ドナルド・キーン わたしの日本語修行 (‘Donald Keene: My Japanese Language Training’)

Looking back on your life requires a language all its own. Your own voice, essentially. Full of entirely personalized inflections and intonations, such a finely modulated register necessitates a kind of memory-bias that allows you to freely consider where you’ve come from without the worry of an irritating echo that will grate all who listen to the wobbly arc of your past.

You have to sound just like yourself, is what I’m saying.

Yet to render that voice via a language that was not originally your ‘own’, and to have the entire point of these specific recollections revolve around exactly how you learned this foreign tongue to begin with, is to create a new kind of oral autobiography all together, and therefore a novel voice in the process — a chronicle of one’s life in which this ‘new’ language itself is entirely the point of the telling. (And perhaps even of your whole life to boot.)

In the 2014 book ドナルド・キーン わたしの日本語修行 (‘Donald Keene: My Japanese Training’), the famed American author, translator and lecturer of Japanese literature discusses with Yuka Kawaji exactly how he learned the language which would form the bulk of his life’s work.

For the phrase 修行 (‘shugyou’) in the book’s title can refer to ‘study’ or ‘training’ but also to a kind of ascetic practice of sorts, and it’s quite clear from this book that the Japanese language for Keene has provided an abiding throughline for his life that feels almost spiritual in nature.

Composed of two long interviews with Keene that were conducted in the winter of 2012 and the summer of 2013, the book is also a sly kind of extended, if inverted, fan letter. In her introduction, Yuka Kawaji, Keene’s interlocutor, mentions how she first came across Keene’s book MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE: AN ANTHOLOGY in a used book shop in Tokyo’s famed Kanda district, serving as her first entry into the world of her homeland’s vast storehouse of fiction. To sit across from him, forty years later, talking to him about how he learned Japanese? Like some kind of a dream.

Yet part of the book’s cumulative appeal — as prosaic as it nonetheless remains due to Kawaji’s ultra-specific interrogations as to which textbooks Keene used, what kanji he learned, how many classes a day he studied, and in what exact forms of educational composition all his lessons entailed — is Keene’s own acknowledgement that there is so much in life that is the result of what we might call pure chance.

Indeed, Keene is quite able to understand (and articulate) how so much of his life has been ruled by the vagaries of accidental encounters, existing airily alongside those more grounded elements of his personality that lent themselves to his eventual vocation (through no initial plan of his own).

Born in New York City in 1922 — the same place where he would indeed spend most of his working life as a teacher of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, his alma mater — Keene was raised with the local accent and dialect of the kids of that age and that urban environment. His father travelled to Europe for much of his business, and Keene so longed to go too. He never cried all that much, as a child or afterward, but he remembers bawling when his dad said that right now was not the right time to travel. Instead, his dad would bring back souvenirs from the various lands that he visited; Keene remembers eagerly collecting the local stamps his father gave him from the different lands that he travailed, an early harbinger of how he would one day collect kanji in his mind in much the same way.

Eventually, Keene is able to spend a month bopping around Europe with his pop, and it is while he is in France that he becomes aware for the first time of what a ‘foreign language’ might sound like, be like. Everybody around him is speaking French, but Keene cannot not say a word. He wants to talk to these people. He wants to laugh with these people. He wants to get to know these people. Yet such a sophisticated kind of communication is entirely beyond him.

He almost had the chance to grasp a foreign language — albeit not in France. At one point in his childhood his father had planned on moving the entire family to Spain for business reasons, but the sudden outbreak of the Spanish Civil War quickly kiboshed that idea for good.

Keene wonders: What would my life have been like if we had moved to Spain? He realizes that he would never have ended up studying Japanese.

Who might he have then been?

Who is to say?

Back at home, Keene eventually starts to learn languages at school — French, Latin, German — even as his family’s life crumbles around him. His little sister dies when he is eleven; his parents subsequently divorce, with Keene moving in with his mother. (He keeps silent as to what, if any, relationship with his father he was able to maintain). Life was closing in.

