Translator extraordinaire, historian and beloved pedagogue, Edward Seidensticker has given us the definitive English versions of "The Tale of Genji" and the major novels of Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki, a conclusive history of Tokyo and a delightful epistolary novel, "Very Few People Come This Way." Now, he leads us behind the scenes of his own life in this always forthright and sometimes blunt memoir.
It is well titled since, as the author tells us several times, Tokyo is central to his experience of Japan. It was "such a lively and interesting and amusing city, much more so then, to my mind, than it is now." Back then, young people in Tokyo "used to be bouncing and eager and, well, young . . . Today they are haughty and world-weary."
In recalling the delights of the past, Seidensticker is much like the Japanese author whom he in so many ways resembles -- Nagai Kafu, the man the American wrote about in his 1965 masterpiece "Kafu the Scribbler." Like Kafu, Seidensticker regrets the changing past, though he knows perfectly well that "the relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change is itself a tradition."
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