Chronicles Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan by Donald Keene

Chronicles Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan Reviews

• 
  Jim Coughenour

  Any American reader of Japanese literature owes a debt to Donald Keene, an eminent translator and long-time professor at Columbia. My first encounter with his translations (over 25 years ago) was Essays in Idleness by the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, a book I still unearth from time to time.
  
  Keene's memoir is, in most respects, a quiet tale of an uneventful life. Other than serving as an interpreter for Japanese prisoners during World War II, the highlight of Keene's life seems to have been traveling to and from Japan for 60 years, meeting friends and authors, translating and writing his books. It's the only memoir I've ever read that makes no mention of the author's erotic life, even obliquely, which gives it a curiously abstract quality. Perhaps Keene is honoring Kenkō's injunction: "A man should never marry. I am charmed when I hear a man say, 'I am still living alone.'"
  
  The book is beautifully written and beautifully published, including whimsical illustrations by Akira Yamaguchi – and convinced me of the author's abiding love for Japan. What I missed were the particulars of that passion: I would have appreciated more detail about the literature Keene has done so much to champion. Keene would no doubt reply that he's already written that book, several times. In any case, I'm glad to have spent a day with his memories.
  
• 
  Philipp

  What an absolute joy, what a way to finish this year.
  
  A short-ish autobiography written by Donald Keene, one of the main translators and critics who brought Japanese literature and arts to a US audience. For most of his life, Keene taught Japanese literature at Columbia University, all the while writing essays and non-fiction for a general audience (in English as well as in Japanese!) as well as translating Japanese art to English. To sound like a cliche, I feel like this describes a more civilized time, when people could spend their lifes translating beauty, from before universities became neoliberal degree machines. Back when a student could walk into a university course, realise he's the only one, and the professor would say, 'One is enough.'. That would be impossible today, units like that get culled quickly.
  
  In many ways I was reminded of the German literature critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki's autobiography
  Mein Leben - both books feature a parade of who is who of post-war literature. Like Reich-Ranicki, Keene was connected with all of the literary giants of his day - he was good friends with Arthur Waley, Tanizaki Jun'Ichiro, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, Kawabata Yasunari, Kenzaburo Oe, it's ridiculous what names come through here, and how many of these giants were close friends of Keene. (That's the Reich-Ranicki link - Reich-Ranicki did the same but with all the big names of post-WWII German literature). Keene even bumped into a young Yoko Ono at one point, back when she was still working as an interpreter, only connecting the dots decades later.
  
  I loved this book because Keene's life was all about love of knowledge, and arts, and the past, and literature - being interested in everything for the good of everything. A younger Keene could be a bit ignorant, not understanding that one needs a lot of knowledge to appreciate temples; there's a funny story about Keene being annoyed at an unnamed Western visitor who got sick of all the temples in Kyoto, a feeling I shared when I was in Kyoto. Keene knew which temple was built by whom and for what reason and what makes each temple special, a dumbo like me sees only yet another church. There is infinite beauty in this world, but you have to work on yourself to recognise that beauty.
  
  Keene also does not lie; often autobiographies are represented as a straight line. Keene makes it clear again and again how random all these accidents in his life put him into this happy life he lived; he sat next to someone from China as an undergrad, thereby triggering an interest in Chinese literature, from which it was not far to Japanese; WWII broke out so the US government paid for Americans with no Japanese background to become translators, and that work laid the foundation to his reading/writing knowledge; his skillset was always rare, at one point being one of ten foreign students in all of Kyoto; then he always bumped into the right person who introduced him to the next person, all the way up to becoming friends with two Literature Nobel Prize winners.
  
  Another thing that struck me is how self-directed Keene was. Normally, you have some kind of boss or some kind of mentor, some kind of environment in which researchers work, like grants setting up research programs etc., so you have some externally-given thread to follow. Keene describes his decades-spanning work on histories of literature as something he usually came up with himself, and worked on himself, without much external direction. That's so extremely rare.
  
  What's interesting is the complete absence of any girlfriends/wives/boyfriends/husbands,
  This came out in 2008 - after the large Tohoku earthquake in 2011, Keene moved to Japan and took up Japanese citizenship, leaving his US citizenship behind, living the last eight years of his life in Tokyo. I would've loved to see Keene's reasoning behind this late move; he must've been 89 years old. Later in 2013 Keene adopted Shamisen player Uehara Seiki, why? how? Edit, 2nd January 2022: I've been informed by my wife that adoption is a common approach in homosexual couples in Japan. Marriage still is not legal, so adoption solves issues like inheritance or hospital visits.
  
