Professor Donald Keene

Donald Keene portraitDonald Keene, University Professor Emeritus and Shinchō Professor Emeritus of Columbia University, died in Tokyo on February 24, 2019. He was 96.

Professor Keene played the leading role in the establishment of Japanese literary studies in the United States and beyond. Through his scholarship, translations, and edited anthologies, and through the work of students he trained and inspired, he did more than any other individual to further the study and appreciation of Japanese literature and culture around the world in the postwar era.

Donald Lawrence Keene was born on June 18th, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended public schools there and entered Columbia College at the age of sixteen in 1938. He studied French and Greek literature and took classes with such renowned professors as Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling, and Moses Hadas; he also began learning Chinese and Japanese informally. In 1940, he happened upon a discounted copy of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji in a midtown bookstore, and found refuge from constant news of warfare overseas in the world of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century classic. In the same year he took a class on the history of Japanese thought with Ryūsaku Tsunoda, the founder of Japanese studies at the university. Although he was a committed pacifist, Keene enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor, graduating from the College and traveling to California to enter the Navy Japanese Language School in early spring 1942. Commissioned as an officer a year later, he served as a translator and interpreter in Hawai’i, the Aleutian islands, Guam, Leyte, Okinawa, and China, first visiting Japan at the end of 1945, on his way home to the United States. His wartime experiences are vividly described in a collection of letters he exchanged with Language School classmates, War Wasted Asia (ed. Otis Cary, 1975; republished in 1984 as From a Ruined Empire).

After the war Keene returned to Columbia to continue his studies with Ryūsaku Tsunoda. He received an M.A. in 1947 (with a thesis on the early modern intellectual Honda Toshiaki), and spent a year as a visiting student at Harvard University and five years as a student and lecturer at Cambridge University. While in England he befriended the legendary translator Arthur Waley, whose rendition of The Tale of Genji had been such an influential discovery during his undergraduate years. In 1951 he received a PhD. from Columbia (with a dissertation on the early modern historical play Battles of Coxinga, published in London the same year).

In 1953, at the age of 31, Keene received a Ford Foundation fellowship to study at Kyoto University. During the two years that followed, he began friendships with prominent Japanese authors, including Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Mishima Yukio. Over the ensuing decades he would maintain close relationships with these and many other major literary figures. While in Kyoto, with the help of Kawabata and others he edited two anthologies filled with new translations by himself and many other pioneering scholars of Japanese. Published by Grove Press, Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955) and Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology (1956) provided several generations of students and general readers with a sweeping and compelling introduction to a vibrant literary tradition of which Anglophone readers were largely unaware.

Following his years in Kyoto, Keene returned to New York in 1955 to take a position as a professor at Columbia, where he played a key role in the development of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures into a national standard-bearer. For decades he taught classes on Japanese literature and cultural history and trained generations of students, many of whom went on to become professors themselves at universities in North America and Europe. He was named the Shinchō Professor of Japanese Literature in 1981 and became a University Professor in 1989. In 1992 he retired and was named Professor Emeritus, but he continued teaching a graduate seminar every spring semester for the following two decades; his final class at Columbia, in Spring 2011, was widely covered by the Japanese media and commemorated by a public symposium.

Throughout his years at Columbia and afterward, Keene produced a prolific stream of translations and scholarly studies of Japanese literature and culture, publishing hundreds of books in English, Japanese, and several European languages. His translations range from classical works such as the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the Essays in Idleness of Yoshida Kenkō, numerous Noh plays, Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to Oku, and plays by Chikamatsu, to modern novels, stories, and plays by authors such as Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, and Abe Kōbō. He also wrote monographic studies on topics including the “discovery of Europe” by early modern Japanese intellectuals, the Noh and Bunraku theaters, and the millennium-long Japanese tradition of diary-writing. However, the greatest monument to his scholarship is his enormous multivolume history of Japanese literature, written over nearly two decades: World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600-1867 (1976); Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (1984), and Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (1993). That such detailed and comprehensive works were written by a single person is still hard to believe. In the years after his retirement Keene published two charming autobiographies (On Familiar Terms in 1994 and Chronicles of My Life in 2008) and a series of biographical studies of such figures as the Emperor Meiji (2002), the medieval shogun and arts patron Ashikaga Yoshimasa (2003), the early modern artist Watanabe Kazan (2006), and the modern poets Masaoka Shiki (2013) and Ishikawa Takuboku (2016). When the last of these books was published, he was 94 years old.

