Lost in Alignment Alun Richards in Japan

Abstract

Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Alun Richards seems to have spent a whole year of 1984 in Japan. Although he found it fascinating to live a life in a totally exotic location, it is also clear from letters and correspondence that he also found it unbearably baffling. If that is the case, we cannot but wonder what he was actually baffled by in his encounter with Japan. Indeed, references to Japan and its culture are everywhere in his writing, but they are too stereotypical to communicate his upset to readers: ‘a little bald Japanese’, ‘exotic Japanese’ (Plays for Players), and even ‘a case of constipation on a Jap’ (Ennal’s Point).Presumably humour is his defensive strategy whenever he comes across ‘Others’,especially those of a different tongue. Richards constructs Japan as an ‘Other’,before proceeding to break down the barriers. My working assumption in this article is that Richards in Japan failed to ‘align with’ the unknown Others,that is, the Japanese. Also, Richards in the 1980s seems not only to have lost sight of his own community due to Thatcher’s drastic post-industrial politics but also to have evaded an emergent movement of nationalism which was quite new to him. The unbearable bafflement he experienced in Japan was arguably similar to this failure of alignment on his side. On this basis, this paper will contend that Richards’responses to Japan may offer important clues to understanding his controversial responses to cultural divisions and difference in his native Welsh context and more broadly.