  Recommended for: people who love knowledge for knowledge's sake.
• 
  Natalie

  How did I not write a review of this?! Probably because I have too much to say about it, but a lovely memoir. It often shocks me that when I'll be talking to a fellow self-professed student of Japanese and mention Donald Keene, they have no idea who he is! May they wonder no more through these handy dandy memoirs!
  
  Still, this book is just lovely for ... so much. First, a look at Keene's amazing life. I smiled at his recollection of that cabin in the Carolinas where he first started studying Japanese because as a Japanese student, we had to read an essay about that experience in Japanese! But even more than that, his war experiences brought to life an era that my generation is beginning to lose touch with. My heart warmed at his description of Chinese characters as precious stamps in his memory.
  
  And his descriptions of Kyoto as he remembers it...! Oh, I could swoon! I had the good fortune to live there for awhile as a student a couple years ago, and Kyoto is still my favorite place in Japan but his stories... Ryoanji at night, sharing tea with the priest's wife! Cars, still a rarity! What a city it must have been. While I am truly a child of my internet/convenience generation, Keene brought tears to my eyes describing what I've missed.
  
  His anecdotes, also, are not to be missed, for all the amazing people he's associated with in his life, and for his gently humorous, well-measured writing style. And speaking of his writing style, one can't help reading his memoirs without realizing just how thoroughly he has influenced Japanese literature in translation in the West. Sometimes, he'll write here, "I was moved to tears..." or some other phrase that feels not quite Western, but a good reader will know often appears in translation of Japanese literature. It makes me wonder how much Japanese has affected Keene, and then, how much he has affected the study of Japanese in turn.
  
  Truly, a thoroughly enjoyable read.
  
  [edit to add years later] and now that he’s passed, it’s hard not to miss him. I was one of the students who participated in his final classes at Columbia before his permanent move to Japan for his final years... I will always treasure this book.
• 
  micha

  Quite moving but mainly insanely interesting account of Donald Keene's life and work - his books, the people he met, the times during the war, his love for opera and, above all, his passion for Japan. A must-read for every Japanophile.
• 
  Christie

  This is the best autobiography/memoir I have ever read! It is my favorite book I have read this year, I would rate it 10 stars if I could. This is not just a chronicle of a man's life and passionate scholarship/work (though it is that), this is a story about PEOPLE and their influences and impacts on our life, no matter how brief or deep. Also, how luck and chance often shape the course of life. Keene's love of music and travel figure greatly into his recollections.
  
  I was moved and impressed by Donald Keene's writing style as well; it is completely devoid of pretentiousness or false humility. Reading this book felt like talking with a true friend, not a scholar or "celebrity". I got a sense of him as a man who possessed real humanity. As I have a deep personal interest in Japanese literature, history, and culture, this book was extremely interesting to me. My knowledge was broadened and this book has left me with much to further research and explore. I found this read to be absolutely inspiring and will be purchasing a copy for my own collection. Donald Keene's legacy is truly a treasure chest for us all. Highly recommend!!!
• 
  Jefther Vieira

  Comovente em certos momentos, erudit0 e informativo em outros, mas sempre leve e bem escrito. Prevejo voltar de quando em quando a esse livro para pegar algumas referências.
  
  Ah, as ilustrações! きれいですね。
• 
  kkurtz

  this is a wonderfully heartfelt & humble memoir from the pre-eminent Japanese Scholar. Keene recounts how he fell into his love for the Japanese culture & language quite by accident, but how those early events would shape the rest of his life. The reader gets a vivid picture of the often solitary life of a working scholar, as well as glimpses into Keene's friendships with leading Japanese writers of the day. Writers like Mishima, Kenzaburo Oë, & Kobo Abe. The book was originally written for serialization in the Japanese newspaper the Daily Yomiuri,
  that's why the short chapter format, which also makes it quite a breezy read. As a bonus, the book is also illustrated throughout with amazing drawings by Akira Yamaguchi.
  
