[. . .]

  I went for nearly a month to England and Scotland, seeing the English publishers, and staying with a series of dear and kind friends who cut a wide swath between Dorset and the Hebrides. What wonderful things I have seen. Have you ever been to the island of Staffa? (Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, Fingal’s Cave, etc?) During those weeks, I went to the country house (divine, in Buckinghamshire) of an old friend, David Sainsbury, whom I first knew when he was twenty and who is now sixty, a lord, and a cabinet minister (for the sciences). To my surprise, he reminded me that I had told him, when he was on a trip to NYC in recent years, and we were speaking of Japan, of the immortal—truly—evening of your apotheosis at Columbia, and of how one of your former prisoners of war had spoken of your original meeting with him on Okinawa. David has said that in this way—my having spoken of the ceremony and you—he had become aware of your works and was “trying to get you” for a conference in the autumn in Britain. Do you recognise this conference? If you do meet David, you will find an original, thoughtful man phenomenally unimpressed by having been born into wealth and power, and entirely free from the British class affliction.

  As to conferences—If you are coming to Venice, can you drop in at Naples? I could not promise to retain the run of glorious weather we have now had ever since I arrived in mid-September; but at present the little sun-trap of the Marina Piccola on Capri is thick with swimmers, the island is in its autumn reflowering—full of roses and jasmine and plumbago, and empty of boutiques and tourists (not quite empty, but a great diminution): a paradise. [. . .] I think you haven’t seen Naples since so many monuments and museums have been beautifully restored—a surprise. And much is open to the public that was closed and derelict before. On Capri, my little “casa” is a great success to me, like living up in the sky on a blue and white tiled shelf. [. . .]

  I was honoured to think that I could figure in one of your dreams, even while haranguing you to go to Reggio Emilia. I think we had better go there, since you have introduced the idea, as I’ve never seen it and it is packed with works of art—a famous Duomo, churches, what one can in Italy off-handedly refer to as “the usual”. What a wonderful country it still is. Arriving in September, I stayed three days with beloved friends in Milan—one of the sons of the family in whose house I lived long ago at Siena. [. . .] They took me to see the restored Last Supper. I am too ignorant to speak of it in any detail, but the entire work seemed far more alive to me this time, and not merely for its colouring. I know that Everett (Fahy) has some reservations, but he thought that nothing better could have been done. (He also said, since it has been in a state of ruin for centuries, and badly damaged in the war, that it was either a choice of doing what they could with new techniques or of letting the entire work decay conclusively (the latter being what Everett calls “the Christian Science approach to art restoration”)). I found it rather thrilling. That church is very beautiful—another heroic feat of rescue, after dreadful bombardment in the war. My friends live in the very centre of Milan, in a delightful apartment in a tree-lined street off Via Manzoni, and I walked a good bit around those familiar places, so sophisticated after Naples; and went to the beautiful Poldi-Pezzoli. [. . .]

  I think this letter is now a dismaying length—the length that causes the reader to groan aloud on opening the envelope. However, I keep wondering how the last Meiji is revealing himself, and whether—in your customary prolific way—you have come near the end of his story? That, too, I’d be glad to hear about when you reach Italy and Venice. November can be very nice in Venice—weather chancy but not always cold, and with the Piazza empty in the evenings when the tourists have all gone off in their motorised gondolas to their mainland hotels.

  In a few days, the 20th, Francis will have been dead five years. It is terrible to me to think and write that, and I must find some way to pass the day that would not have made him feel sad.

  Here is a little fact that would not have been of interest to Ivan: there is a brief scene in War and Peace in which Cherubini’s opera Les Deux Journées (The Water-Carrier) is mentioned; but since that opera is from 1804, it fails to scramble into Ivan’s classification of 18th century acceptables. (The scene is when Natasha takes up her guitar—during the months in which Prince Andre has fatally left her alone in Russia while he goes abroad—and sings to it the air from the chorus. She had been to hear the opera in Saint Petersburg with Prince A.)

  [. . .]

  As to World News, how can one dwell on it? I will only mention that the Vesuvius has rumbled and caused tremors during the past week. I can’t remember if Fujiyama is active and has a plume of smoke? I do know that it gives good luck to travellers when it becomes visible at the time of departure . . . I think we’ve been lucky—so far—in our relations with our respective volcanoes.

  I’ll be one among the many glad to see you again, whether in New York or in Italy. I wonder where you will be put up in Venice? I was there last year—it is really visibly imperilled, which makes one want to get there all the more. Perhaps next year . . .

  With all affection, dear Donald, from Shirley

  Tokyo, November 5, 1999

  Dear Shirley,

  I was very pleased indeed to receive your letter.

  [. . .]

  It is amazing that you should have written about David Sainsbury. Yesterday I got a letter from the Sainsbury Institute to give a lecture in June and today I answered that I would be delighted. The Foundation is also planning to collaborate with the center at Columbia founded in my name. Your letter makes me sure that I shall like him. Yesterday (memorable day!) I also received an honorary doctorate from the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages. At the reception afterwards I met the Director of the School of Oriental and African Languages at the University of London. I thought what I would have given earlier in my career to work under such a man. I was also greatly pleased that three former students of mine are teaching at the School. I may develop into a Mr. Chips after all.

