Five Modern Japanese Novelists
Donald Keene
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0231126115
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The New Yorker has called Donald Keene "America's preeminent scholar of Japanese literature." Now he presents a new book that serves as both a superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction and a memoir of his own lifelong love affair with Japanese literature and culture. Five Modern Japanese Novelistsprofiles five prominent writers whom Donald Keene knew personally: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, and Shiba Ryotaro. Keene masterfully blends vignettes describing his personal encounters with these famous men with autobiographical observations and his trademark learned literary and cultural analysis.
Keene opens with a confession: before arriving in Japan in 1953, despite having taught Japanese for several years at Cambridge, he knew the name of only one living Japanese writer: Tanizaki. Keene's training in classical Japanese literature and fluency in the language proved marvelous preparation, though, for the journey of literary discovery that began with that first trip to Japan, as he came into contact, sometimes quite fortuitously, with the genius of a generation. It is a journey that will fascinate experts and newcomers alike
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Finally, virtually the only works of Japanese literature that were available in readable translations were the classics. What, then, made me particularly aware of Tanizaki? I had read several stories, including the celebrated “Tattooer,” in English or French translation, and while in Hawaii during the war, I had read in Japanese his novel Naomi (Chijin no ai). But more important than either of these experiences was a gift I received in 1951 from the great translator Arthur Waley, whose work had
had passed the medical examination was not long afterward massacred in the Philippines. The narrator of Confessions of a Mask exults in the thought of an early death, imagining that his scrawny, unattractive body will somehow, miraculously, attain the glory of the martyred St. Sebastian. I asked Mishima once if the schoolboy compositions included in Confessions of a Mask (including a prose poem on St. Sebastian) were actually written when he was a middle-school student, and he said they were; his
Just before they kill themselves, they make love with the ardor of newlyweds and with delight in each other’s bodies. They die, still young and beautiful, still deeply in love and absolutely secure in their beliefs. 52 ■ Mishima Yukio Mishima himself took the part of Lieutenant Takeyama when the work was made into a film. The music played throughout was the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. It was essential to Mishima’s story that Lieutenant Takeyama kill himself by committing seppuku, the
(when he was sixteen) in order to study at the Seijo¯ High School in Tokyo. At school he excelled, especially at mathematics. He told me once, not long after he had attended a high-school reunion, that his classmates remembered him as a mathematical genius. His knowledge of science was also remarkable. Some years before his death, he appeared on a television program with an eminent physicist who, assuming that a novelist would have trouble understanding the terminology of modern physics,
those long-ago women actually felt, in a manner that appeals to the emotions and understanding of modern readers. By maintaining this distance between the readers and the people of the work, Tanizaki kept intact the reserve and indirection that he felt to be an essential part of life in the Kansai region. Tanizaki’s most eloquent defense of the traditional aesthetics was presented in the essay “In Praise of Shadows” (In’ei raisan, 1933–1934). As the title indicates, he associated shadows (as