  
• 
  Ozymandias

  It’s always a bit hard to judge an autobiography and that’s especially true since I’m not wholly sure why I started reading this one. I’m familiar with Keene’s work, although I’ve only read a tiny fraction of it as my interests are mainly A. European and B. historical, but I can’t say I often wonder about the backstory of scholars I read. What got my interest is the background in World War II and the postwar Japanese years. Extreme shifts in culture and values have always fascinated me, which is why I have a great interest in Rome’s adoption of Greek and Christian culture in my real job and Japan’s opening to the West and recovery after World War II as a hobby. A translator working for the US Navy trying to gain intel from Japanese POWs and both find a way to open them up and interpret what they say to English-language superiors sounds fascinating. And indeed I did find the beginning of the book the most interesting.
  
  Part of the reason this didn’t really hit all the buttons is that his life and interests are both too similar and too different from mine. All the books I knew of from him were historical or biographical, but his main overriding interest is literature. I love reading (duh) but I have little interest in poetry or classics, so much of his obsessions go over my head. His experience of academia was interesting (the fact that Cambridge never used to accept other universities’ undergraduate degrees was a surprise!) and I found his attitude to teaching interesting, but this gets rushed through a lot because it’s hard to summarize. Mostly the book is about all the famous authors he knows and his relationship with them. I know some of these authors. Mishima for example is quite (in)famous. He committed seppuku after taking an officer hostage and trying to overthrow the Japanese constitution and restore direct imperial rule through rousing speeches. Which is absolutely nuts. But while that moment is a great shock to Keene we really don’t go into it much outside the effect it had on him. Obviously this is his memoirs so that makes sense, but it’s not great that the most interesting sections are those where he’s not present.
  
  Even in the World War II sections he’s quite short on details about his job, which I gather he didn’t much like. He’s a pacifist so that’s hardly surprising, but the focus is also on personal experience than any of what I’d call the technical aspects of it. So while I can tell you where he was stationed for most of the war the other details aren’t important. As for Occupied Japan, only businessmen and missionaries were allowed in. I’d thought he might be stationed there, but nope: plenty of Nisei willing to do the translation work and he pissed of his CO. Aside from a brief and illegal visit while feigning orders he only goes to Japan after the country is reopened in the mid-50s and intermittently from then on.
  
  What else should you expect from someone’s memoirs? I guess nothing more is really required. But the really great ones capture a feel of time and place. I didn’t really get that here. At times you feel you have some understanding of uprooted life in the Navy or the experience of flying on a plane back when that was something new, but on the whole the focus is very much narrowly on him. This may be strange for an ancient historian to say, but he also lives very firmly in the past. His main love is medieval classics like the Tale of Genji and forms of theater like No and Kabuki. The modern world is an intrusion that he regularly complains about. So much of the elements of Japanese culture that interest me (anime, manga, films) are completely missing. Likely he would have looked down on them (he can be quite snobbish in his opinions at times). High art is what is being examined.
  
  Cultural observations are surprisingly limited in many respects as his main love is for literature, theater, and opera. We get bits of culture here and there (how could we miss them?) but it’s not much. I suppose that if you’ve been to the places described you might be shocked to know how much they’ve changed (and some of the illustrations are lovely and even amusing) but I’ve never been fortunate (or wealthy) enough to visit Japan. Politics and broader societal issues are basically nonexistent, as he expresses a distaste for them and any grand overarching ideals (one more reason the book isn’t for me). Instead we get a string of individuals he knows. His personality seems a stereotypical academic – often impractical and naïve, with enormous enthusiasm but also that determination to go his own way no matter what which makes getting academics to agree to anything like herding cats. I say that in a mostly sympathetic way (I’m in academia and even if I like to think I’m more practical that’s probably delusion) but it doesn’t exactly make for the compelling life story you find in the best of biographies.
  
