I was lucky also in another way. I have been going over the notes I took on my readings while my leg was still in a cast. It is clear to me now that if I had been leading a normal life—making friends, going to concerts, visiting museums and so on—I could not have accomplished so much. I now have enough material for a book on Japanese writers during wartime and immediately afterwards. My problem is that I still have not thought of how to use the material, what kind of structure the book should have. No doubt this will come eventually.

  This has been a terribly hot summer in Tokyo, but terribly hot summers are nothing new in Tokyo. As a lingering effect of my injury in the period of enforced seclusion, I find I am able to spend days happily with my work in an air-conditioned room without going out. No doubt I will feel differently when my foot has healed.

  I am not quite undisturbed. Next year is officially the thousandth since the composition of The Tale of Genji, and preparations are already underway. Today two people came to verify I would give a lecture in November and another man telephoned about a lecture in December. I do not relish these lectures. Although The Tale of Genji merits of celebration, the purpose of the events is probably to attract even greater crowds of tourists to Kyoto.

  The one thing I miss most in my present life is conversation. How I would love to have a conversation with you! I have friends here and I am grateful to them for their many kindnesses, but I missed the pleasure of talking with old friends about things that matter to us.

  I hope that you are well and that your work is proceeding to your satisfaction. I shall be back in New York on the tenth of January. I hope that you are there at that time.

  As ever, Donald

  Tokyo, October 21, 2007

  Dear Shirley,

  When I wrote you in August I said we had not been in touch in a very long time. Now two additional months have passed without word from you. I hope that you have been well and that you haven’t written simply because you haven’t had the time.

  [. . .]

  I have managed to start a new book, on the diaries kept by Japanese writers during the war years.4 I knew several of the writers, one of them very well. It has therefore come as a shock when I find him expressing a sense of relief and even joy that war has at last come, ending the prolonged tension and sweeping away the clouds of British and American culture. Now the radiant sunlight of Asia will shine unhindered. Another man, a quiet, amusing man who looked as if he might have devoted his life to the study of Tristram Shandy, revealed that his great hero was Hitler. Of course, he did not know what we know about Hitler’s crimes, but still.

  These are not the only voices. A professor of French at Tokyo University kept his diary in French so that the police would not be able to read it, and in it he expressed profound dismay with the terrible war into which the militarists had drawn their country. Another diarist attacked his countrymen for their inability to understand what was going on around them, contrasting their cruelty towards prisoners with the decency of Japan’s enemies.

  I still don’t know how to present this new knowledge. Perhaps it will not be as exciting to other people as to myself, but I keep going back to the four war years I experienced, unlike any other period of my life.

  I don’t even know where you are now, but I shall send this letter to New York and hope that it reaches you.

  As ever, Donald

  Tokyo, July 21, 2008

  Dear Shirley,

  It will soon be a month since I arrived in Japan. What have I been doing? The day after I arrived I was obliged to attend a party at the Irish embassy in honor of an Irish friend who has recently published a volume of translations of mediaeval Japanese poetry. Of course, I was glad to go, but my talk on this occasion was not one of my most stimulating. The next day I had a dialogue with a famous Kabuki actor. This was enjoyable, though I grew steadily more sleepy. Every day there has been something to occupy me. Most of these engagements are in some way agreeable, but I find it very difficult to do my own work or even to write letters.

  The most time-consuming activity lies ahead. I may have mentioned to you that the thousandth anniversary of the writing of The Tale of Genji will be celebrated this year. I have been asked to deliver lectures on the work all over the country. I have attempted to refuse, laying stress on my great age, but the people who ask for the lectures are almost always so unhappy when I refuse that, sooner or later, I am persuaded. I have never learned the pronunciation of the word NO.

  Despite my silence, I often think of you and wonder if the injury you suffered has now completely healed. It looks as if I shall be going to Venice in September, but everything is extremely vague. A foundation, which apparently has a building of its own on the island of San Giorgio, has invited me, among a dozen others. They expect me to give a lecture on The Tale of Genji, to last no longer than thirty minutes. This seems easy, but (if there were nothing else to detain me in Italy) it would be rather strange to invite someone all the way from Japan to talk for thirty minutes, and this possibly includes a ten minute introduction. But, of course, there is much to detain me (and anyone else) in Italy. By a curious coincidence, there is to be a gathering of scholars of Japan in Lecce about the same time. I have not been invited, possibly because I am considered too old, but it would be delightful to spend time in Lecce, a city I visited for one day some years ago.

  I hope very much to see you in Italy. I expect to have about a week on my own, from about the tenth to the seventeenth of September.

  All my best to you, dear Shirley.

