Searching for Levy Hideo

Even in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, the tale of Ian Levy stands out. A suburban Washington, DC, teenager with a troubled past, Ian became Levy Hideo—or Ribi Hideo as his name is sometimes transliterated in scholarly studies—a celebrated Tokyo novelist who writes in Japanese and says it’s now difficult for him to speak in English. 

In newspaper interviews, the blue-eyed author calls himself “a white Japanese” or a “new Japanese.” In one of his novels, he thinks of himself as “kind of Japanese.” That would also make him a “kind of Japanese Jew” because his work is heavily grounded in his Jewish heritage. Although he has emphatically rejected that identity, he remains haunted and defined by his Jewish past, underscoring its magnetic pull.

Piecing together Hideo’s transformation became an exploration of identity and a family tale…Hideo was aware of my efforts but kept aloof. 

In Hideo’s heavily autobiographical novels, especially A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard and Henry Takeshi Lewitsky’s Summer Sojourn, the main character is an American Jew living in Japan or China who is searching for a new identity and a rebirth. He says he is inspired by 11th-century Jewish merchants who emigrated from Europe to China and whose progeny melded into the population but still saw themselves as Jews.

“The Jewish diaspora around the world is an experience that involves moving from one language to another,” says Masahiko Nishi, who has translated the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer into Japanese. “The path Levy has taken is different from Singer’s, but Levy is still someone who has experienced the loneliness of the Jewish diaspora.” 

Hideo, now 74, has won a passel of Japanese literary awards, and other foreign-born writers have followed in his footsteps, creating a genre in Japan known as “border-crossing” literature. “He killed the stupid Japanese narcissism that ‘you can’t write Japanese if you are not Japanese,’” Keijiro Suga, a prominent Japanese poet and essayist, wrote to me when I asked about Hideo’s work.

Over the last 10 years or so, piecing together Hideo’s transformation became an exploration of identity and, for me, a family tale. Hideo is my second cousin, although I have never met him. In unraveling his story, I was helped immensely by genealogical research and notes written by relatives I barely knew and Japan-based critics and scholars I contacted online. Hideo was aware of my efforts but kept aloof. More on that later.

***

I first heard about Hideo from an elderly relative, Sam Fink, who fancied himself a family historian and was a first cousin of Hideo’s father, Howard Seymour Levy. Fink was a prominent illustrator who kept in touch with me by letters starting in the late 1990s. In 2009, I wrote about him and our old-fashioned letter-writing relationship for  the Wall Street Journal where I worked for decades.

According to Fink, Hideo’s father Howie, as he was known, was a GI stationed in Japan during the post-World War II occupation who fell in love with the place. A talented linguist, Howie made a living translating Japanese pornography, Fink said, and wrote Japanese porn himself. Howie married a Japanese woman and named his son Ian Hideo. (Howie gave Ian his middle name in honor of a friend who had been interned in the U.S. during World War ll, but the boy didn’t use it until later.) Ian, Fink said, also became a porn translator. 

Aside from the naming details and Howie and his son being talented linguists, that story turned out to be mostly fable. Hideo’s actual narrative is even more surprising.

It begins with his Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents, Morris and Bessie Levy, who immigrated from Russia to the United States in 1886. One of their sons, Izzy, dropped out of school after the 8th grade and became the co-owner of a box-making factory in Brooklyn. Izzy’s passion was gambling on the horses, say relatives, and he made sure to keep cash by his bed to pay his bookies.

Howard Seymour Levy was Izzy’s son. As a child of some affluence, Howie dreamed of a life beyond a Brooklyn box factory. He was a GI during World War ll, as I’d been told, but he was never posted in Japan. Rather, with his gift for language, Howie mastered Japanese and became a translator of Japanese documents, a job that kept him stateside and safe. He later joined the State Department in 1947 and was posted first in Taiwan. He only wound up living in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s when he spent a dozen years in Yokohama running the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, which teaches advanced Japanese. 

Howie spoke nine languages and read 11, according to family lore. Aside from teaching diplomats to speak Chinese and then Japanese, he found time for academic research, most of it focused on China. Along with translating an ancient biography of An Lushan (an 8th–century Chinese general whose rebellion killed millions) and one of Huang Chao (a 9th-century rebel leader who also tore apart the country), Howie focused his academic pursuits on sex practices. As his cousin Sam Fink would tell it Howie was writing pornography. In reality Howie’s focus was sexual fetish. 