  I think it’s fair to say this simply wasn’t a book for me. It wasn’t overly insightful about the author or the time period and the areas that did interest me were clearly tangential to the types of areas he wanted to talk about. That’s all fine. As with most such books your enjoyment will depend on how you feel about the topics of interest. I’m not sure who this biography will appeal to though – students of Japanese literature looking for a sense of how the arts scene was a half century ago may be interested. If you’re a big fan of Keene’s and want more than a quick biographical sketch this may be of use. Or maybe if you’ve felt a similar yearning to be inside Japanese culture. But outside of that fairly narrow range the biography will probably not be people’s cup of tea.
• 
  Mayumi

  As I have enjoyed a long relationship with Japan, Prof Donald Keene's thorough and sensitive telling of his studies about Japan, time as a US Navy interrogator of Japanese prisoners, world travels, and his many, many tales of learning from, and partying with, the most esteemed of all Japanese scholars and authors (Mishima, Tanizaki, Kawabata, Oe, Abe, et al), this book touched my heart. The autobiography includes personal accounts of the background considerations leading to his most interesting literary translations and books of cultural history. The tiny cartoon drawings by Akira Yamaguchi should be studied with a magnifying glass to catch all their hilarious details. That Keene died only two months ago made a reading of his memoirs all the more poignant for me.
• 
  Arvind Radhakrishnan

  This is easily one of the best memoirs I have read.Donald Keene's erudition is truly astounding.I had started exploring Japanese literature seriously after reading his essays and books. So it was a treat to read about his life and experiences as a Japanologist. Through his wise insights he has transmitted to the world the beauty of Japanese literature. Keep teaching us Keene-san!
• 
  Charlie Canning

  For anyone studying Japanese culture, and especially Japanese literature, the name Donald Keene is a familiar one. In a career dating back to the 1950s, Keene has published more than thirty books of translation, criticism, and history. His latest offering, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (Columbia, 2008), is an autobiography that was first serialized in The Daily Yomiuri newspaper in 2006 as "Chronicles of My Life in the 20th Century."
  
  Keene begins the narrative with his childhood in New York City. He was a sensitive boy who cared more for music and stamp collecting than he did baseball, and except for a trip to Europe in 1931 with his father, he seemed to have had a tough time of it. The family fortunes changed dramatically in the lean years of the 1930s and this, coupled with the death of his sister and the divorce of his parents, made Keene even more studious and withdrawn. In 1938, however, at the age of sixteen, he won an extremely competitive four-year Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia University and things began to look up.
  
  At Columbia, he studied with Mark van Doren. Professor van Doren's teaching style and his emphasis on the importance of the so-called "Great Books" of Western civilization were to have a life-long influence on Keene: "Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for ourselves why they ranked as classics. Insofar as I have been a success as a teacher of Japanese literature, it has been because I had a model in Mark van Doren."
  
  The other outstanding teacher that Keene had at Columbia was Tsunoda Ryusaku who taught the history of Japanese thought. When Keene first enrolled in Professor Tsunoda's course in 1941, he was the only one registered. Thinking that the course would not be offered to only one student, Keene had thought to withdraw. But in characteristic Japanese fashion, Tsunoda had said, "One is enough."
  
  Keene was hiking on Staten Island on December 7, 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Although a pacifist by nature, Keene would later refer to the timing of the war as a form of "luck": "The outbreak of the Pacific War, just at a time when I had begun to study Japanese, determined my whole life." He was admitted to the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School and studied Japanese intensively for eleven months. Upon graduation in February 1943, he was sent to Pearl Harbor where he worked on the translation of captured Japanese documents. Other wartime assignments included trips to the Aleutians, the Philippines, and Okinawa.
  
  Keene's first visit to Honshu was in December 1945 when he spent a week in Tokyo. The attitude of the people that he met then surprised him: "I could detect no trace of enmity of Japanese for Americans or of Americans for Japanese, and yet it had been scarcely four months since a bitter war ended. How was it possible for people's emotions to change so rapidly? I wondered. But perhaps friendship is the normal feeling between peoples, and war is only an aberration."
  
  It was to be another eight years before Keene would return to Japan. During this period, he continued his studies at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge. At Cambridge, Keene met Betrand Russell, E. M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, and Arthur Waley, "the great translator who had rendered The Tale of Genji into marvelously beautiful English." According to Keene, "Waley was a genius. The word genius is sometimes used in Japan for any foreigner who can read Japanese, but Waley knew not only Japanese and Chinese but also Sanskrit, Mongol, and the principal European languages. Moreover, he knew these languages not as a linguist interested mainly in words and grammar but as a man with an unbounded interest in the literature, history, and religion of every part of the world."
  
  In 1953, Keene returned to Japan and spent two years in Kyoto. He began publishing articles on Japanese literature in Japanese and also compiled the outstanding two-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature published by Grove Press in 1955 and 1956. This work brought him into contact with many of the great writers of the day including Mishima Yukio and Tanizaki Junichiro. Later, he would develop friendships with Abe Kobo, Oe Kenzaburo, and Kawabata Yasunari.
  
