Quotes of the Day

The 84-year-old Japanologist Donald Keene walks in a state of intense absorption. "If he doesn't recognize you when you pass him on the sidewalk," says one of Keene's students at Columbia University, where he still teaches a seminar on Japanese literature, "it's because his head is so full of everything he's ever read." Few heads anywhere, including Japan, have taken in as much Japanese literature as Keene's. His forthcoming memoir, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan, tells the unlikely story of how a boy born in Brooklyn in 1922 grew increasingly drawn to a country that many in his generation would know only as an enemy to fear and conquer. Lovingly illustrated by the artist Akira Yamaguchi, the book limns a life inseparably linked to its dominant passion. "I sometimes think," Keene writes, "that if, as the result of an accident, I were to lose my knowledge of Japanese, there would not be much left for me."

In the mid-1950s, with Japanese cities still pocked by wartime bombing, Keene published an English-language anthology of Japanese literature that gave the world glimpses of an astoundingly rich literary tradition. An 1899 history of Japanese literature was the only reference available in English at that time. Keene's feat was stupendous. Just over a decade into his study of the language, he navigated more than a millennium of its finest compositions — the creation myths of Japan's oldest book, the 7th century Kojiki; early poetry from the 8th century collection Manyoshu; the sublime socio-psychological epics by the legendary 11th century Heian court ladies; Zen-inflected 14th century battle tales and Noh dramas; haiku, travelogues, kabuki and puppet plays of the Edo period (1600-1868); and the panoply of modern novels, poetry and plays from the Meiji era on. Still read by Japanese-literature students, the anthology alone would have secured Keene's stature. But he has since published, on average, an English-language book every two years — gems on Japanese culture and history, in addition to his acclaimed translations of the country's classical and modern literature. John Nathan, a translator of modern Japanese novels, says that Keene told him he considered writing a novel of his own, but decided not to because "I could use the time to translate a great Japanese one."

Keene's enchantment with Japanese literature began when he stumbled on Murasaki Shikibu's 11th century classic The Tale of Genji in a Times Square bookshop in 1940. The hero Genji is a sensitive aristocrat who pursues beauty in a world he knows more readily offers sadness. With the news from Europe full of Nazi advances, Keene writes, "I turned to it as a refuge from all I hated in the world around me." The translation was by Arthur Waley, a British polyglot who was also a famed translator of classical Chinese literature. Keene eventually befriended him, and years later traveled from Japan to comfort Waley in London after learning that Waley's longtime partner, the dancer Beryl de Zoete, was dying. The description of that sad meeting is one of the few truly intimate passages of Keene's book, and reveals the same sensitivity to the perishability of things — what the Japanese call mono no aware — felt everywhere in Genji.

Keene learned Japanese at the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School during World War II, and worked throughout the war translating captured documents. He also interrogated — and sometimes comforted — captured soldiers in Okinawa and Hawaii. Keene told one desolate prisoner who asked why he shouldn't kill himself that he should stay alive to fight for the new Japan. That he has an empathetic nature should come as no surprise: What is translation, after all, but relating how others see the world?

The book is not without its flaws: originally serialized in an English-language newspaper in Japan, it occasionally repeats itself. Some may also dislike Keene's refusal to share more of his life outside academic or literary circles — particularly as he stresses literature's importance in conveying the communality of our deepest thoughts and emotions. But the history is fascinating, and the literary life Keene has doggedly carved out of it, remarkable.

• Andrew Monahan