, as befitting a man who thrives on being the outsider and born into the privilege of being able to do pretty much whatever he wants. 

With a famous movie director uncle, and an education (both academic and practical) that opened his eyes to the smallness of his native Holland, Buruma first opted for studying Chinese, before Japan captured his imagination through theatre and film. 

His arrival in Tokyo – with Japanese girlfriend in tow, who doesn’t get much of a look in across these vignettes – is coloured by the experimental theatre performances he had already seen in Amsterdam courtesy of visiting Japanese troupes.

“I assumed that Terayama’s spectacles were the madly exaggerated, surreal fantasies of a poet’s feverish mind. To be sure, I did not come across ventriloquists in nineteenth-century French clothes being whipped by leather-clad dominatrices. 

“But there was something theatrical, even hallucinatory, about the cityscape itself, where nothing was understated; representations of products, places, entertainment, restaurants, fashion, and so on were everywhere screaming for attention”.

Staying initially with wealthy relatives in the hills of Aobadai, Buruma learns the language from the below-stairs staff, and soon falls into dizzying, overlapping, floating worlds.

One is the avant-grade theatre populated with eccentric, driven performers.

Another is that of Western artists and writers revelling in the freedom – especially the sexual freedom – of Tokyo in contrast to their dreary and repressive home countries.

And more generally, we see the bars, cabarets, and the underbelly of the city, whether in wooden old theatres, cinemas and bathhouses that have long since been destroyed. Buruma was in search of ero, guro, nansensu – the erotic, the grotesque, and the absurd – and sure finds it. 

With frankness about his own naivety, and an uncanny eye for detail, this would-be photographer found fellow-travelling outsiders and flaneurs, both gaijin and Japanese, to search out the theatrical “Other”. 

So we hear all about the Human Pump, a man who could regurgitate coloured goldfish on demand, and of live sex shows, and then, as Buruma moves up the social scale, he ingratiates himself with some of the most interesting performers and directors of the age.

One such is dance choreographer Hijikata Tatsuma, founder of Butoh and archetypal eccentric sensei. He provides this memorable and apposite quote about Abe Sada, a sex worker who cut off her lover’s penis, to lasting fame and artistic portrayal:

“I knew Sada. She was an artist. Artists must be like criminals. They must draw blood.”

There is a lot to like in this occasionally startling memoir. Buruma is happy to be the butt of many jokes, though he remains a slippery figure throughout. 

Ultimately, Buruma saw himself as an observer, and at this, he excels. His expertise in Japanese cinema, in particular, is superb, as is his understanding of performance in its many guises. 

For this, he offers up the story of Ri Koran, whose acting career took in propaganda pictures for the Japanese occupation of China (playing an idealised Chinese beauty) all the way to appearing in Hollywood films as the perfect “geisha girl”.

“I was deeply struct by this double, or triple performance act… the star who invited Japanese men to imagine fucking China, and Americans to fuck Japan.”

As for who Buruma truly wished to fuck, that might be a story for another memoir.

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma is available at all good bookshops and libraries (though the Brighton Central copy is currently out on borrow).