By all accounts a brilliant student, Keene enters Columbia at the age of sixteen, and it is here, once again, that chance slyly shoves its way to the front of life’s line.

While attending a class focusing on classical literature of the world, taught by the noted scholar Mark Van Doren — whose son, Charles Van Doren, would be caught up in the television scandal of the 1950s that Robert Redford chronicled in his film QUIZ SHOW — Keene is seated alphabetically, sitting next to a Chinese student with the surname ‘Lee’. Studying alongside each other every day, they soon became friends. Keene, already an eager student of languages, quickly becomes fascinated by the Chinese characters that Lee introduces him to, so different in shape and intent from any other language that Keene had previously encountered. (Indeed, Keene notes that he had had no previous exposure to Asian languages, Asian culture, Asian thought whatsoever prior to matriculating at Columbia.)

Before long, Keene is studying Chinese with a few other students. One day a fellow student spots Keene poring over Chinese characters and asks, since Keene seems to be interested in Chinese, might he also be interested in perhaps giving Japanese a go? This new friend has a summer place in North Carolina, and he’s looking for an informal Japanese study group to get together and study in tandem — might Keene be interested in going? Why not get out of the city and study Japanese amidst some rural fresh air?

In this way a life’s direction is subtly altered and aligned.

Keene eventually starts taking formal classes in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia, yet the students are few; neither subject, at this point in American life, is particularly popular. Having been introduced to the glory of Japanese literature, in English translation, via Arthur Waley’s magisterial translation of THE TALE OF GENJI that Keene picked up for forty cents at a used bookshop in Times Square, Keene was already finding himself more interested in Japanese than Chinese. His knowledge of Chinese kanji was extremely helpful in learning Japanese kanji, but he did find himself more fascinated by the Japanese language’s myriad possibilities.

Yet he doesn’t have all that much time to study, at least in an academic setting, because soon the winds of war are blowing pretty damn strong. Knowing that he would probably be enlisted soon, Keene hears about the United States Navy Japanese Language School. An ardent pacifist — which he would remain throughout his life — Keene knows that he wouldn’t be able to avoid entering the service, but this might be a way to serve a useful purpose other than through brute combat alone. He might not be able to avoid the wary, but at least he could continue his language studies.

Keene states that he doesn’t remember the exact interview he had in Washington, D.C., but he was accepted into the program, and soon he was off, via train, to California, a trip that remains vivid in his memory; the cold, bleak winter of New York being replaced by the welcome sunshine of the west.

After a bout of illness, and some training in Boulder, Colorado, Keene settled into the next eleven months of his life at the Navy training school in Berkely — reading, writing and speaking Japanese, six days a week, along with self-study on his single day off.

I’ve written extensively about Keene’s early life here, mostly because the bulk of the subsequent book tends to spend a great deal of time delving into the content and form of his Japanese lessons while attending the Navy school. Fascinating stuff, to be sure, but not exactly scintillating in summary.

Some of his teachers were second-generation Japanese-Americans, who had actually served in internment camps (which Keene was not aware of at the time); others were natives of Japan; some were Americans who had been raised in Japan, the sons of missionaries. All were diligent and helpful, if not entirely, what’s the word, liked.

One of the fascinating parts of the book is the extent to which Kawaji, Keene’s interviewer, comprehensively researched her subject, including diving into army archives and university collections in order to present Keene with material that he hadn’t seen in over seventy (!) years. There are photographic examples of the covers and pages of textbooks that Keene used as his daily study materials; there are even erroneous textbooks shown to Keene, to which he points out that he actually didn’t use the textbook shown to him — that it was a text used a few years after he graduated. (The past, shoved into the present, is not as cohesive as we’d often like it to be.)

