Overview

Edward Seidensticker's translations have introduced two generations of English-language audiences to the masterpieces of classical and modern Japanese literature. His patient rendering of novels ranging from the eleventh-century Tale of Genji to works of such modern masters as Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata has earned him the National Book Award as well as the Order of the Rising Sun, Japan's highest honour for foreigners. In this colourful, sometimes prickly, memoir, Seidensticker tells of his introduction to Japan at the Navy Japanese Language School in 1942, at the age of 21. He recounts his formative experiences as a young diplomat during the Occupation, his early impressions of the Japanese literary scene and its stormy PEN session meetings, his encounters with American luminaries such as Arthur Koestler and Edwin Reischauer, and his gradual immersion in Tokyo life. He offers vivid glimpses of Japan's intellectual and political elite as it moved from the ashes of World War II through Cold War political storms in the 1950s and 1960s, when strikes and radical politics abounded, through the 1970s, when the nation's strategic and cultural alliances hardened with the United States and Europe and Japanese politics turned decisively more conservative. Tokyo Central illuminates the translator's challenge in approaching classical and modern Japanese culture, and gives singular insight into the writing and personalities of many leading Japanese novelists.

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9780295981345

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... a book that has something for everyone. - Asian Affairs, October 2002

"" ... a book that has something for everyone."" - Asian Affairs, October 2002

A professor's love affair with Japan and its language. Seidensticker ( Tokyo Rising , 1990, etc.) traces the origin of his lifelong engagement with Japanese culture to a crucial decision taken during WWII. Just graduated from the University of Colorado, he at all costs wanted to avoid being an Army grunt. So he joined the Navy's Japanese language school instead and became a Marine, carrying books and dictionaries in his rucksack during the invasion of Iwo Jima. From there he moved on to Japan and stayed for years. Seidensticker is not a flashy or emotional writer. He states explicitly that this is not a personal history per se but rather a memoir about his connection to things Japanese over the course of his life. The resulting quirky tone can frustrate with its elusiveness, but on occasion it offers delightful, well-timed insights, as when a flat discussion of a boring but esteemed teacher ends with the author realizing that everyone else in the class is as bored and miserable as he is. Seidensticker also conveys a wonderfully unadulterated sense of place. He clearly loves his native Colorado, whose mountains are described with a gusto he never voices with regard to the natural attractions of Japan. There, his energy is devoted to loving characterizations of people, especially the writers he's translated: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Unfortunately, passages featuring these writers often become bogged down in turgid discussions of the Cold War's influence on Japanese intellectual life. Although those familiar with the intrigues fostered by the Congress for Cultural Freedom will find new material here, in that Seidensticker is concerned with Asia, lay readers will be confused, and in hindsight, Congress seems a tempest in a teapot not worth the space it gets. Japanese scholars will devour this testament by one of their own. Others may find it a half-readable curiosity. (Kirkus Reviews)

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