His most exhaustive work, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Exotic Custom (1967), explores the Chinese obsession with women’s tiny, though deformed, feet. In his writing, Howie was empathetic. “Male curiosity was aroused; stealing a covert glance at one’s beloved with bindings unraveled thrilled the beholder and stirred his passions,” he wrote. “The impact must have been greater than that felt by a Westerner who accidentally sees his enamored in the nude.”

Among Howie’s other works were Oriental Sex Manners: A Guide to the Bizarre Sexual Morality of the East (1972) and a series of works on Korean, Chinese and Japanese dirty jokes. “Korean jokes tend to be the most direct and vigorous,” he wrote in Korean Sex Jokes in Traditional Times: How the Mouse Got Trapped in the Widow’s Vagina and Other Stories (1972). “Chinese jokes [are] also to the point but not as bold in language, while Japanese erotic humor is the most complex and involved,” he added.

At work, Howie seems to have been a traditional anti-Communist State Department official of his era. Living in Taiwan in the 1950s, he said, “There are Nationalists and Communists, and we are on the side of the Nationalists,” according to an essay by Hideo cited by Thomas Brook (a Japanese literature scholar at Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka, who helped my effort immensely by sharing his research on Hideo and putting me in touch with other Hideo scholars in Japan). Howie also put up with the casual antisemitism of his era. “I thought you guys had darker skin,” a colleague of his remarked. 

At home, Howie’s life was marked by some upheaval. In Taiwan, he divorced his first wife, Ian Hideo’s mother Virginia Worek, a Polish-American Catholic who had converted to Judaism to make herself acceptable to the Levy clan. Howie then married Henriette Liu, a Chinese woman 13 years younger than himself who didn’t convert and never gained the level of family acceptance that Virginia had. He later divorced Henriette too, after he moved to Yokohama, and married a younger Japanese woman named Michiko. When a son he’d had with Henriette died young, Howie built a Buddhist-style shrine to him in his home in Japan where he would light candles and incense. When Howie himself died in 2003, at age 79, Michiko did the same for him. 

Howie’s first divorce, from Virginia, shattered the young life of his son Ian Hideo Levy. Ian was just 10 and living in a colonial-era house in Taiwan paid for by the U.S. government when Howie took up with Henriette. 

Ian and Virginia moved first to Hong Kong and then to Arlington, VA, just outside of Washington, DC. Virginia found work as a secretary at George Washington University, quite a comedown from her days in Taiwan hosting government officials and generals.  

With his father now married to a Chinese woman, many of the Levy relatives rejected Ian, he told a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1992, and this added to his growing sense of alienation. In his first novel, A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard, the only one translated into English, he recalls calling his grandmother in New York. When she heard his voice, she was silent and then hung up. 

That callousness wasn’t unknown on that side of the Levy clan, says Janis Eisner, a Levy cousin. Her mother, she says, was the first gentile to marry into the family and was rejected by her mother-in-law until she converted. Ian’s grandmother, Pauline, had a reputation as even less forgiving. “She could rule the roost,” Eisner says.

Separated by thousands of miles and the shared memory of a bitter divorce, Howie and his son had a strained relationship. But they had many things in common, including a love of literature and a stunning facility with language.

As for Howie and his son’s view of their Jewish identity, it’s complicated. In a note to me, Hideo’s assistant said, “it’s fair to say that Levy very much keeps his distance from the Jewish community.” On the one hand, neither Hideo nor Howie fully rejected that identity. In Star-Spangled Banner, the main character is Ben Isaac, an American Jew with blue eyes, like Hideo’s. In the novel, the Howie character answers questions about their religion by saying, “We’re Confucian.”  

***

After Ian graduated from high school in 1967, Virginia sent him to live with his father and his Chinese wife in Japan for a year. It was there that Ian found himself, and “Hideo” began to emerge. Alienated from the United States like many of his generation who were soured by the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam war, Hideo tasted the freedom of the 1960s in Tokyo. He roamed the bustling Shinjuku neighborhood, fascinated with the glittery nightlife and an assortment of street characters he had never encountered in the D.C. suburbs.

“The thing that always entranced me as I walked through Shinjuku was the unique feeling of freedom that filled the air of the Japanese city,” Hideo told a Japanese magazine Shukan Bunshun in 2014.

The autobiographical character in Hideo’s first novel pals around with a Japanese college student, Ando, who is his guide to the city and on whom he develops a crush. But it’s a drag queen Ben meets on the street who seems to confirm for the young protagonist that it’s possible to choose whatever identity he wants and to live in any language he desires. “It was the laugh of a kindred spirit,” says Ben after the two share a joke. “It sounded as if the man, who lived as a woman, had seen through to Ben’s real identity.” 

Although writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad grew up speaking Russian and Polish and later wrote in English, no Westerner had made the reverse transition from a European language to Japanese as successfully as Hideo.

