Carol’s Reviews > Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan > Status Update
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