Donald Keene was familiar to scholars and enthusiasts of literature throughout the English-speaking world, but from the 1970s onward he was a major media figure in Japan. His friendships with many prominent Japanese authors, journalists, and publishers certainly contributed to this fame, but he also wrote and lectured widely in Japanese for many decades. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s there was a great deal of popular interest in what foreigners made of Japan, and as a fluent speaker of Japanese and authority on traditional and modern literature, he was much in demand. Virtually all of his English-language publications appeared in parallel Japanese editions, and many of them were originally written for serialization in Japanese magazines and newspapers. But much of his work never came out in English: for example, he wrote essays about his travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, or about aspects of American and European culture of interest to his Japanese readers. For many years he also wrote columns on and reviews of opera and classical music recordings and performances. His main publisher, Shinchōsha, recently finished compiling an edition of his collected works in Japanese: it runs to 15 volumes (plus a forthcoming supplement).

A complete listing of the various ways in which Keene’s accomplishments were recognized would be many pages long, but his major prizes, awards, and honors include the following. The Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class in 1975 and the Order of the Rising Sun, Second Class in 1993; named him Person of Cultural Merit in 2002; and granted him the high honor of the Order of Culture (Bunka kunshō) in 2008 (he was the first non-Japanese so designated). He was named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986, and an honorary member of the Japan Academy in 1990. Among the universities to grant him honorary degrees were Cambridge University, St. Andrew’s College, Middlebury College, Columbia University, Tohoku University, Waseda University, Tokyo Foreign Language University, and Keiwa University. He received the Kikuchi Kan prize in 1962 and won both the Yamagata Bantō Prize and the Japan Foundation Prize in 1983. His account of Japanese diary literature, Travellers of a Hundred Ages, won the Yomiuri Prize and the Japan Literature Prize in 1985. He won the Tokyo Metropolitan Prize in 1987, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandorf Award in 1991, the Radio and Television Culture Prize in 1993, the Inoue Yasushi Prize in 1994, the Asahi Prize in 1998, and in 2002 his biography of the Emperor Meiji received the Mainichi Culture Prize. In 2013, the Donald Keene Center Kashiwazaki, a museum dedicated to his life and writings, opened in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture.

At Columbia University his legacy is commemorated by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, which was established in his honor in 1986. The Center is dedicated to advancing the understanding of Japan and its culture in the United States through university instruction, research, and public education; in addition, it seeks to encourage study of the interrelationships among the cultures of Japan, other Asian countries, Europe, and the United States. As the central institution supporting the study of Japanese culture, literature, and history at Columbia, the Keene Center frequently co-sponsors events with other centers and institutes.

For many years Keene divided his time between Manhattan and Tokyo, where he kept an apartment in Kita Ward overlooking the expansive Kyu-Furukawa Garden. After the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in March 2011, he moved to Tokyo full time, becoming a Japanese citizen in March of the following year. At a time of national crisis and mourning, with frequent accounts of foreign residents leaving the country for fear of radiation, these acts were widely reported in the Japanese media and met with an outpouring of affection and gratitude. In 2012 Keene also adopted Uehara Seiki (b. 1950), a traditional shamisen performer and bunraku puppet theater narrator, as his son and heir. His final years in Tokyo were happy ones; he was surrounded by friends and well-wishers, and his son Seiki cared for him devotedly. A private funeral and a memorial service took place in Tokyo this past spring. At Columbia, the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures will host a memorial service on Friday, 27 September 2019. The Keene Center has established a scholarship fund in his honor; donations can be sent to 507 Kent Hall MC 3920, 1140 Amsterdam Avenue, Columbia University, New York NY 10027, or by clicking on: https://www.givenow.columbia.edu/?_sa=10767&_sd=32402#

 


Memorial Service
For Donald Keene
5:00 PM, Friday 27 September 2019
The Faculty House, Presidential Ballroom (3rd Floor), Columbia University
64 Morningside Drive, between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive (directions)
With reception to follow
PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
View video from Memorial Service here.

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