In real life, though Ian returned to the United States for college, the lure of Japan kept its hold on him. A star student, he tore through his studies at Princeton University, focusing on Japanese language and literature and earning his PhD there. At age 28, Ian became an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Princeton and tackled a translation of ancient imperial poetry, known as the Manyoshu, the oldest known collection of Japanese poetry. His book Ten Thousand Leaves, published under the name Ian Hideo Levy, was so well-received it was a finalist for the National Book Award for translation in 1982 when he was 32 years old.

He moved on to a tenured professorship at Stanford, but he wasn’t at peace with himself. He regularly shuttled back and forth to Japan and found that translation didn’t fulfill him. He wanted to be a novelist and was encouraged to do so, he told the Shukan Bunshun interviewer, by Japanese novelist Kenji Nakagami, who knew of his translation work and discussed his future with him at a bar one day. The two became drinking buddies, Hideo said, and Nakagami later sent him a note, saying “Join Us. Write in Japanese.” 

Nakagami was famed as an outsider and rebel in Japan. He was a Burakumin—a member of a Japanese group that had long faced discrimination because their feudal ancestors had been consigned to occupations associated with death, such as butchers and gravediggers. Yasuko Takezawa, an emeritus professor at Kyoto University, has drawn parallels between the Burakumin of the Middle Ages and Jews as marginalized people. For Ian, an English-speaking outsider who desperately wanted to be accepted in Japan, Nakagami was an inspiration. 

Finally, in 1990, he took the plunge, gave up his tenured position and moved to Japan to devote all his time to writing novels. Perhaps it was the specter of his approaching 40th birthday and ensuing middle age that gave him the final push. Whatever the motivation, Levy Hideo, as he was known in Japan, lived alone in a cluttered apartment in Tokyo and wrote drafts of his novels in longhand in Japanese characters.

Almost immediately, he had success. A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard, Seijoki no kikoenai heya, was published in 1992. Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe praised the novel in the national Asashi newspaper.

 “Can’t you hear the resounding music of Mr. Levy’s earnest tone? Clearly, Japanese literature has a new novelist,” Oe said, in what could be the greatest blurb for a new author since Ralph Waldo Emerson praised a young Walt Whitman “at the beginning of a great career.”  

Hideo’s classical prose bowled over Japanese critics and made a fan of Empress Masako, a poet herself, who invited Hideo to the Imperial Palace, according to a biographer.  

“Levy’s writing is even more Japanese than usual for Japanese writers” who are influenced by contemporary English language authors, says Mitsuyoshi Numano, a professor emeritus of contemporary literature at the University of Tokyo. That may come from Hideo’s work as a translator of Japanese court poetry, Numano said, or just plain talent. 

In 1992, Hideo became the first Westerner to win a major Japanese literary award, the Noma Prize for new authors, and became a sensation in literary circles. Westerners had frequently written about Japan, often in cliched descriptions of an Oriental land of mystery. Japanese critics point to the work of Lafcadio Hearn, a British-Greek journalist, as the model of the gaijin–or foreign—writer. Hearn traveled to Japan in 1890, married a Japanese woman, and remained for years writing dispatches about Japan that captivated a global audience. But he wrote in English.  

In 1990s Japan, Hideo was something fresh—a white, slim, square-jawed American with thick hair parted in the middle who wrote elegant novels in Japanese of how his life there had liberated him. Although his books weren’t big sellers, and his fans were mainly college students and academics, he gained a following through interviews in the Japanese press and television appearances. 

Hearn wasn’t his model. If anything, he walked in the footsteps of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), one of his literary heroes. Mishima’s works were extravagantly praised for their classical style, a style to which Hideo aspired.

Mishima created a literary persona as an ultra-nationalist warrior who sought to restore imperial rule and went so far as to commit seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment, after he failed to inspire a coup. Hideo created a literary persona as the new Japanese man, one who gave up the cushy life of an American professor at a top university to become a white-skinned Japanese. Although writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad grew up speaking Russian and Polish and later wrote in English, no Westerner had made the reverse transition from a European language to Japanese as successfully as Hideo.

Numano, the Tokyo University professor, says he considers Hideo “a very important phenomenon for the entire Japanese literary scene. He changed the meaning of being a Japanese writer.”

 

The time was ripe for someone like Hideo to emerge. Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s was becoming a global economic power whose ascent fascinated and frightened Americans and Europeans. Hideo’s embrace of Japan and Japanese-ness was yet another confirmation of Tokyo’s rise on the global stage. 

