Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese As Revealed Through 1, 000 Years of Diaries

by Donald Keene

Descriptions rather than texts or excerpts of dairies of Japanese for the past 1,000 years, including those of Lady Murasaki, author of The Tale of Genji and Basho, the master of Haiku. The glossary is without pronunciation. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Japan, History, Travel, Nonfiction, Japanese Literature, Anthologies, Essays

468 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Donald Keene was a renowned American-born Japanese scholar, translator, and historian of Japanese literature. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, he developed a love for foreign cultures early in life. He graduated from Columbia University in 1942 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he studied Japanese at the Navy Language School. After the war, he returned to Columbia for his master’s and later earned a second master’s at Cambridge, followed by a PhD from Columbia in 1949. He studied further at Kyoto University and became a leading authority on Japanese literature.
Keene taught at Columbia University for over fifty years and published extensively in both English and Japanese, introducing countless readers to Japanese classics. His mentors included Ryusaku Tsunoda and Arthur Waley, whose translations deeply influenced him. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Keene retired from Columbia, moved to Japan, and became a Japanese citizen under the name Kīn Donarudo. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 2008, the first non-Japanese recipient. Keene remained active in literary and cultural life in Japan until his death in 2019 at the age of 96.

Reviews

[Othy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keene proves himself here to be a very knowledgeable critic but also a very opinionated one. Keene is of an era where critics were often critical more than they were commentators or guides, but I think that Keene pushes it too far. I am often left, after reading each selection, with more of a sense of what Donald Keene thinks is good rather than a sense of the author under study. Keene prefers poetry and travelogues like Basho's, he disdains the medieval as inauthentic and overly superstitious, and he assumes the readers' tastes are just like his. Luckily, he quotes enough that the original authors' voices are readily apparent, but there's still way too much Keene. A delightful compendium, surely, but alas marred by poor scholarship.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding overview of Japanese diary literature. Keene is a congenial guide as he describes a wide variety of diaries, tracing the evolution of the poetic Japanese diary.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have used this text as an introduction and a guide to further readings. I value it as a reference and always appreciate Mr. Keene’s observations and analyses.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bought this expecting a book of diaries; instead it is a book of essays about diaries, with fairly sparse quotations from the diaries I wanted to read. My rating may be undiluted petulance, as a result.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although, of course, not comparable to reading the actual works it discusses, I found this book to be thoroughly enjoyable. However, the same reasons that made me rate this book so highly might discourage other readers; the diaries are treated with Keene's piercing, and sometimes even cruel insight in a very subjective way. Not only that, the author, surrounded by tales of people who talk only about themselves, can't resist the temptation to insert here and there his own little auto-biographical paragraphs. But to me, this style is quite satisfying. The straightforward way in which he describes the diarists makes them sound more real, flesh and bone people that occupied a place in history, and it does convince you to check their actual writings, which I think it's the purpose of the book. I don't mind the autobiographical notes either, just like with the diaries, they just make me want to know more about the author.