Veteran scholar and translator Donald Keene shares his memories of five writers he knew personally: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Kōbō Abe and Ryutaro Shiba. Each essay neatly mixes Keene's affectionate (sometimes comical, always respectful) first-hand reminiscences with a mini-bio and a brief critical appreciation of his most important works and some notes on how they have been received in Japan and in the West. For the moment, I've only read books by two of the five, but I found it interesting and useful to read about the others too. There's a good bibliography for anyone seeking to explore in more depth.

I was curious about what Keene would have to say about the Mishima Incident - he takes the line that Mishima's activism had little to do with real right-wing politics but was driven by an aesthetic infatuation with the beauty of sacrifice and early death. ( )

Five fascinating personal portraits of the greatest modern Japanese novelists of the 20th century by perhaps the last of the great Japanologists, Donald Keene. Intimate, refreshing, and revealing, this is a good read.

Five Modern Japanese Novelists is a short introduction to five 20th century Japanese authors whom the author befriended during his years in Japan: Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata (the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature from Japan), Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe and Ryutaro Shiba. Keene provides brief biographies, interesting personal recollections, and short analyses of their major works. This would be a good book for someone who is unfamiliar with these authors, but those seeking in depth analyses of their works should seek out other scholarly works by Keene, who has translated several books by Japanese authors into English, written over two dozen books on Japanese literature and culture, and taught Japanese literature for over 50 years at Columbia University. ( )