Keene, Chronicles of My Life

Two months after passing along the news that the Japan scholar Donald Keene is emigrating there at age 88 I came across a hardcover copy of his 2008 autobiography Chronicles of My Life: an American in the heart of Japan for $10 at Schooner Books, so I had to read it. It's a surprisingly plain and quick-paced account of his remarkable career as the preeminent herald of Japanese culture in the second half of the twentieth century, told without footnotes, and with a bit less poetic imagery than I would have expected. I think if I were his editor I would have encouraged him to quote more classical verse, or opera, or one of the many Japanese diaries he read as a naval interpreter during the war, and relate it to his own life, and perhaps imply a love affair with the moon as Yasunari Kawabata does in Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. As it is there is a layer of artistic interpretation in the dozen or so fanciful illustrations by Akira Yamaguchi that cluster toward the beginning of the book. The one above puts a storybook spin on Keene's account of a childhood trip to Europe in 1931. The kanji on the brass plaque of the French train window seem to say that although the autobiography is written in English, the story is ultimately Japanese. D