  Keene returned to New York in 1955 to take up his position teaching Japanese literature and history at Columbia University. Although he wept in the airplane at the thought that he would never be able to return to Japan, he has "managed to spend at least a month in Japan every year since then."
  
  In the intervening years, Keene has been enormously productive with books on fiction, poetry, theater, and history too numerous to mention. Keene's memoir, coming as it does at the end of a long and distinguished career, is yet another worthy title to read.
• 
  Darryl

  "Chronicles of My Life" is a short autobiography and memoir written by Donald Keene, who is arguably the leading American scholar of Japanese literature, poetry and theater. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught for over 50 years, and he has written several dozen books about Japanese history, culture and literature, including "Modern Japanese Literature", "Twenty Plays of the No Theatre" and "Five Modern Japanese Novelists". His latest book, "So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers", was published by Columbia University Press earlier this year.
  
  Keene was born in New York City and initially attended Columbia on a scholarship, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1942. He enlisted in the Navy, where he was trained to be a Japanese translator during World War II. He made his initial trips to China and Japan during the war years, serving both as an interviewer of Japanese prisoners and civilians and a translator of sensitive documents and diaries. Upon his discharge from the Navy he attended Cambridge, then spent several years living in Japan, where he continued his study of Japanese literature while befriending many leading Japanese novelists, including Yukio Mishima, Nobelists Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. He returned to Cambridge to teach, while spending summers in Japan, and then returned to Columbia, where he received his PhD and taught Japanese literature and culture.
  
  Keene describes his fascinating life and experiences in New York, Cambridge and London, and Tokyo and Kyoto in this compelling and personal account, with great sensitivity and candor. His life is both enriching and most rewarding, but he also portrays himself as a sensitive, often lonely and sometimes depressed man, which endeared this reader to the man and his story. He also describes, in lesser detail, the personal lives of several tragic figures, including Mishima, who committed seppuru in 1970 after being passed over for the 1968 Nobel Prize, and Kawabata, who may have also taken his life in part due to Mishima's death.
  
  Keene also aptly describes his experiences as a foreigner in Japan, a translator of Japanese literature and the difficulties he faced in getting American publishers to accept Japanese literature despite its popularity in the mid-20th century, and the rewards and frustrations of teaching at Columbia and Cambridge.
  
  "Chronicles of My Life" is a wonderfully written and sensitive memoir, and is highly recommended.
• 
  Matthias

  Nachdem ich aus nicht mehr nachvollziehbaren Gründen nach ca. 70 Seiten der Lektüre einige Jahre Pause eingeschoben hatte, war ich dann, beim Weiterlesen regelrecht gefesselt von Keenes Bericht seiner ersten Kontakte zu Japan, seinen Menschen und natürlich der Literatur des Landes. Wie sehr unterschied sich doch das Studium der „Japanologie“ damals und heute. Keene kam zu einer Zeit nach Japan in der ihm weder das Internet noch elektronische Wörterbücher oder andere Hilfsmittel zur Verfügung standen und sogleich stürzte er sich in ein anspruchsvolles Projekt nach dem anderen, um schließlich eine japanischen Literaturgeschichte zu verfassen, die mehrere Jahrzehnte als Standardwerk in englischer wurde. In seinem Text skizziert er sein Leben bis zum 84. Lebensjahr – eine dauernde Pendelei zwischen Japan und den USA – weitgehend entlang seiner wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprojekte, wobei insbesondere die Einblicke in die literarische Welt Japans dieser Zeit von großem Interesse sind. Neben anderen stehen hier die Freundschaften zu Abe Kobo, Tanizaki Jun‘ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari und vor allem Mishima Yukio im Mittelpunkt, und es wird ganz nebenbei so manches private Detail oder persönliches Erlebnis berichtet. Am Ende der insgesamt recht kurzen Lektüre war ich jedoch überrascht, dass so viele Themen, über die ich mir mehr zu lesen erhofft hatte, von Keene ausgespart worden waren. Doch wer will dem Autobiographen das Recht auf das letzte Wort über das eigene Leben absprechen? Ein wunderbarer Text, den ich jedem Studierenden der Japanologie und anderen, an der japanischen Literatur/dem japanischen Theater Interessierten, sehr ans Herz legen möchte.
• 
  Contando Dragones

  Nunca antes había leído una biografía, ni tampoco una autobiografía, como es el caso, pero creo que si la persona es lo suficientemente interesante y tiene suficientes cosas que contar, puede ser una lectura muy interesante.
  