  Your mention of the scene in War and Peace in which Cherubini’s opera is mentioned made me want, quite suddenly, to read the book again. Yesterday (what a busy day it was!) I had the recollection I always have of Anna Karenina while waiting alone on a train platform. I can’t explain why, but I have reread Dostoevski novels but not Tolstoi’s, no doubt because I think I remember them well . . . Or perhaps I fear they won’t be as magnificent as I remember them. I sometimes have that experience. There is an Indian film called The Music Room about a maharajah who has a castle on a lonely shore. I saw it a long time ago and over the years it had built up in my memory as the perfect evocation of the power of music. Then I saw it again last year and was deeply disappointed. I had somehow contrived to blot out all the details that disappointed me on second viewing, leaving only the wind-swept shore, the disintegrating palace, and the maharajah who uses all his remaining money for a final concert.

  I am nearing the completion of my account of Emperor Meiji. Because it is being serialized in Japanese, I have had to plan each episode independently, with a suitable ending for each. Now I shall have to break down the sixty-odd units to make them fit within the covers of a single book. I shall also have to decide just how much historical information that does not directly relate to Meiji should be included. I am afraid that I have not yet “found” Meiji and probably never will, and this may disappoint readers.

  To answer your question: Fuji has not been active since the 9th century. This is a useful piece of information for scholars of literature: if a poem mentions the plume of smoke it must have been written before the last eruption. I have recently been in Kagoshima where my hotel room faced directly an active volcano called Sakurajima. It made a marvelous sight, especially at sunset.

  [. . .]

  As always, Donald

  Postcard, Norwich, June 3, 2000

  Dear Shirley,

  Last night I delivered my talk in Norwich at the magnificent cathedral. Apparently I read my manuscript in an intelligible manner, but I was so tired that I had no recollection of what I had read. All in all, however, it was an unforgettable experience. I am thankful that I have lived to be 78 (this month). I love England, especially Norwich!

  I met your friends the Sainsbury’s and we talked of you with great affection.

  As ever, Donald

  Tokyo, June 19, 2000

  Dear Shirley,

  I feel rather embarrassed when I recall the somewhat excessively euphoric postcard I sent you from Norwich. I hope that I did not seem too pleased with myself. It was an unforgettable experience, and I thought I should tell you about it. After Norwich I had two delightful days in Cambridge [. . .], beautiful as always. The only new thing was the admission charged to tourists by each of the colleges. I suppose they need the funds, but I felt nostalgic for the old days when the colleges could assume that no one who didn’t belong there would intrude.

  From London I flew to Luxembourg. I believe I had told you of my great “fan” in Luxembourg. He is a professor of Greek and Sanskrit but has taught himself to read Japanese. He and his delightful wife showed me much of the country. It is small but varied and the villages seem like those I imagine existed throughout Europe before 1914. The people at home speak Luxemburgish, which is about as far from German as Dutch is, but they are all required to learn both French and German from their early schooling. The newspapers have articles in both languages, seemingly unrelated to the content; they assume that the readers can read both French and German without difficulty. The street signs are all in French and the food is definitely French, but the people all have German surnames. A delightful place.

  [. . .]

  Now I am back in Tokyo. Yesterday I had my 78th birthday. It seems incredible. Am I really that old? So many of my friends here have died. In fact, when I have a telephone call I can be pretty sure that it is a business call—someone who wants me to give a lecture or write an article. I keep debating whether I should reverse the part of the year I spend here (two-thirds) and the part I spend in New York (the rest). One reason for staying here, I now realize though I had not been aware of this before, is that there are people who to some degree depend on my being here. Probably I will enjoy my life here more once I begin some major project. I am thinking of writing a biography of a fifteenth-century shogun. It will be difficult, I know, but I so much enjoyed writing my biography of Emperor Meiji.

  [. . .]

  I am enclosing an article about Cesare Valetti. I met him twice in New York, but I know that you were a friend, and his death must come as a loss. I remember him especially for his appearances in the Mozart operas. What a beautiful voice he had!

  [. . .]

  Best wishes as always, yours, Donald

  I am reading The Way We Live Now by Trollope, an extraordinary novel. I hope this does not set me off on a Trollope binge—I must do other work!

  Tokyo, July 18, 2000

  Dear Shirley,

  I was so pleased to talk with you when you telephoned. There are so many things that have gone wrong with the world, even during the past thirty years, that it is agreeable to think of something which has improved—telephone service. When I first lived in Kyoto it took about two hours to get through to Tokyo, let alone any more distant place. My recollections of international calls at that time are mainly of fear that I would dial a wrong number and then, at some vast cost, have to try again. [. . .] And now it is all so simple. Too simple perhaps. Receiving a letter has become a much more unusual pleasure.

  [. . .]

