“The Beauties of Japanese”: Donald Keene in a new light

Known and recognized

If Donald Keene (1922-2019) is internationally recognized as one of the greatest translators, cultural mediators and specialists of modern Japan, he enjoyed even greater fame and admiration within the Archipelago itself. All of his most important works, including his masterful multi-volume “History of Japanese Literature,” have been published in Japanese translation (some even before they were printed in English) and have received prestigious awards. The best literary magazines in Japan solicited him for articles. And when he was shopping in his neighborhood in Tokyo, elderly people often came up to him just to have the honor of shaking his hand (which delighted him, he admitted to me). In fact, Keene had a kind of aura and when at an advanced age he opted for Japanese nationality, the news made headlines.

Keene’s erudition in everything relating to the intellectual life of Japan has always interested the Japanese audience, but his readers especially wanted to discover what he thought about it, they wanted to know his life, his career and to know what touched him. The man of letters therefore wrote several books with this Japanese audience in mind and “The Beauties of Japanese” were published in 2000 (Nihongo no biChûô Kôron editions).

The genesis of “Beauties of Japanese” is worth stopping for a moment. Keene was 62 years old when the monthly Chûô Kôron asked him to write a series of short personal essays, texts which would preface the magazine every month for two years, from January 1985 to December 1986. Keene decided to first talk about characteristics of the Japanese language and he chooses to write directly in Japanese rather than having his texts translated from English, as he is accustomed to doing for longer works. A natural choice, as he liked to assert with understandable pride that “Japanese is a language that is not foreign to me”. These essays were then supplemented by others, written in Japanese during the decade 1980-90, this is how “The Beauties of Japanese” was born.

Desires from elsewhere

This book in three parts therefore opens with the twenty-four short essays published in the journal. This jumble of little-known facts contains judicious remarks on the Japanese language. The texts of the second part (which, it must be said, in places largely echo his writings in English) speak of the friendship which linked him to various renowned artists, scholars and intellectuals, including Abe Kôbô, Mishima Yukio, Edwin Reischauer, Shiba Ryôtarô or the pianist Nakamura Hiroko. There are also small studies on the writers Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912) and Tokuda Shûsei (1872-1943) or on Tsunoda Ryûsaku (1877-64), the scholar he called “my teacher”. (To be fair, I discovered his writings last year, when I was asked to translate three essays from Part Two into English). In the third part, Keene writes autobiographical texts, notably in a long story about his journey on the Silk Road.

I had read almost all the autobiographical stories that Keene had written in English, but this section of the collection contains previously unpublished texts. Two in particular stand out: “Lifestyle, Escape” and “Reflections on Death”.

“Lifestyle, escape” speaks of his desire to take the key to the fields, a call from the open sea which finds its roots in the solitude of childhood. The leitmotif of his entire life. Here is an excerpt:

“As a child, I must surely have had different dreams, but today the only one that remains in my memory is my dream of escape. Throughout my schooling, from elementary school to high school, I was always the smallest in the class. Even as puny as I was, with a little stubbornness and endurance I could still have made an impression in sports, but I was used to navigating studies without making any effort and never the idea of getting physically involved and striving to gain the respect of my classmates had never crossed my mind. I only had one thought, if I was not accepted for what I was with all this “weakness” and with disregard for my true qualities, then it would be better to take a tangent and take refuge in other worlds, there where people would be able to understand me and assess me at my true value. »

“But there’s nothing like the cinema to escape. As I was penniless, I couldn’t go as much as I would have liked, or when the urge took me, but I managed to go and see movies at least once a week, on Saturday. There was a movie studio not far from my house in Brooklyn and every now and then I would purposely hang out in the lobby, dreaming that a producer or director would see me on my way out and exclaim, “But you are exactly the kid we were looking for for this role!” Unfortunately, no matter how hard I persevered, I always remained unnoticed. No one has ever even honored me with a “Come on, get out of here, little one!” »