  As ever, Donald

  Acknowledgments

  My work on this book has been supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP230101797) and by a period of sabbatical leave granted by the School of the Arts & Media, Faculty of Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

  I would like to thank Jennifer Crewe for her enthusiasm for the project, and the editorial and production team at Columbia University Press for their impeccable work on the manuscript. Finally I would like formally to thank the estate of Donald Keene for permission to publish Keene’s letters, and The Trustees of the New York Society Library for their permission to publish Hazzard’s letters.

  Notes

  Sources

  In the introduction and notes, I have provided full citations of published sources in a source’s first note; subsequent references have a short-form citation. The notes provide a full bibliography of published and unpublished sources used in the book.

  Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene’s correspondence is held in the Shirley Hazzard Papers 1920–2016, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York.

  Introduction

  1. Donald Keene, “In Memoriam: Ivan Morris, 1925–1965,” Monumenta Nipponica (Winter 1976): 416.

  2. Donald Keene, Meeting with Japan (Tokyo: Gakusiesha, 1978), 1.

  3. Hazzard to Keene, December 29, 1980.

  4. Donald Keene, On Familiar Terms: A Journey Across Cultures (New York: Kodansha, 1994), 132.

  5. Jan Garrett, “The Transits of Hazzard,” Look and Listen (November 1984): 39.

  6. Trish Evans, “Shirley’s ‘Transit’ Is a Rare Event,” Weekend Australian, November 29–30, 1980, 13.

  7. Lucy Latané Gordan and T. M. Pasca, “Shirley Hazzard: Back to Basics,” Wilson Library Bulletin 65 no. 3 (November 1980): 45.

  8. Shirley Hazzard, “Bread and Circuses: Thought and Language in Decline,” Sydney Papers 9 no. 4 (1997): 28.

  9. Jay Parini spoke on a panel called “Shirley Hazzard: Literary Icon” at the New York Society Library, September 7, 2012. Recording at https://www.nysoclib.org/events/shirley-hazzard-literary-icon.

  10. Michael Hofmann, “Citizen of Nowhere,” Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 2012, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/shirley-hazzard-brigitta-olubas-book-review-michael-hofmann/.

  11. Shirley Hazzard to Elizabeth Harrower, March 9, 1980, Papers of Elizabeth Harrower (1937–2005), National Library of Australia.

  12. See Timothy Duffy, “The Gender of Letters,” New England Quarterly 69 no. 1 (1996): 92.

  13. Shirley Hazzard, “Lives Well Lived: Francis Steegmuller: Our Reading List,” New York Times, January 1, 1995.

  14. Roland Barthes, “Réquichot and His Body,” in The Responsibility of Forms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 230.

  15. Jamie Katz, “Sensei and Sensibility,” Columbia College Today (Winter 2011–2012): 30.

  16. Katz, “Sensei and Sensibility,” 30.

  17. Donald Keene, “Living in Two Countries,” in The Blue-Eyed Tarōkaja: A Donald Keene Anthology, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 284.

  18. Donald Keene, “The New Generation of American Japanologists,” in The Blue-Eyed Tarōkaja: A Donald Keene Anthology, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 80.

  19. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 33.

  20. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 193.

  21. Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 24.

  22. Keene, Chronicles of My Life, 22, 23, 36.

  23. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 23.

  24. Katz, “Sensei and Sensibility,” 32.

  25. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 23–24.

  26. Donald Keene “The Eroica Symphony,” in The Blue-Eyed Tarōkaja: A Donald Keene Anthology, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 13.

  27. Keene, “The Eroica Symphony,” 15.

  28. Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xiii.

  29. Donald Keene, Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 166.

  30. Keene, Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion, 9.

  31. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 236.

  32. Donald Keene, “Introduction,” in Mishima Yukio, Five Modern Nō Plays, trans. Donald Keene (Tokyo: Charles E Tuttle Company, 1957), xi.

  33. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 83.

  34. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 273.

  35. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 84.

  36. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 95.

  37. Keene, On Familiar Terms, 89–90.

  38. Katz, “Sensei and Sensibility,” 30.

  39. Katz, “Sensei and Sensibility,” 33.

  40. Donald Keene, Travellers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed Through Their Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

  41. Martin Collcutt, “Review of Travellers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries” Monumenta Nipponica 45 no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 357.

  42. Donald Keene, So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 5.

  43. Keene, So Lovely a Country, 6.

  44. Keene, So Lovely a Country, 4–5.

  45. David Pilling, “Lunch with the FT: Donald Keene,” Financial Times October 28, 2011 https://www.ft.com/content/9a0ebac8-00f5-11e1-8590-00144feabdc0.

  46. Takami Jun, diary entry for March 13, 1945, quoted in Keene, So Lovely a Country, 80.

  47. Pilling, “Lunch with the FT.”

  48. Pilling, “Lunch with the FT.”

  49. Ken Moritsugu, “Scholar of Japan,” Business Insider, December 30, 2015, n.p.

  50. Quoted in Ben Dooley, “Donald Keene, Famed Translator of Japanese Literature, Dies at 96,” New York Times, February 24, 2019, D6.

