By Donald Keene
Columbia University Press, 192pp, $41.95
IN his slim 2008 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, renowned Japanese scholar Donald Keene described working as a translator on board a US Navy boat in the last years of World War II.
"One day I noticed a large wooden box containing captured documents," he writes. "The documents gave off a faint, unpleasant odour. I was told that the little notebooks were diaries taken from the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers or found floating in the sea . . . I felt squeamish about touching the little books but, carefully selecting one that seemed free of bloodstains, I began to translate it.
"At first I had trouble reading the handwriting, but the diaries, unlike the printed or mimeographed documents I previously had translated, were at times almost unbearably moving, recording the suffering of a soldier in his last days."
These dead soldiers, Keene observes, were the first Japanese he "met". As the reality of defeat dawned, many had included messages in English in their diaries, asking the reader to return them to their families. Although it was forbidden, Keene hid them with the intention of doing so, but his desk was searched and they were confiscated.
Little wonder he should subsequently feel such a calling to Japan, publishing 50 books on the country's literature and culture in as many years as a professor at Columbia University, including an earlier volume on modern Japanese diaries. Even less surprising that he should be fascinated by the wartime diaries of Japanese writers who, while fearing punishment for non-patriotic thoughts by the notorious kampetei (military police), were often moved, nonetheless, to express feelings of ambivalence or anger.
Yet for those coming to So Lovely a Country wanting to know more about Japan's most eminent writers, such as Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima and Masuji Ibuse, this book will immediately disappoint: of the writers known outside Japan, only Nagai Kafu is present. Tanizaki, apparently, did keep a wartime diary, but it was too dull for inclusion, perhaps because he was one of the few writers able to live out the war fairly comfortably, as writing work dried up, on book royalties.
I have read elsewhere that Ibuse, whose 1965 Black Rain explored the repercussions of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, worked during the war as a propaganda writer but gave up writing his diary because of censorship. For the lay reader, a broader description of both the diary resources available and unavailable to Keene, and the effect of this war on Japan's literature, would certainly have been welcome additions.
The other difficulty is that these diaries are not collected in excerpts long enough to allow one to feel their daily progression as chronicles but instead are doled out in small doses (never more than a page) as Keene painstakingly tells the story of Japan's war, from its first day to the seismic effects of reconstruction.
This book is likely to be of more interest to scholars of Japanese studies than the general reader. Yet, for an academic book, it is unusual in not engaging with the large body of scholarship that discusses diaries as untrustworthy bearers of truth. These diaries present a particularly gnarly problem, as many authors wrote with an eye for posterity, later publishing them. Kafu, for example, would lose three houses but preserve his diary by always carrying it in a satchel.
In this way they are quite different from the journals of ordinary Japanese collected by Samuel Hideo Yamashita in his Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies, though it is particularly interesting to learn, in Keene's introduction, that every Japanese soldier and sailor was issued with a diary in the new year and encouraged by his superiors to keep it.
Keene's book introduces many individuals whose reactions to the war, across its duration, are intriguing to follow, though they take patience to untangle.
There is the loner Kafu, bravely expressing contempt for the militarists who started the war, although seeming at times more concerned with the inconvenient dwindling of his supplies of Lipton tea and English soap.
There is young Yamada Futaro, who never wavers in his hatred of the enemy, all the while sustaining himself through intense bombings by reading Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky and Balzac.
There is the prevailingly cheerful Uchida Hyakken who, when his house is destroyed, expresses relief that he will never have to attend to the tedious business matters accumulating in his study: "It gave me a really marvellous feeling to think that the flames had liberated me from everything in one stroke."
Most interesting is distinguished professor Watanabe Kazuo who, writing his diary in French to hide his pacifist sentiments and struggling with his sense of responsibility as an intellectual, exhorts himself, as a nameless little beast, coarse and cowardly, to "Endure!"
As defeat comes to a country that has never been beaten, all struggle with their sense of what it means to be Japanese and where the nation's future lies.
The most interesting part of So Lovely a Country is the reconstruction, as the writers share our surprise at how quickly the Japanese adjust to the feared occupation.
It is even more interesting when Keene offers rare autobiographical glimpses of his own feelings as a young man and later friend to some of these authors.
Modesty is the admirable hallmark of his long career.
Yet the personalities here are so much more interesting than the composite picture. It would have been engrossing to hear them speak more boldly for themselves.
Delia Falconer is a novelist who teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney. (The Australian July 03, 2010)
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