All that follows is true. In his 1972 introduction to The Master of Go Edward G Seidensticker ~ in the author’s opinion the best of those translators who have laboured to bring postwar Japanese fiction to the English speaking world ~ wrote

Yasunari Kawabata has described The Master of Go as “a faithful chronicle-novel.” The word used, of course, is not ‘novel’ but shōsetsu, a rather more flexible and generous and catholic term than ‘novel’. Frequently what would seem to the Western reader to be a piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs, somewhat embroidered and coloured but essentially nonfiction all the same, is placed by the Japanese reader in the realm of shōsetsu.

So it is with The Master of Go. It contains elements of fiction, but it is rather more chronicle than novel, a sad elegant piece of reportage, based upon a 1938 Go match, the course of which was precisely as described in this “chronicle-novel” and upon which Yasunari Kawabata himself reported for the twin Osaka and Tokyo newspapers that today both bear the name Mainichi.

Certain elements of fiction are obvious. Mr Kawabata gives himself a fictitious name, Uragami, and apparently, though the matter could be a small failure of memory, assigns himself a different age from that which is actually his. The Master is known by his professional name, Shusai, but ….. his adversary, in real life Mr Kitani Minoru, is given a fictitious name. The complex treatment of time, with the action beginning and ending at the same point, and the delicate, impressionistic descriptions of setting and season, are further justification for the expression “chronicle-novel”

The Poacher and the Poacher’s Dog is a memoir. The events and people described are all real. Like The Master of Go it is very much more chronicle than novel. The author has chosen to take his life experiences and write them as a memoir, rather than re-purposing the material to create fictions, simply because he has neither the time nor the inclination to invent wild stories and he has no need to for he already has a vast and entertaining archive of real life events featuring real people to draw upon. And as Aurelia Pinchbeck writes in a letter published elsewhere in this book “real sex, real drugs and real rock-n-roll are always more entertaining and enlightening than the invented sort”.

Life itself is a fiction of course. People invent their lives as they live them. Then, from time to time they re-invent them as they see fit. Memory takes those re-invented lives and re-invents them again and then history re-invents both the re-invented lives and the events surrounding them.

The past rewrites the future in the same way and to the same degree that the future rewrites the past. And today, more than ever before, yesterday’s brief lives never end but go on developing and changing long after death, as interested third-parties indulge in post-mortem burnishing and sanitising on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web. 

Those disclaimers at the beginning of movies saying that “what follows is a true story but we have invented some characters and events for dramatic purposes” are at best redundant and at worst misleading. The true stories were invented in the first place by the characters themselves and then rewritten by others. There are no lives that are proof against embellishment and redaction but, it is worth noting, the lives of the rich, the powerful and the famous are more prone to re-invention than the lives of the men and women on the Clapham omnibus.

In The Poacher and the Poacher’s dog the author genuinely and consistently tries his best to be as candid and as truthful as possible about his own life and the lives of others that are occasionally transgressive and frequently shameful. Nevertheless he gets his own age wrong from time to time, just as Yasunari Kawabata did in the Master of Go.

-:-

I met Ed Seidensticker in a Shinjuku gay bar on the day in 1975 that he was presented by Emperor Hirohito with the Order of The Rising Sun (with ribbons) Third Class. I wanted to talk about writing, he wanted to talk about Pinchbeck who was pleasing herself for the evening by passing as a boy. A Japanese boy. Seidensticker was fascinated by her. A child of famous parents, her mother was a French actress and her father a high profile Japanese architect, she was fluent in English, French and Japanese.

Ed Seidensticker was American but sometimes, from long exposure, more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. Now he wondered which language she would use to undress, which language to direct and encourage and which language she came in. He couldn’t take his eyes of her and his companion became more sullen and grumpy as the evening wore on.

After a while Seidensticker explained that he and Toshiro were going to a small supper hosted by some friends at a nearby restaurant. It was by way of being a celebration of his winning the medal. Would we like to come, he asked, adding that we could go clubbing in Ni-chōme afterwards. I looked at Pinchbeck and she winked.

All that follows is true.