Unique reflections capture a half-century of momentous transformation.
American scholar and translator Keene traces his lifelong fascination with Japanese literature.
Covering some of the same ground as a previous memoir (On Familiar Terms, 1994), the author points to his college years at Columbia—which he entered as a 16-year-old scholarship student in 1938—as the beginning of his attachment to Asian culture. A Chinese classmate taught him to read and write some Chinese characters. When he discovered The Tale of Genji (in translation) in 1940, it showed him there was more to Japan than the militaristic nation occupying China. The “distant and beautiful world” invoked in Genji also provided refuge from the war Keene hated even though he knew it was unavoidable. He began to study Japanese, then after Pearl Harbor was attacked, he got further training at the Navy Japanese Language School in San Francisco. For the rest of the war, he translated captured Japanese documents and interpreted for prisoners in the Pacific. A brief visit to Tokyo was the last he saw of Japan for eight years, during which he pursued graduate studies at Columbia, Harvard and Cambridge, where he met Genji translator Arthur Waley. A fellowship in 1953 took Keene to Kyoto, where he began writing reviews for Japanese journals and became engaged in the debate between modern and traditional forms of Japanese literature. Putting together his seminal Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955) brought him into contact with a wealth of bunjin (men of letters), including Yukio Mishima, Nobel Prize laureate Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzabura Oe and Kobo Abe. It was the launch of a long, fruitful career bringing important works of Japanese literature to readers of English, still going strong when Modern Japanese Diaries was published in 1995. Keene’s observations on Japanese culture and society will be enlightening for Western readers. Humorous sketches by Akira Yamaguchi and evocative period photos provide a visual counterpoint to his elegantly dry text.
Unique reflections capture a half-century of momentous transformation.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-14440-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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