There is a kind of moral ugliness that, without being quite evil, may be even more repellant than evil because evil — genuine evil — has, sometimes, a certain romantic appeal. You can admire the villain's strength, or courage, or dash, or reckless defiance ...
In "The First Modern Japanese," Donald Keene pays tribute to Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa (1886-1912), who he calls "an extraordinary man, at times shameless but always absorbing and, in the end, difficult to forget." Though I'll take his poetry gladly, I struggle to revere ...
So few teaching opportunities existed for a young Japan scholar in late 1940s America that a professor suggested he teach Greek instead. Donald Keene persevered, arriving in the ancient Imperial capital of Kyoto in 1953 to do research. "I was extremely lucky, because the time that ...
In 1994, on the day when Kenzaburo Oe was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — the second Japanese writer to receive the award — eminent literary scholar Donald Keene received a long-distance call from Peter Owen, publisher of novelist ...
Will he or won't he? It's about the time of year when the Japanese media descends into a frenzy of speculation about whether Haruki Murakami will land the Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first Japanese literary laureate since Kenzaburo Oe in 1994. There is ...
Local interaction and nurturing personnel suitable to such efforts is the key to the future of grass-roots exchanges between Japan and the United States, experts in bilateral cultural relations said Friday at a Tokyo symposium. The aim of the symposium organized by the nonprofit America-Japan ...
Osamu Dazai's "No Longer Human" comprises a series of three fictionalized notebooks, with each increasingly darker than the last. The character writing these books, Yozo, is detached from the beginning and is afraid of human interactions, but he learns how to socialize with people ...
"Sometimes people take themselves too seriously and, in reality, we invent our own characters. Who we are changes with time."
A new museum built in honor of Donald Keene, a prominent U.S.-born scholar of Japanese literature, was opened to reporters Friday in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, prior to its public unveiling Saturday. At a news conference at the Donald Keene Center Kashiwazaki, Keene, 91, said: "I ...
Every school child knows that in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Every school child knows wrongly. When the Genovese explorer's three ships sailed westward from Palo de la Frontera, Spain, on Aug. 2, 1492, he was bound, he thought, for "the noble island of ...
Prominent Japanologist Donald Keene has adopted shamisen player Seiki Uehara, 62, as his son, the aging scholar reveals in a talk in Niigata.
He saw Ginza when it was a blackened plain but for the bombed-out Mitsukoshi department store, the Hattori Building and a handful of other structures left standing. He observed the city as it was rebuilt, and its people. He observed, and then he wrote. New ...