  1. 1977–1986

  1. Donald Keene, “The Barren Years: Japanese War Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica 33, no.1 (Spring 1978): 67–112.

  2. Edita Morris, mother of Ivan Morris.

  3. Annalita Marsili Alexander had been engaged to Ivan Morris at the time of his death.

  4. Donald Keene, Meeting with Japan (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1978).

  5. Mishima Yukio was one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century, admired in Japan and internationally for the range and quality of his writing and also for having taken his own life by sepukku. He was a good friend of Keene’s and Keene translated some of Mishima’s work.

  6. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1984).

  7. Keene provides an account of the invitation in both his memoirs: On Familiar Terms: A Journey Across Cultures (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), and Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). In the first of these memoirs, he comments that he thought the intention behind the invitation was “to make the newspaper more international.” Donald Keene, On Familiar Terms: A Journey Across Cultures (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 275.

  8. Hazzard had been invited to present the prestigious annual “Boyer Lectures” for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

  9. Hazzard published a number of articles critical of the United Nations, where she had worked in the early 1950s. In 1980 she published an article implying that then-Secretary General Kurt Waldheim had falsified his wartime records to conceal his connection with the Nazis, and the story had broken more widely in 1986, while Waldheim was seeking to be elected president of Austria. A fuller account is provided in Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022).

  10. Lily Aprile was a longtime close friend of Hazzard’s living in Naples. Keene met her whenever he visited Hazzard there.

  11. It was Joseph Stalin who used the term, not Adolf Hitler.

  2. 1987–1997

  1. Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages (New York: Henry Holt, 1989).

  2. Hazzard’s friend, Naples historian Carlo Knight.

  3. The Naples historian Carlo Knight was a good friend of Hazzard’s. The occasion was the marriage of his daughter Ella.

  4. Hazzard published two essays on Waldheim in 1989: “Reflections: Breaking Faith,” in the New Yorker, September 25, 63–99, and in the New Yorker of October 2, 74–96. These essays were later expanded and published in book form as Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (New York: Viking, 1990)

  5. Kōbō Abe, Three Plays, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

  6. Francis Steegmuller died October 20, 1994.

  7. The postcard shows a painting by Frans Post, “Brazilian Landscape with a Worker’s House (detail) 1655.”

  3. 1997–2008

  1. Makoto Oda, The Breaking Jewel, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

  2. Donald Keene, Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

  3. Donald Keene, Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan 1793–1841 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

  4. Donald Keene, So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

  Index

  Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

  “Abbé Galiani, The,” (Steegmuller) 108

  Acton, Harold, 133

  Adam Bede (Eliot), 69

  Ainu (aboriginal inhabitants of Hokkaido island), 84–85

  Alexander, Annalita Marsili, 208n3

  amateurism, 6–7

  Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 161, 176

  Annals (Tacitus), 131

  Anthology of Japanese Literature (Keene), 8

  anti-American bias, in Japan, 77–78

  Antoinette, Marie, 153

  Aprile, Lily, 208n10

  Asahi Prize, 7, 152

  Asahi Shimbun, 13, 32, 34, 53

  Auden, W. H., 6, 72, 183, 190, 192

  Australian Broadcasting Commission, 208n8

  “Barren Years: Japanese War Literature, The” (Keene), 18–19

  Barthes, Roland, 6–7

  Bashō Matsuo, 126, 187

  Bay of Noon, The (Hazzard), 3

  Beatrice di Tenda (Bellini), 92

  Bergen, Norway, 179, 184

  Berkoff, Stephen, 146

  Biblioteca Angelica, 65

  Booker prize, 192

  Borchardt, Georges, 167, 172

  Breunig, Erse, 122

  Brooke, Rupert, 125

  Browning, Robert, 181

  Broyard, Anatole, 112

  Caniglia, Maria, 82

  Capon, Edmund, 25

  Carlo, Teatro S., 98

  Carraciolo, Battistiello, 64

  Carraciolo, Lanfranco, 63–64

  Castel Nuovo, 105

  Castel Sant-Angelo, 67

  Chatwin, Bruce, 23

  Chekhov, Anton, 189

  Cherubini, Luigi, 160–161

  Child of Fortune (Tsushima), 41

  Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 105

  Christoff, Boris, 26

  Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (Keene), 208n7

  Church of San Luigi dei Francisi, 65

  Church of San Pietro a Maiella, 83

  Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, 97

  Colet, Louise, 29

  Commager, Steele, 191

  Confucian wisdom, 128

  Conservatory of San Pietro di Maiella, 82

  Cosi Fan Tutte (Mozart), 63

  Counter-Reformation, 37–38

  Cranford (Gaskell), 165

  Crewe, Jennifer, 103

  Cultural Revolution (Chinese), 121

  Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 119

  Dante, 181–182

  David Copperfield (Dickens), 105, 119