Tokyo Central: A Memoir.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.
• Position: Book Review

Tokyo Central: A Memoir. By EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2002. Pp. 250, illus, $30.

Edward Seidensticker's translations both of classical and twentieth-century authors have probably introduced more readers to the attractions of Japanese literature than have those of any other Westerner. Though he may be known most readily for his numerous superb translations, he has also published volumes of historical scholarship on Tokyo, a selection of his early newspaper columns, selections from his diaries, and a hilariously whimsical novel. Moreover, he has navigated a very individual route through the shifting currents of the Japanese literary and political seas for the past fifty years. In the best and also root sense of the word, he has remained forever an amateur, shunning wherever possible the aura and pretensions of the specialist expert. But if anyone in these latter days of civilization can fitly be described as a "man of letters," and in two cultures, Seidensticker is one of the very few to qualify. For this reason his memoirs invite more interest than those of the normal scholar and teacher.

One reads memoirs to learn of the author's life and also, perhaps even more avidly, to savor his candid opinions of people and events. There is much of both in this book, Stretching from Seidensticker's birth in the then isolated village of Castle Rock, Colorado, in 1921 (in fact, starting from before that date, since he traces some of his family's early history) to 1981, when he completed the full sexagenary cycle of traditional Chinese and Japanese chronometry. It is interesting to hear how he entered on the study of Japanese unlooked-for, after graduating from college, and how his singular career in Japan during the Occupation, then as a professor at Stanford, Michigan, and finally Columbia evolved in ways often fortuitous (both senses here), and how he came to translate the works he did and why. It is equally interesting to hear of his encounters with, and varying reactions to, members of the literary, intellectual, and political arenas. While a goodly number of pages are devoted to the major figures of Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima--of whom Seidensticker was the primary English translator and about whom most readers may be most curious--the author also recalls vividly a host of lesser-known though perhaps more inviting individuals who reveal other, sometimes more personal, facets of his life in and pertaining to...