There are also personal letters Kawaji found that Keene had sent to friends that had somehow survived all of these decades, and in one of them Kawaji mentions the respect that Keene had shown while writing to his friend about a specific teacher. Seven decades letter, Keene amusingly points out that that particular point of praise was actually a lie; he had not considered this teacher to be particularly bright or effective, but the Navy would probably review, if not censor, many of the letters sent or received, so he had to be somewhat careful with the contents of his correspondence.

Each day in his classes, Keene and his fellow Japanese language learners practice conversation, reading and writing. Keene uses cards to keep track of his kanji – drawing each character on one side, with the pronunciation and meaning on the back. He states that the language they used was primarily 文語 (‘bungo’) — classical or written language. Yet this emphasis on the written language, even in hand-written form, would come in handy for Keene’s subsequent role as a Navy interpreter in Hawaii, examining the diaries of captured Japanese soldiers, and although he was not well-versed in daily Japanese conversation he would eventually be able to chat with these prisoners, even become friends with them, as unlikely as that seems.

In between all these intensive perusals of textbook orthodoxy and language-learning specifics are the fascinating comments Keene makes on his own language-learning journey.

He mentions that katakana — the written syllabary used to represent foreign words — was barely covered in his Navy classes, since its linguistic presence at that point in Japanese life was not as omnipresent as it would become in Japan’s postwar period, so to this day his knowledge of katakana remains somewhat shaky. That’s part of the reason, he says, that he has little interested in manga: too much katakana blotting each panel.

Keene also discusses how his own spoken Japanese has always remained somewhat formal. He learned the language academically, beginning at Columbia in his late teens, solidified in his Navy training. Never having had any childhood friends with whom he grew up speaking casual Japanese, he therefore has never felt comfortable using the kind of informal words that good friends use with each other. ( I was amused when Keene states that it’s common in Japan for people to remain lifelong friends with their chums from elementary school and junior high school, to even have regular reunions with pals from those bygone classes, which, outside of high school reunions, almost never happens in the west. I, too, was shocked when I came to Japan and discovered that my sixty-year old student was attending an elementary school reunion, which he attended every single year!) Even now, Keene always uses the honorific ‘san’, never ‘chan’, or ‘kun’. His Japanese is formal to the core.

Also interesting to me is Keene’s acknowledgement that he’s never quite nailed the accent. Again, having not grown up around the language, having learned the standard Japanese dialect in academic classes, never having experienced any kind of regional Japanese dialect while learning its tongue, and having spent eight months of the year, every year, for forty years, teaching Japanese literature in his native New York, Keene’s Japanese, while fluent beyond belief, his knowledge of both the ancient and contemporary versions second to none, is laced with the practical understanding that he nevertheless can’t help but enunciate his own American upbringing. Watching him speak Japanese in interviews and lectures on You Tube, I would always smile a little bit, as his pronunciation and articulation remained firmly New Yorker in tone.

After eleven months of daily Japanese study, Keene and his classmates are sent off to war.

Keene spends much of his time, as mentioned, interrogating Japanese POWs, bonding with them. He mentions that it might seem unlikely, but he never felt, at that time or after, any animosity towards them. They were fellow humans, and he was getting to know them in their own language. Empathy was inevitable.

While this book is an autobiography, of sorts, albeit in interview-form, it doesn’t delve all that much into areas that have already been explored in Keene’s other remembrances.

He has written two autobiographies of his own in English — ON FAMILIAR TERMS: A JOURNEY ACROSS CULTURES and CHRONICLES OF MY LIFE: AN AMERICAN IN THE EHART OF JAPAN — which extensively explore his yeas as a translator and lecturer. this book takes a different, language focused-tack. We do learn a little bit about Keene’s life as a lecturer of Japanese at Cambridge after the war — in which, because he knew the bare rudiments of conversational Korean, and because nobody else in England seemed to speak any Korean at all, Keene was obligated to teach an introductory class in that language that he was not at all academically capable of conducttng, but what the hell, let’s give it a shot — and we also hear of how he was finally able to make it to Japan (after only a few days of time on the ground there in the war while travelling from a Chinese island back to the States) in the 1950s for three years of study, on the GI Bill, in Kyoto, but the focus here is mostly on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of how he learned the language itself.

