Chronicles of My Life in the 20th Century
Chronicles of My Life in the 20th Century / Autobiographical essays by Donald KeeneThe Yomiuri Shimbun7. Enamored by 'The Tale of Genji' At first there was so little fighting between France and Germany that people laughed at the "phoney war," but in 1940, the most depressing year of my life, the German army suddenly struck, first at Denmark and Norway, then at Holland and Belgium. The Maginot Line, which was supposed to protect France against German invasions, was easily bypassed by the Germans, and half of France was soon occupied. Later that year the aerial bombing of Britain began. It seemed almost impossible for the British to resist the Germans. I could hardly bear to read the newspapers, dreading the latest news of Nazi conquests. I spent more and more time trying to memorize Chinese characters, though I realized that this study without aims was an unreal pursuit. But in the autumn of 1940, most unexpectedly, at the worst point of the conflict within me between hatred of war and hatred of the Nazis, a kind of deliverance came my way. At that time there was in Times Square, the center of New York, a bookshop that specialized in remainders, and I would look in every time I was in the area. One day I saw a stack of books called "The Tale of Genji." I had never heard of this work before, but I examined a volume out of curiosity. I could tell from the illustrations that the book must be about Japan. The book, in two volumes, was priced at forty-nine cents. This seemed a bargain, and I bought it. I soon became engrossed in "The Tale of Genji." The translation (by Arthur Waley) was magical, evoking a distant and beautiful world. I could not stop reading, sometimes going back to savor again details. I contrasted the world of "The Tale of Genji" with my own. In the book antagonism never degenerated into violence, and there were no wars. The hero, Hikaru Genji, unlike the heroes of European epics was not described as a man of muscles, capable of lifting a boulder that not ten men could lift, nor as a warrior who could single-handedly slay masses of the enemy. Nor, though he had many love affairs, was Genji interested (like Don Juan) merely in adding names to the list of women he had conquered. He knew grief, not because he has failed to seize the government but because he was a human being and life in this world is inevitably sad. Until this time I had thought of Japan mainly as a menacing militaristic country. I had been charmed by Hiroshige, but Japan was for me not the land of beauty but the invader of China. Lee was bitterly anti-Japanese. When we went to the New York World's Fair we visited the various foreign pavilions, but he absolutely refused to enter the Japanese pavilion. I sympathized with him and his country, but this did not prevent me from enjoying "The Tale of Genji." No, "enjoy" is not the right word; I turned to it as a refuge from all I hated in the world around me. One day in the spring of 1941 I was studying in the East Asian Library at Columbia University when a man I did not know came up to me and said, "I have seen you eating at the Chinese restaurant every day. Would you have dinner with me there tonight?" Naturally, I was surprised by this invitation. My first reaction was fear that I might not have enough money to pay my share of the bill. But, intrigued by the unexpected invitation, I soon agreed. The man, whose name was Jack Kerr, had lived several years in Japan and taught English in Taiwan. He had some command of spoken Japanese, but had never learned to read the language. One of his students from Taiwan, of Japanese ancestry, had been born in America and had recently returned. Kerr intended to spend the summer at his house in the North Carolina mountains studying Japanese with his former student. He feared, however, that if he was the only one studying he would not be very diligent. Competition would help, and he was therefore trying to find three or four others who wished to learn Japanese during the summer. That was why he had invited me to dinner. Despite my love of "The Tale of Genji," I had not considered studying Japanese because I feared it might hurt the feelings of my friend Lee. But the chance to get out of hot New York in the summer and spend it in the mountains was too tempting to resist. There were three pupils--Jack Kerr, myself, and Paul Blum. I did not know it, but Blum had recently escaped from France. He was considerably older than myself--about 45 to my 19--but we easily became friends. He had been born in Yokohama where his father, a Frenchman, was in business. About the time he graduated from Yale his father died, leaving him a considerable income. Blum decided to use his inheritance in travel, hoping to record his experiences in books that he would write. I was fascinated by his conversations, especially his accounts of the distant places he had visited. He described so well that I could all but see the red city of Tananarive in Madagascar and the lonely town in Brazil where he had once spent New Year. The one place he had never gone was the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. He felt he should leave one place unvisited. Paul Blum had learned Japanese as a boy, but like many foreigners who spent their lives in Japan, he could not read the language and his vocabulary was limited to what a boy would know. That was why he had joined us. Our tutor, Inomata Tadashi, taught us from the elementary reader that began saita, saita, sakura ga saita. Unlike the other two students, I could not say even the simplest thing in Japanese, but I recognized kanji I had learned in Chinese. I was excited at the thought of learning another language, but the other two gradually lost interest in memorizing kanji. For me, the complicated way that Japanese is written was one of its attractions. If Japanese were written in romaji, I might not have felt the desire to conquer its difficulties. Kerr later taught Japanese history at various American universities and wrote excellent books on Taiwan and Okinawa, relying mainly on materials in Western languages. It was normal at that time for professors of Chinese or Japanese history or art at American universities not to be able to read the languages. I did not see Kerr much after I returned to Columbia to begin my fourth year, but I saw Blum fairly often. At a time when I still had not made up my mind whether to continue my study of Chinese and Japanese or devote myself to my first love, French literature, Blum (although originally a French citizen) urged me to study Japanese. He pointed out that many Americans had grown up in France and spoke perfect French, but few knew Japanese. (Feb. 25, 2006)