Like Hideo, Japan at the time was grappling with the question of identity. For centuries, many Japanese had assured themselves of their specialness—that only those with Japanese blood could fully understand what it meant to be Japanese or excel in Japanese culture. Foreign sumo wrestlers had begun to chip away at that self-image; now a foreigner, Hideo, was winning literary honors once reserved for Japanese writers.

Around that time, many Japanese had also become fascinated with what they believed was the global influence and power of Jews. In 1991, The New York Times reported that among the books selling well in Tokyo bookstores were those “depicting a Jewish conspiracy to control the world economy.“ The Times attributed the surging sales to interest in “all aspects of the Middle East” in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. 

Although Hideo’s trailblazing metamorphosis is in many ways a very traditional Jewish tale of of seeking acceptance in a foreign land, his ethnicity was scarcely mentioned in commentary about his debut novel, says Nishi, the Isaac Bashevis Singer translator, perhaps because critics didn’t want to be accused of antisemitism. What could be more traditionally Jewish than the emigree looking for acceptance in a new home? For Hideo, the longing has remained.

In The Star-Spangled Banner, the Hideo character, Ben Isaac, rejects his nationality, language and even his sexuality to live in a new culture and language. He swoons over his friend Ando’s muscular body and lets Ando put his hand on his as he teaches Ben to write Japanese characters. Ben thinks of himself like Helen Keller. “The deaf-mute little girl who lived in darkness was essentially a gaijin, an outsider to the people around her and even to her own family,” Ben reflects.

The real-life Hideo has never fully found acceptance and hasn’t fully shattered the gaijin glass ceiling. He hasn’t become a Japanese citizen, living for more than a decade as a permanent resident. And he isn’t asked to sit on a Japanese literary jury to judge awards or been awarded the Akutagawa prize, probably Japan’s most prestigious literary award, though he was nominated for it. (So far, two foreign-born writers, one from China, the other from Taiwan, are the only non-native writers to do so.) In Hideo’s nonfiction, “he always asks why Japanese people don’t accept foreign people learning Japanese,” says Dan Fujiwara, a Japanese literature professor at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaures in France. “His feeling is that he is discriminated against.”  

Whatever limitations he faces, other foreign writers have been inspired by his example and are writing in Japanese as the notion of border-crossing expands. Gregory Kherznejat, an American from South Carolina, won the Kyoto Literary Prize for new writers in 2019 for his Japanese novel The Kamogawa Runner, about a young American who teaches English in a Japanese junior high school. A Hideo essay about what it means to be a foreigner and man of letters in Japan inspired him to make his life in Japan and write in Japanese, Kherznejat says.

Border-crossing Japanese literature now includes writers born in Iran, China and Switzerland, as well as the United States, but also Japanese writers who write in other languages. Probably the best-known of these is Japan’s Yoko Tawada, who lives in Germany and writes in German and Japanese. Her novels have been translated into English; The Emissary won the National Book Award for translated literature in 2018.

Journalist Dreux Richard, a Hideo family friend who in 2019 wrote a long profile of Hideo in the Kyoto Journal, an English-language magazine in Japan, says Hideo longs for the recognition that could put him in the running perhaps for a Nobel Prize. But foreign writers who win such awards are invariably known through the English translations of their work. 

The fierce determination of Hideo and his cross-border disciples to live and write in Japanese has limited their international influence. Hideo’s sole English translation was financed by a now-defunct Japanese government translation program. Hideo’s other works haven’t sold well enough in Japan to entice U.S. publishers to pay for translation. In the deepest of ironies, the continuing primacy of global English, which Hideo has forsworn, has undermined his later career ambitions. 

***

Later in his career, Hideo became intrigued with the Taiwan of his youth and mainland China, which was closed to Americans in the 1950s. In 2023, he told the Japanese newspaper Chunichi Shimbun that since China had opened up in the 1980s, he had visited 123 times. Japan and China were connected by the “umbilical cord” of kanji, he said, the Chinese characters that are part of Japanese script. 

Hideo was captivated by the story of the Jews in the Chinese city of Kaifeng, a Song dynasty capital about 400 miles south of Beijing.  And it’s here that Hideo’s life and mine began to intersect. 

In 2011 I was based in Beijing where I covered the Chinese economy for The Wall Street Journal. By that point, I had heard of Hideo from my elderly cousin, although I only knew his fictional account of his life. 

I asked for help from the Journal’s Japan bureau in tracking him down—how many Hideo Levys could there possibly be in Tokyo? I got a phone number and sent him a fax, which I was told was the only way he communicated. He never responded, a foretaste of the stance he would take later. Overwhelmed by the demands of daily journalism, I moved on to other stories. Only recently, after I left the Journal, did I have time to resume my search.

