Donald Keene: On Familiar Terms

Donald Keene, the most famous scholar and translator of Japanese literature alive, has published two autobiographies. This one, put out in 1994, is the first; the glossier, breezier, but somehow no less substantial Chronicles of My life came out in 2008. Rather than some multi-volume, each-decade-a-book-unto-itself Clive James autobiographical situation — though I’m a fan of that form, too — Keene’s two memoirs cover almost the same life territory. The second technically has 15 more years to work with, but Keene doesn’t seem to consider them nearly as eventful or interesting as the preceding 72.

That’s not without cause, by the way; they’re a pretty damned exciting 72 years. Exciting to my mind, at least, especially the middle 30 or so, when Keene was in tight with the Japanese literary titans of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Your Yukio Mishimas. Your Yasunari Kawabatas. Your Kenzaburo Ōes. Your Kobo Abes. It’s the Kobo Abes that particularly interest me, since (a) Abe is my favorite Japanese novelist, (b) information on the man in English is hard to come by, and (c) Keene and Abe were pretty good pals. Or they became so after clearing a misunderstanding in which, on their first meeting, the medically-trained Abe instinctively diagnosed the transcendently mild but (at the time) very tired Keene as a drug addict.

Keene himself is an interesting guy, no doubt, as you’d have to be to get into Japanese literature in the forties — and more on his autobiographical persona later — but it’s his association with all these fascinating Japanese writers that drew me to him. It’s the same reason I’ve been so into other memoirs like Ed Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central and (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) John Nathan’s Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. This hard-working, hard-talking, good-eating (and sometimes hard-drinking) community of novelists, poets, translators, and other literary figures was called, I think, the bundan. Sure, this bundan existed long ago and far away, but I’ve come to see it as a model that could in some sense come back suddenly and unexpectedly, given the right conditions.

As a vehicle for experiencing this time, place, and coterie, Keene’s mind is as close as you’re going to get to neutral observation. That’s not to call the man a passionless cipher; he often expresses great admiration for some things and people and great irritation with others. But given how deep he gets into literary Japan, he keeps a curiously uncrossable emotional distance. Keene’s dominant feelings are devotion to Japanese literature, love of classical music, impatience with ideology, dismissal of students not as devoted to Japanese literature as he is, and bemusement at what he considers his impossibly good fortune in life.

I can’t avoid commenting on the glaring absence of any trace of sexuality. The sexual neutrality Keene puts across in his writing about himself feels so deliberate that it backfires, drawing close attention to the very thing it excises. I have to assume, on his part, either complete asexuality or some variety of closetedness. Certainly the latter is more plausible, especially given what Keene’s peer Donald Richie called “the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists” of their generation. Indeed, Keene’s contrast with the liberated Richie, who’s written at least one entire unpublished manuscript on his Japanese homosexual encounters alone, could hardly be starker.

Still, that’s a reasons I actually find Keene’s persona in these books compelling. Below what I’m sure some readers would call a gentle, amiable, resoundingly bland surface exists an obviously complex fellow. And I admit to getting a kick out of imagining Keene, retiring self-effacement in a comb-over, hanging out with boisterous types like Abe, who would hand him cup after cup of his homebrewed carbonated garlic sake drink. (“I do not recommend it,” Keene writes.) Let alone the mental image of him sitting in a plastic pool chair alongside the Speedo-clad, flamboyantly muscled, ever-less-covertly gay Yukio Mishima, who even then foreshadowed his elaborate ritual suicide in the name of the glory of Japan.

Naturally, there’s also an element of self-flagellation to my reading books like this. I imagine it’s a surprisingly common cause for reading the autobiographies of those who have lead rich lives. I think to myself, “Donald Keene did all this stuff decades and decades and decades ago, without computers, without the Information Superhighway, without fancy-man Mac applications — hell, without reliable mail. What’s your excuse?” I certainly have no desire to become an academic, which was one of Keene’s goals from early on, and he would probably call himself a cautious, play-it-safe type, but still, there’s a courage of conviction in his life that’s way, way too rare.

Comments

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