EMPEROR OF JAPAN: Meiji and His World 1852-1912, by Donald Keene. Columbia University Press: New York, 2002, 922 pp. + xiii + 18 pp. of illustrations, $39.50 (cloth)

Like any great story, history prefers that its leading men (and women) have some sparkle, whether a foible (Henry VIII's marital tangles; Napoleon's alleged complex about his diminutive stature) or the ability to turn a pithy phrase (Archimedes' "Eureka!"; Martin Luther King's "I have a dream"). Cause for wonder, then, that Sachinomiya, later Mutsuhito, later Emperor Meiji, ruler of Japan 1867-1912, is the subject of an expansive new biography by one of our foremost scholars of Japan, Donald Keene.

The Emperor was, by all accounts, a singularly colorless individual. Shortly after his death, men who had known him were asked for their recollections of the former ruler; those of the politician and diplomat Nobuaki Makino seem most to the point: "The Emperor had almost no private side to him. He also had no preferences . . . everything was done because it was necessary for the nation . . . He led almost no life apart from his work."

Is this book, then, 922 pages of a pretty dull read? Far from it. Emperor Meiji reigned for 45 years; not only were they the most decisive years of Japan's millennia-long existence, they were also without precedent among the history of nations. In a few short decades, a feudal society with a military ruler was transformed into an industrialized constitutional monarchy.