As a correspondent, I was drawn to Kaifeng  for the same reason as Hideo, although we have drawn different conclusions. Sometime around the 11th century, Jewish merchants, probably from Persia, settled in Kaifeng and their descendants still identified as Jewish though they had lost any knowledge of the religion or culture.

I went to Kaifeng in 2011 to write about the remnants of the Jewish community, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people who have sought to rediscover their customs after centuries of intermarriage and decades of Communist-atheist rule. I found a community riven into factions and led by various foreigners who would teach the locals about Judaism and cultishly collect adherents. 

To support themselves, the community relied on a small tourist trade. In a shabby apartment on a street called Teaching the Torah Lane, Jewish descendants sold yarmulkes, CDs and other knickknacks to support their community. Despite the infighting and suspicion of their activities by local party leaders, the descendants were determined to reclaim their identity.

For me, Kaifeng was a symbol of Jewish resilience. For Hideo, it was a symbol of identity and assimilation. Kaifeng was his ideal. Like so many other Jews migrating from their homeland, Hideo had to learn a new language and immerse himself in it, as Jews in Kaifeng had done centuries earlier. They succeeded and made a full transformation, as he hoped to do. 

In his 2002 novel, Henry Takeshi Rewitsukī no natsu no kikō ( Henry Takeshi Lewitsky’s Summer Sojourn,) an American Jew who lives in Japan visits Kaifeng to try to find the Jewish community and comes up empty-handed. Henry only finds hints of the past. In the boiler room of the dilapidated Fourth People’s Hospital, he finds a stone lid with a geometrical design. When he lifts it, he realizes it covers the well of the ancient synagogue.

The novel ends with Chinese kids yelling to Henry in pidgin English as he walks by, “What’s your name? What’s your name?” He scurries away without answering. Once again Hideo is haunted by questions of identity. Is he Japanese? American? Jewish? Even Chinese? How should he answer?

After writing the novel, Hideo later toured a Kaifeng museum and found a stone monument detailing the construction of the synagogue, with Biblical phrases written in Chinese characters. He bought a rubbing from the stone back home to Japan and deciphered the Chinese characters for places like Mount Sinai. He also realized that the emperor sometimes gave the Jews the name Li, which corresponds to Levy.  

This was the kind of outcome Hideo so desired for himself. Centuries ago, foreign Jews traveled to China, found it entrancing, made their lives in the local language and melted into the general population. In Kaifeng, it’s impossible to tell the Jewish descendants facially from their neighbors; they are all Han Chinese. 

“Having lived partly as Levy, partly as Hideo, I discovered here the ultimate metaphor in actual history of people from outside East Asia who had become East Asians, who had translated their identity, who had lived another language for 800 years,” Hideo said at a Stanford University lecture in 2010. “This for me was a kind of a happy ending.”  

The past few years haven’t been quite so happy for Hideo. He turned 70 in 2020 just as the pandemic swept through Japan. In photos and videos, he had put on weight. He still had bushy hair, though his once-piercing eyes were puffy and sad. Already a loner who rarely answered phone calls, eschewed digital communications and counted on an assistant to print out and deliver emails and texts, the pandemic was especially isolating.

I had hoped to discuss his life and work with him, even though I knew he was estranged from his family and reluctant to speak in English. I figured word of my digging into his past and interviews with family members and Japanese specialists in his work would reach him and make him more amenable to talk. Thomas Brook, the Japanese literary scholar who had written the English subtitles for a documentary on Hideo, helped out by sending him a note in Japanese about my work.

I also reached out directly in English through Hideo’s literary assistant, even offering to stop by Tokyo during a recent trip to Hong Kong. None of it worked. His assistant chose a Japanese word for “silence” to explain Hideo’s stance, noting that was the same word Japan’s prime minister used in 1945 when he turned down the Allied demand to surrender—a refusal that quickly led to the United States dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

The reference to the Potsdam Declaration struck me as one more odd detail in the Hideo narrative. It was also yet another indication that he had shed his life as Ian Levy and made his life in Japanese culture as a kind of Japanese Jew, one who wonders if his influence will be lasting.  

“Is [cross-border writing] important for world literature or is this just something that happened in a country with a rather eccentric sense of nationalism?” he rhetorically asked his Stanford audience. “I don’t know.”

Bob Davis is a former Wall Street Journal senior editor who collects his freelance work at bobdavisreports.com.

Top image: Hideo Levy looks out the window of a moving train in a screenshot from the trailer of A Home Within Foreign Borders, a documentary by Keiko Okawa.