Status Updates From Chronicles of My Life: An A...
Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan by
Status Updates Showing 1-30 of 169
Carol
is 97% done
Had the civil war not broken out in 1936, I might have spent my life in Spain. If the “liberation” had not taken place in China in 1948, I might have become a scholar of Chinese literature. These possibilities (and there are others) are intriguing, but the conclusion is always the same: I was fantastically lucky.
— Jun 10, 2025 04:13PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 96% done
Tastes change, and it is conceivable that I may discover one day that I would like to have miso soup every morning. At present, however, when friends urge me to make preparations for old age by finding a suitable retirement home in Japan, the thought of a Japanese breakfast every day is a factor that keeps me from investigating such places.
— Jun 10, 2025 04:12PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 92% done
The long tradition of portraiture in Japan dates back to the portrait of Prince Shōtoku. …Often a portrait was painted after a man’s death by an artist who had never seen him, but the lack of resemblance was not criticized. Instead, it was sufficient for the artist to suggest the virtue considered most characteristic of the subject, whether commanding dignity, profound piety, or unruffled calm.
— Jun 10, 2025 04:03PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 83% done
Scholars frequently mention the fifteenth-century Ōnin War as the dividing period between the old and new in Japanese culture. During this war, which lasted for ten years from 1467 to 1477, virtually every building in the city of Kyoto was destroyed. At that time, Kyoto was not merely the biggest city in Japan but the great repository of Japanese culture, and its destruction was an immense, irreplaceable loss.
— Jun 09, 2025 05:31PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 72% done
My book, The Japanese Discovery of Europe was published in Russian in an edition of 7,500 copies. It sold out the first day. There was no second printing because that would not have been in keeping with a planned economy. While in Moscow I was told that I would be paid royalties in rubles that could be used only in the Soviet Union.
— Jun 09, 2025 04:46PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 69% done
When I praised the lovely architecture of Leningrad, she pointed to one building and said, “In each room of that house, a whole family now lives. The rooms were cut up into such small units that in one apartment the painting on the ceiling may show only one foot of an allegorical figure, the other foot being in the next apartment.”
— Jun 09, 2025 04:30PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 67% done
It was thanks to Ōe… that I first became friendly with Abe Kōbō, who became, after Mishima’s death, my closest friend in the literary world. I had met Abe …in 1964…. He, Teshigahara Hiroshi…and a young woman, their interpreter, visited my office at Columbia. I was annoyed by the inference that I needed an interpreter and paid no attention to the young woman. Only years later did I learn she was Ono Yōko.
— Jun 09, 2025 04:25PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 56% done
1956 ”After the interview, realizing that the reporter knew nothing about him, Mishima asked me what one had to do to become famous in New York. He was accustomed to people stopping him in the streets to ask for his autograph. He told me that once a young woman had held out a magic marker, asking him to autograph her underwear. The indifference of the reporter had thus come as a shock.”
— Jun 09, 2025 03:43PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 54% done
The PEN Congress was one factor that led to the acceptance of Japanese works as an integral part of the world’s literature. Another factor, though I hesitate to mention it, was the publication of the two volumes of my anthology of Japanese literature in 1955 and 1956…. The only history of Japanese literature in English was published in 1899 and was hopelessly out of date.
— Jun 09, 2025 11:47AM
Add a comment
Carol
is 46% done
It would have been better if I had contented myself with praising Waley, but in the effort to persuade Japanese readers of the merits of his translation [of The Tale of Genji], I stated that it was better than Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s translation…. After my article appeared, I wrote him a letter of apology, and he answered that the article had not bothered him. Of course not.
— Jun 07, 2025 07:06PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 45% done
Later I discovered why the professor so rarely appeared. The salaries paid to professors at national universities were so meager that he had no choice but to take additional teaching jobs elsewhere.
— Jun 07, 2025 07:00PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 42% done
People in Kyoto are apt to take pride not in the number of temples and gardens that survive from the past but in the fact that the first streetcars in Japan ran in their city, that three major Japanese department stores had their beginnings in Kyoto, and that the aqueduct that brings water from Lake Biwa to the city is the oldest in Japan.
— Jun 07, 2025 06:53PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 39% done
1952 Phnom Penh was quiet, and the museum was full of wonderful sculptures, but we were advised that when we went to a restaurant to choose a table as far from the door as possible, as it was quite common for passing terrorists to toss bombs into public buildings.
— Jun 07, 2025 06:44PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 34% done
At the time, students at Cambridge who knew no Japanese were introduced to the language by reading the preface to the tenth-century anthology of poetry Kokinshū in the original. It seemed strange to me to start learning a living language from a text a thousand years old, but the tradition of studying dead languages—Greek and Latin—was strong in England.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:26PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 34% done
I left for Italy with the manuscript and a typewriter…. When the train reached Milan I asked a man in the compartment if he would look after my belongings while I got a breath of fresh air. He agreed, and I walked up and down the platform for about ten minutes. When I got back to the compartment, there was no man, no suitcase, no typewriter.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:24PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 34% done
Bicycles were everywhere, and some naturally got lost or were even stolen. A brilliant British lawyer once successfully defended a student accused of stealing a bicycle by establishing the truth that a bicycle is a wild animal and therefore does not belong to anyone.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:20PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 33% done
When the college servant showed me to my two rooms, he said, “Coldest rooms in Cambridge, sir.” I would remember these words as autumn turned into winter. There was no way to heat the bedroom, and the window could not be completely shut. The sitting room had a gas stove that produced a feeble heat detectable only in immediate proximity.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:19PM
Add a comment
Carol
is 29% done
I remembered asking an aviator why Kōfu was bombed so often. He answered with a laugh that it was easy to find, on the direct route to Tokyo, and there wasn’t much antiaircraft fire. It was the safest place to drop bombs.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:09PM
Add a comment
