Chronicles of My Life by Donald Keene

Author:Donald Keene [Keene, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography and Autobiography/Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

When I left Japan in 1955, I wept in the airplane at the thought I might never again have enough money to return. As a matter of fact, however, I have managed to spend at least a month in Japan every year since then. When the purchase of airplane tickets was beyond my means, I generally succeeded in obtaining the necessary funds from some organization. In 1956, for example, I received travel expenses from Newsweek, in return for which I wrote five or six articles about events in Japan. Only one of these articles was ever printed.

In 1957 I was chosen as a delegate to the PEN Club Congress held in Tokyo and Kyoto. I owed this honor to being the only member of the American PEN Club who could speak Japanese. It was my first such experience, and I was excited to meet and even to converse with writers whose works I had long known. It was an unusually brilliant congress. Famous writers who normally avoided such gatherings gladly accepted the invitation to attend, mainly because the site was Japan. Although many American writers had lived in Paris or London in the 1920s and 1930s and had published nostalgic accounts of their experiences, probably not one writer of importance had ever visited Tokyo. “Going abroad” meant going to Europe, so this made Japan, because of its unfamiliarity, an alluring destination.

The American delegation included John Steinbeck (who received the Nobel Prize a few years later), Ralph Ellison (the best-known African American novelist), John Dos Passos (whose novel USA was a great favorite of mine), and John Hersey (who had published a celebrated book on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima). The British delegation, equally distinguished, included Stephen Spender, Angus Wilson, and Kathleen Raine. There were delegates from many countries, including refugees who described with bitterness what it meant to be exiles, forbidden to return to their own countries.

The Japanese delegation, naturally the most numerous, was headed by Kawabata Yasunari, the president of PEN. The Japanese had every reason to be proud of the congress’s success, the first major cultural event staged in Japan after the war. Even schoolchildren had contributed money to support it.

Although I was one of the least distinguished delegates, I was a favorite with Japanese newspaper reporters because I could speak Japanese. Each of them was eager to ask such penetrating questions as “What do foreign writers think of Japan?” “Who are their favorite Japanese authors?” “Is it true that the delegates, not satisfied with the Japanese banquet last night, went afterward to a restaurant for a steak?” I quickly grew tired of such questions, but the professional writers, accustomed to being interviewed, replied patiently to each reporter, never saying, “I’ve already answered that question ten times!”

I knew one of the reporters, Takahashi Tan, a former prisoner. Takahashi had been a Dōmei reporter on Guam where he was captured, close to starvation. I had interrogated him in Hawaii and, years later, saw him occasionally in Japan.

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