  Nada de fantasía ni relatos maravillosos (en el sentido más imaginativo de la palabra), simplemente hechos realistas que no llegan a ser del todo cotidianos. Como digo, si la persona es interesante, puede ser una gran lectura.
  
  Esto es lo que me ha pasado con este libro. Adoro Japón, su historia, su cultura y su lengua, y este hombre se nota que piensa igual que yo. He leído sobre el tiempo que pasó en Japón, pero en vez de entretenerse en llenar el libro con detalles de historia, fechas y hechos, nos cuenta su visión de lo que vio y aprendió.
  
  
  Puedes leer el resto de la reseña
  aquí.
• 
  Masanaka Takashima

  I have come to like Mr Keene through this stunning memoir. Chapters where he meets my literary heros like Kenich Yoshida and Arthur Waley excited me a lot, but I enjoyed the earlier development of how he met and learned Japanese language, and joined the US Navy as a linguist officer working in war-operations against Japan. There he translated huge amount of various Japanese sources into English. Among them were killed Japanese soldiers' diaries. Japanese soldiers were encouraged to keep a diary while US counterparts were prohibited from doing so --- do you know why? This made me as Japanese feel down and think.
• 
  Jason Keenan

  What a wonderful journey and what a wonderful life. Donald Keene traces the chains of his long life (he's now in his 90s) that lead from sitting next to a Chinese student in his youth to a life as one of the world's preeminent experts on Japanese literature (and quite the writer on culture and history as well).
  
  His life and his career and his friendships with modern writers like Yukio Mishima, as well as his focus on the history of Japanese literature, will have you taking copious note for your to-read list. Mine doubled - at least for Japanese fiction.
  
  A fun read and an insightful one - I'm already looking forward to tackling more of Keene's books.
• 
  Kazen

  Have you ever read an obituary of a semi-famous person and think, "Hey, this person was awesome! Why didn't I know about them?" That's the way I feel about Donald Keene, though (thankfully) he's still alive and kicking.
  
  Keene is a translator, professor, and scholar of Japanese literature. Those who know even a little bit about post-war writers like Mishima and Kawabata will love the anecdotes Keene relates. And anyone who has ever visited Japan, especially Kyoto, will enjoy his stories about what living here was like in the 1950's. (Above all, it was quiet!)
  
  A lovely memoir by a humble, impressive man.
• 
  Bruce

  Professor Keene's memoir is all the more powerful because of his understated style. Anyone who has lived in Japan will get a lot out of this, as will anyone who translates for a living. This is a memoir that actually has a lot to impart to its readers. It inspired me to both continue translating Japanese writers and to try to maintain even closer ties with Japan. His anecdotes about working with and becoming friends with Mishima, Abe, Tanizaki, Oe and others give us a fascinating glimpse of the Japanese literary world in the decades before Murakami burst onto the scene.
• 
  Karl Lion

  I've finished reading the book. I love many parts in it which I cannot tell you without citing almost the whole book that are still so alive and vivid in my mind. It thrills me a lot as if I've met in person with Mr. Keene. I've made a plan to read other books of his and of those he mentioned in this one. I especially love the conclusion he made for the book as well as for his life: "I hope that this chronicle, for all its deficiencies, has at least suggested how one human being spent an essentially happy life."
  
• 
  Blake

  Received this book as part of a prize after meeting Mr Keene himself as well. It's really amazing to read about this man's life. Even though he might seem slightly reserved or retiring, it's clear that he didn't let anything hold him back all these years! The people he met, the times he experienced, they're all so fascinating. Definitely inspiring. I wonder who's going to be able to top his achievements in this field in the coming years...
• 
  Tim

  Good quick read. To fully enjoy it, some knowledge of famous Japanese figures (especially from the literary world) may be required. He also talks about opera and theater a bit more than I was expecting, but overall I was satisfied, and I particularly enjoyed the illustrations.
• 
  Erin

  Love Japan. Love this book.
• 
  Alexander Páez

  IMPRESCINDIBLE.
• 
  Jaime

  Me resulta extraño explicar por qué este título me ha gustado tanto. Tal vez sea porque Keene, un intelectual poderosísimo y probablemente uno de los mejores japanólogos que vio el S.XX, sabe construir un relato absolutamente literario incluso de manera inconsciente. Puede ser su humildad, el presentar todos los logros de su vida como hechos con la relevancia justa, hechos por la pasión y el trabajo y sin ninguna ambición más que el puro conocimiento y mostrarlo a los demás para que puedan disfrutarlo como él lo hace.
  