(We also learn that, while returning to study in Columbia after the war ended, he continued to study Chinese, as well as Japanese, and even considered taking up Russian, so unlikely did the usefulness and occupational prospects of Japanese seem due to the country’s sheer ruins.)

However, his own biographical linguistic progress aside, in the final segments of the book we do get to see the ultimate legacy of his unlikely immersion in Japanese, through interviews with his former students who became Japanese literature teachers and translators themselves.

Janine Beichman, Laurence Kaminz, Shin-Wei Sun — all studied with Keene, and each subsequently devoted their life to the Japanese language in some form. It’s heartening to hear through their interviews how thorough, methodical, tough and tender a teacher Keene was; interspersed with these interviews of past students, we also get to hear from Keene, too, about why each of the above were so special in their own right.

In some sense, this concluding section is the ultimate emotional and intellectual pay-off to not only this book, but to Keene’s day-by-day trudge through the Japanese language before many of his students were even born; his early diligence and proficiency would, in turn, later birth their own navigation through life.

(Perhaps most interesting from these remembrances of Keene about his former students is when he reminisces about Royall Tyler — not interviewed here — who would go on to translate THE TALE OF GENJI, but whose path to translation was hardly a smooth road. According to Keene, Tyler, born into money, reached a point in his life where he was ashamed of his upper-class roots, and longed to leave behind for all time modern, bourgeoise life. He moved with his young family to the woods, took up manual labor. Keene would write him from time to time, emotionally urging him to please reconsider academic life — he was too talented not to. Eventually, Tyler came around, went back to school, and ended up producing what Keene considers to be an astonishing English adaptation of THE TALE OF GENJ.)

The book ends with Keene, now fully retired from Columbia University, eager to spend his remaining years living in Japan. After the tsunami and earthquake in 2011, he feels the need to pay back and give back to the country whose language and literature has sustained him for so long. And, at his advanced age, with so many of his friends now deceased, not much is keeping him in New York anymore.

Keene did end up moving to Japan, even attaining Japanese citizenship, before passing away in 2019 at the age of ninety-six.

I’ve written about his life here (mostly) in the present tense, as I do with most of my reviews, but it feels particularly apt in this case — to talk of Keene as if he is even now blithely moving through life. Language does that. It keeps things current. Through language, everything, even when it’s expressed in the past tense, is nevertheless happening right now, as you read it. (A form of wish-fulfillment, language is.)

And since this book is mostly an extended transcript of an actual conversation, Keene feels even more present on the page. His voice speaks for itself, in Japanese, about all the twists and turns that led him to learn Japanese. There’s something, not ironic, but let’s say enigmatic about that fact, something mysterious, but appropriate.

After all, near the end of his life, why wouldn’t Donald Keene, Japanese literature’s most notable advocate, talk about his education in the language through the language itself?

Only while reading the book do you consider that all of his knowledge and passion for his subject was itself subject to life’s fickle sway.

If the Spanish Civil War hadn’t happened, he would have ended up in Spain; if that Chinese student named Lee had decided to take another class other than Mark Van Doren’s, he never would have sat beside Keene, and Keene would never have discovered Chinese, which meant he would have never gotten into Japanese; if Keene had not accidentally heard about the Navy’s language school-system, he might have even ended up somewhere else in the infantry, or possibly killed in combat. All of which would have meant that the grand historical arc of Japanese literature would have had to have been introduced to the west by somebody other than Keene, at some other point in time.

Yet life worked out the way it did.

It always does.

This book makes clear, via his own (Japanese) words, that, for whatever reason, be it by randomness or fate, Keene, the lonely, bookish kid from New York — who admits here that he never had any real friends from elementary school through high school who he stayed in touch with — found his life’s calling through what his adopted language could offer.

He wrote. He taught. He translated.

That says it all.