  At the moment I am translating a short novel about the Japanese defense of an island (Peleliu) in the South Pacific in 1944.1 The author evidently studied documents of the period carefully and there is a kind of authenticity that impresses me. There is an antithesis between the Japanese sergeant who stands for the samurai virtues and a Korean corporal who is desperately eager to be accepted by the Japanese but cannot go along with the rigid fanaticism of the sergeant. The author is someone I first met forty years ago when he was about to go to Harvard to study classical Greek. He later became involved in politics, especially during the Vietnam War, when he organized a group which encouraged American sailors to desert and spirited them off to Sweden. He has more recently become involved with Korea. His wife is Korean and he has written about his experiences with his wife’s family. (This probably accounts for the Korean corporal.) The book is certainly not what one would expect someone with his background to write, but I do not think it represents a rejection of his iconoclastic attitudes. In reading the book one may feel sorry for the Japanese on the island, bombed and strafed by innumerable American planes, but I don’t think anyone would wish that the Japanese had won. (A footnote: after all these years, the author has gone back to the classics. He has published a Japanese translation of Longinus on the sublime.)

  My life in Tokyo is rather dull, partly because it is so hot that I don’t feel like going anywhere. I am not precisely lonely, but I realize as I write this letter that I have nothing very exciting to report. I can never seem to make up my mind whether I prefer to spend a day entirely in this apartment, engaged in translation, or whether I really would like to have dinner with some delightful people. Probably I shall never know!

  My bedtime reading is Mary Barton by Mrs. Gaskell. I picked up the book at an outdoor stall, thinking that all I knew of her writings was Cranford, and I had largely forgotten that. It is not a very good novel, but it provides a marvelous evocation of the grim life of the lower classes in Manchester in the 1830s. I am sure you know it—like every other book!

  [. . .]

  All my best wishes.

  As ever, Donald

  Tokyo, November 26, 2000

  Dear Shirley,

  It was a great relief and joy to have your telephone call. Although I told myself that the reason why I had not heard from you was that you were too occupied with your novel to write anything else, I couldn’t quite put from my mind the possibility that you might be ill. And indeed, though it proved to be a false scare, you yourself probably thought that you were seriously ill. My intuition was partly correct, but I wish that it had been totally incorrect and that you had been happily writing your book all that time.

  I have begun work on my biography of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa.2 He is a strange figure—an ineffectual though not wicked ruler, a man so dominated by his wife that he has been held up to ridicule by Japanese historians, a military man who during a war that lasted ten years and resulted in the almost entire destruction of the city of Kyoto refused to have anything to do with the fighting. He would not be remembered today were it not for the fact that the arts he fostered—gardens, tea ceremony, ink painting and so on—have emerged as the most typical Japanese arts. When Japanese speak (as they often do) of the “Japanese soul” or something similar, they usually refer to arts that developed during Yoshimasa’s reign which have since acquired a special aura. I know that wicked monarchs have been great patrons of the arts, but I haven’t found other examples of a ruler who was a fiasco in his appointed duties but who largely contributed to the formation of the culture of his country.

  [. . .]

  I have been disappointed that my agent Georges Borchardt has not yet been able to place the short novel about the Japanese defense of an island in the South Pacific. Perhaps nobody wants to read about those long-ago events, especially when (in Borchardt’s words) the Americans are portrayed as demons. No doubt some day he’ll find an interested university press, but even if he doesn’t, it will not be a great tragedy for me. I think, however, that like it or not it is worth knowing how a Japanese writer of prevailingly left-wing views recalls the militarism of the past.

  I hear absolutely nothing from New York. [. . .] I had planned to return to New York early in January, but was invited to the first poetry reading of the year, held in the presence of the emperor and empress. I had been invited before, but always at a time when I couldn’t go, so I accepted. I am sure that it will not be anything extraordinary, but I like old rituals, and I look forward to hearing the poems composed by members of the Imperial Family sung to the same tune that has been used for many centuries.

  I hope that all goes well with you and your work after the shock of the doctor’s false report. I truly look forward to seeing you again in January. I return on the 16th.

  As ever, Donald

  Capri, December 6, 2000

  Dear Donald—

  About six years ago I learned that this blue paper, on which I’ve written to friends now for forty years and which came from Pineider in Florence, was being axed (being “discontinued”, as “They” now say). A friend at Florence hightailed it to Pineider in Via Tornabuoni on my behalf, and I duly received a large quantity of pads and envelopes—boxes thereof. It would seem odd to you, who know me as the world’s worst correspondent, to learn that this immense quantity is now dwindling, and that I rummage around for a last few sheets of this or that size, or an airmail envelope of the old blue. (Pineider meanwhile has branched out into expensive tooled leather “items” of note cases, desk sets, and so on, letting essentials go to the wall.) Perhaps we may live to see writing-paper itself become obsolete—and of course the typewriter. The typewriter on which I’m at present pounding was given to me forty years ago when I first began to write for publication. Much of my work, such as it is, was produced on it—it started out pale green, but has grown grey in my service.