“My other method was to look around a world map looking for a place where I could live happily for the rest of my days. At the time, I collected stamps, which allowed me to know the landscapes of foreign countries and the faces of personalities from all over the world. The landscapes, the climate and the remoteness of Reunion Island having seduced me, I set my sights on this French territory in the Indian Ocean, and decided that it would be my imaginary refuge. »

“Of course I hadn’t seriously thought about how I would support myself if I actually managed to escape to Reunion. I imagined myself spending my time contemplating these myriad waterfalls so often seen on my stamps and I took the road to the post office with the idea of ​​obtaining new stickers. It was the very idea of ​​escape that appealed to me, no matter what might happen afterwards, these vile material questions were brushed aside. »

“My very first trip to Reunion took place in 1963, when I was 41 years old. These dreams of escape had long since left me, but in the evening, as I walked through the dark streets of a city without lights, I wondered what kind of person I would have become if, as a young man, I had been able to take the plunge . The next morning, on the advice of the hotel receptionist, I set off to discover the most beautiful sites on the island. There were indeed so many beautiful waterfalls. I also went to the cemetery of Hell-Bourg, a charming holiday village lost in the mountains. I wandered among the tombstones reading the epitaphs, some were two centuries old, it was impossible not to wonder if the French buried there had found happiness in their last haven. »

Faithful to his desires elsewhere, Keene studied Chinese, then Japanese, these dreams continued to guide his steps while he was a soldier during the Second World War. Aware, however, of all the disadvantages of this desire to rush forward, he nevertheless confesses that it is precisely this need for something else that has allowed him to flourish, to find his way, and that this is his greatest joy. You who know him, you know as well as me that this path which fulfilled him so much is this role of conduit of Japanese culture and literature.

Before reading “Lifestyle, Escape”, I believed that Keene had developed a passion for Japan and Japanese literature at university by discovering “The Tale of Genji”, a medieval novel about which he wrote so many texts in English. I had never thought of making the link between his childhood solitude and his desires for elsewhere, yet it was there that lay this sensitivity which made him so receptive to Japanese culture.

Post-mortem

“Reflections on Death” is an extraordinary range of vignettes, almost a path of meditation, relating to the different deaths encountered throughout his life. Yet at the turn of a sentence, Keene stops and suddenly turns the question around:

“What do I want to become after I die? I must admit, as strange as it may seem, that I had never thought about my own death. Nothing exceptional about that when you’re still young, but at my age, 67, wouldn’t it be natural for the idea to cross my mind? However, I did not feel the imminence of my death. »

No sooner has he explained that he never thought about his own death than Keene gives in to the exercise, as if driven by a spirit of contradiction. This essay then allows him to embark on an unexpected introspection. In the final lines, he enjoys imagining the place where he might be buried and thinks about the objects he would like to take to the grave. While he wonders what books or ceramics (he had the soul of a collector) could accompany it, after reviewing different scenarios, he nevertheless corrects himself:

“I don’t really need a grave.” If someone is kind enough to remember me, the rest doesn’t matter. As Shunzei wrote in his poem:

Who will remember there
among the wild orange trees in bloom
who will remember
and will my memory cry?
When I, too, am of the past…”

We can imagine Donald Keene letting himself be gently guided by this poem which takes him by the hand and makes him think about what awaits him after death. These magnificent stanzas by Fujiwara Shunzei (1114-1204), taken from the anthology of Shin kokin-wakashû (1205), did they give him strength?

“The Beauties of Japanese” is full of fascinating essays, but for me, who is interested in Keene’s inner universe, “Lifestyle, Escape” and “Reflections on Death” are apart because in the echo of these two texts we understand how the boy from Brooklyn who loved cinema so much became the scholar and translator we know. A man who felt at home in these two languages, these two cultures and these two countries that are Japan and the United States.

(Title photo: Donald Keene holds a book whose cover depicts the poet Ishikawa Takuboku. Photo taken in his office in Tokyo on March 29, 2016. © Miyazawa Masaaki)

(See also our article by the same author: Donald Keene and “The Tale of Genji”: the contribution of reading the classics in modern translations)