In praise of Donald Keene, the grand interpreter of Japanese literature

His writings, like Basho’s travel diaries, are long walks into the recesses of Japanese literature, and make a fine companion.

There is an old  Korean proverb that says, “The first step takes you halfway there.” The distance traveled just by getting started is immense. And how one is inducted into doing something or introduced to a new area of knowledge also shapes one’s attitude and interest toward the work.

Besides spending time as a student in Kyoto, a few small books and chapters marked my introduction to Japanese literature and are among the writings I am most grateful for. They weren’t great works of art—neither Basho’s travelogues, the Tale of Genji, or Tanizaki erotic last books. My first readings were Donald Keene’s 114-page Introduction to Japanese Literature: A Guide for Western Readers and the first chapter of Keene’s Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciation of Japanese Culture.

 Mr. Keene, the eminent translator, literary historian, interpreter of Japanese arts, and tastemaker who read so deep and broadly and shared the best he found, is, of course, considered the foremost authority on Japanese literature, even by the Japanese. The Guide’s description of Basho’s greatest journey, the Narrow Road to Oku, for example, would be an adequate description of one’s experience reading any of Donald Keene’s books.

A gentle humor and gentle melancholy fill these pages. The desire to blend images into images, found throughout Japanese poetry, here takes the form of diverse experiences… blending into the personality of the narrator.  There is a general smoothing away of the rough edges of emotion, as something indecorous and rather vulgar. Much is sadly evocative, very little is shattering, either in these books of personal reflections or elsewhere in Japanese literature.

Like the entire field he describes, so is the pathfinder. As a synthesizer and interpreter bringing you across epochs of literature or the life and work of an artist, he offers an open pathway marked by his own decorum, taste and personality. In all of his books—from the early guides to the massive histories and final biographies, he is quick to sort out the best and the most representative material and to identify what’s unique or most challenging about each.

In the guidebook, he makes clear his first principles. How poetry in a given language builds on the most powerful features of the language—with Japanese, the compression of many images into a small space, the number of homophones leading to easy wordplay and multiple meanings; and the expectation for how much feeling the medium of words can bear, noting from Chikamatsu that pathos and other feelings is always a matter of restraint. He reminds us that simplicity is never simple, as Japanese is a language clouded in vagueness and suggestiveness with words and thoughts often trailing into smoke.

Unlike today’s critics who crown every work with their own ideologies (as if that were the art), his views are born from solid exegesis of the language and a fascination with the personal style and genre of the field. The major value of his perceptions is their seemingly understated, and hard-earned, rightness.

Borrowing from Claudel and Yeats, the description of distance and representation in theatre and poetry show some of his method. Consider a few sections I underlined in my text 40 years or so ago:

Although in Europe the attempt has been to make puppets seem as lifelike as possible, in Japan actors to this day imitate the movements of puppets.  It was only by turning its back on realism, as the No before it had also done, that the puppet theatre could achieve its high dramatic purpose.

In depriving the marionettes of their unreality, [Western puppets] forfeit every artistic possibility. As Yeats said, “all imaginative art keeps a distance, and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world.”

Keene quotes Paul Claudel:

The living actor, whatever his talent may be, always bothers us by admixing a foreign element into the part that he is playing, something ephemeral and commonplace; he remains always a man in disguise. The marionette, on the other hand, has no other life or movement but that which it draws from the action. It comes to life with the story. It is like a shadow that one resuscitates by describing to it it all it has done, which little by little from a memory becomes a presence. The creature made of wood is the embodiment of the words spoken for it….

Based on these observations, he introduces some of Chikamatsu’s plays and his artistic ideals and predilections—his preference to use dolls over actors and how he elevates the language of merchants, bandits, clerks, and prostitutes onto a higher plane through ritual and poetic dialogue at the crucial moment. “Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal,” Chikamatsu once said.

The first chapter of Landscapes and Portraits is a summary of key principles of Japanese aesthetics, focusing on four themes—suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability.

With his seemingly inexhaustible output, including a majestic four-part history of Japanese Literature and his 30 other books, including anthologies, translations, guides, literary histories, and biographies—it is not surprising to me that these book take up the most space on my shelf, what is remarkable is how much the books deserve to be wedged between the works of two Japanese Nobel Prize winners (Kawabata and Mishima). Also, his consistency as a guide to the perplexing work and his consistently high purpose from his earliest works to his last, all of which were labors of love.

Some of his last books are like last words, in a way, giving a direction forward when the guide has departed. In two of his last books, he shows the reader how stale literary art forms could be revived. He explores how haiku and tanka were transformed by Shiki and Takuboku, respectively.

Most notably, in The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku, Keene reveals Takuboku’s strong contradictions of character and the challenges of his desperate existence, guiding the reader evenhandedly from childhood through his dissolute adult behaviors and strained relationships. Not least, he takes us on a quiet, amiable walk through Takuboku’s Tanka, letters, and the Romaji diary, revealing the artist to be both a wastrel and a modern hero, whose writing was unstintingly honest and has much to offer readers and writers today.