In 1966, Henry Miller was calling The Pacific Palisades home. On Wednesday nights, he'd go into Beverly Hills to visit his doctor and friend, Lee Siegel. He never brought along any "intellectuals," as he was "sick of hearing people discuss art and literature in [his] home;" it was a chance for him to have some fun.
On one of these nights, in Beverly Hills, Miller met a new love. Her name was Hoki Tokuda, and she was in the United States working at the—now extinct--Imperial Gardens. She was, by all accounts, an accomplished jazz singer and pianist. She was on a work visa. She'd also been in two films, by then. Japanese films, they were titled Nippon Paradise(1964) and Chinkoro Amakko (1965). (Those are IMDb links you're looking at, incidentally, and neither offers much to look at.)
In April, he sends her a series of postcard-sized watercolors, one the backs of which is one, continuous message.
Miller had been invited to Japan on a few occasions, but Hoki herself, and her family. He'd refused all invitations, which is a little sad to think about. He really was getting old. He was probably older than Mr. Tokuda, himself. This is a paragraph from his letter, dated August 18th, 1967:
"But now let me try to explain myself to you, if I can. The older I get the more I struggle not to make plans in advance, not to think of tomorrow, or yesterday, either, for that matter. I try my best to live day to day, as we say in English. This is a result of my philosophical strain rather than of my innate temperament. I have been all my life a most active man, perhaps too much so. All I ever wanted of life was the freedom to write what I had to express and to do so with perfect freedom. It has been a long hard struggle, and I suppose one might say that I won out. But at what a price! As a result of a my achievement, my fame or success, whatever you wish to call it, the word tries to involve me in things which no longer concern me. Every day of my life, for the last ten years or more, I have to struggle to win a couple of hours which I my truly call my own. The consequence of all this is that I do less and less creative work. I am at the mercy of the world. And since my time on Earth is running short you can well understand how desperate I sometimes feel. I have thought of running off to some remote corner of the Earth, where I might live in peace and do only what I wish to do, but where is that place? Years ago, I thought of going to Tibet or to Nepal or some remote corner of India, but today I haven't the heart to pick myself up and go to such outlandish places. I need some comforts and also some medical attention. And I don't want to leave my son here alone should he be drafted into the military service."
http://community.livejournal.com/__henrymiller/3939.html
