Donald Keene: 13 books
by Donald Keene
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2005
The New Yorker has called Donald Keene "America's preeminent scholar of Japanese literature." Now he presents a new book that serves as both a superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction and a memoir of his own lifelong love affair with Japanese literature and culture. Five Modern Japanese...
So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish
Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2010
The attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the Greater East Asia War and its initial triumphs, aroused pride and a host of other emotions among the Japanese people. Yet the single year in which Japanese forces occupied territory from Alaska to Indonesia was followed by three years of terrible...
The Winter Sun Shines In
A Life of Masaoka Shiki
Language: English
Release Date: August 20, 2013
Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated...
The People and Culture of Japan
Conversations Between Donald Keene and Shiba Ryotaro
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
This book features conversations between Donald Keene, a preeminent scholar of Japanese literature, and Shiba Ryotaro, the author who continued to contemplate the human condition through his original and distinctive lens of history. These talks—which mainly explore the foundation of Japanese culture—took...
The People and Culture of Japan
Conversations Between Donald Keene and Shiba Ryotaro
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
This book features conversations between Donald Keene, a preeminent scholar of Japanese literature, and Shiba Ryotaro, the author who continued to contemplate the human condition through his original and distinctive lens of history. These talks—which mainly explore the foundation of Japanese culture—took...
Chronicles of My Life
An American in the Heart of Japan
Language: English
Release Date: May 19, 2008
"I sometimes think that if, as the result of an accident, I were to lose my knowledge of Japanese, there would not be much left for me. Japanese, which at first had no connection with my ancestors, my literary tastes, or my awareness of myself as a person, has become the central element of my...
Modern Japanese Literature
From 1868 to the Present Day
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2007
A collection of plays, essays, poetry, and reportage compiled by “the 20th-century’s premier scholar of Japanese literature” (Slate).
Modern Japanese Literature is Donald Keene’s critically acclaimed companion volume to his landmark Anthology of Japanese Literature. Now considered the...
Emperor of Japan
Meiji and His World, 1852-1912
Language: English
Release Date: June 14, 2005
When Emperor Meiji began his rule, in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire, dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, who ruled over the country's more than 250 decentralized domains and who were, in the main, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of...
Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion
The Creation of the Soul of Japan
Language: English
Release Date: November 5, 2003
Yoshimasa may have been the worst shogun ever to rule Japan. He was a failure as a soldier, incompetent at dealing with state business, and dominated by his wife. But his influence on the cultural life of Japan was unparalleled. According to Donald Keene, Yoshimasa was the only shogun to leave a lasting...
Frog in the Well
Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2006
Frog in the Well is a vivid and revealing account of Watanabe Kazan, one of the most important intellectuals of the late Tokugawa period. From his impoverished upbringing to his tragic suicide in exile, Kazan's life and work reflected a turbulent period in Japan's history. He was a famous artist,...
by Donald KEENE, Ryotaro SHIBA
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2017
Edo Japan Encounters the World continues the conversation, begun nearly twenty years earlier in The People and Culture of Japan, between scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene and historical novelist Shiba Ryotaro. In discussions that took place in Osaka and Kyoto from 1989 to 1990, these two...
The First Modern Japanese
The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2016
Many books in Japanese have been devoted to the poet and critic Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912). Although he died at the age of twenty-six and wrote many of his best-known poems in the space of a few years, his name is familiar to every literate Japanese. Takuboku's early death added to the sad romance...
by Donald Keene
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Originally published in 1952, this account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan has been enlarged by two new chapters that extend the story from 1798 to 1830. The author has incorporated the results of recent research by scholars in Japan and the West and made corrections in the text.