  Keene se muestra muy humano. Una persona con aciertos y con errores, con suerte y también tropiezos. Sea tal vez esta humanidad de un gran genio la que nos hace conectar con él. Toda su vida es una sucesión de hechos aleatorios, como la de todos nosotros. Una vida que no estaba dirigida ni a Japón ni a los libros, pero acabó de esa manera. Como lo podía haber hecho de muchas otras. Los libros, la pasión por conocer Japón por ellos, de iluminar una cultura que queda oculta incluso a los propios japoneses, incapaces de verla desde una perspectiva diferente que resulte su valor, se convierten en los objetivos de Keene. Y nos hace partícipes de ellos.
  
  Un libro para todos los que les entusiasma Japón, su cultura, su pensamiento. A un Japón que cambia, pero mantiene su esencia; donde lo superficial se transforma, pero siempre hay un alma japonés que permanece Para aquellos que piensa que los genios nacen, y no se construyen. Para los que viven sin pasión, o crean no tener posibilidades.
  
  Quiero destacar la calidad de la edición de Nocturna, en papel cuché, y con unas ilustraciones de Akira Yamaguchi que dan un toque sencillo de diversión a todo el texto. Recomiendo ir de vez en cuando, mientras se lee el texto, a las fotografías del final del libro: no causa la misma impresión verlas al final que a medida que los hechos que muestran aparecen en el texto.
• 
  Anson Cassel Mills

  First a disclaimer: I know nothing about Japanese literature, and I read Keene’s autobiography only because I am fascinated with people who are gifted at mastering other languages, especially difficult ones. (Apparently even some Japanese were surprised to discover that Keene read their language.)
  
  Donald Keene (1922-2019) was a lucid writer who chronicled his life with grace and modesty. As is typical with academic autobiographies, the general reader will probably find Keene’s early career more interesting than his latter years when he was showered with honors for his multi-volume history of Japanese literature. For one thing, childhoods are more similar than adulthoods. My own concentration flagged as Keene detailed his connections with noted Japanese writers, who were all (except for the notorious Mishima) unknown to me.
  
  Apparently Keene’s life is strictly that of a scholar who loves classical music and especially opera. Keene mentions no love affairs of any sort, and his political views are charmingly naïve. (His strongest quasi-political statement is the declaration, “Down with the car!”) Of religion there is not a hint. In short, he has eschewed discussion of any larger philosophical questions—his right, of course, but somewhat surprising for man in his late eighties.
  
  The book itself is a masterpiece of the bookmaker’s art and includes clever drawings by Japanese artist Akira Yamaguchi—although unfortunately for readers like me, many of the captions are in Japanese. The book concludes with a helpful guide to the Japanese mentioned in the text, but it has no index.
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  Johan Åkerman

  If you have an interest in Japan, and in particular in Japanese literature, and possibly above all how it came to be known in the West, this book is for you. It's very easy to read, the text being straightforward and divided up into short chapters. If anything, the text might come across as a bit dry and barren, as it is very direct. It is not the literary quality that makes me give it 5 stars, but the content, following the life of the Donald Keene from childhood to his 80s. He has obviously left out tons of material and one would have liked to know much more of many of the well-known writers and other persons he has come across throughout his life. And also much more about the work behind his different books. He has also left out any mention of any romantic relation to anybody, and his accounts of his parents are also very brief.
  
  All in all, the book being so easy to read and on such a unique topic, I can highly recommend it if you have the interest.
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  J

  I did not know Donald Keene before reading this book, but I will have to check out some of his translations of Japanese literature.
  The "chronicles" are an autobiography and wonderfully written, anecdotes and memories strung together to form a picture of his fascination with Japan. It is not a complete account of his life, but it shows glimpses of it.
  Keene has a beautiful style, clear and warm, it's a joy to read.