In Memoriam
Edward G. Seidensticker (1921-2007)

We were saddened to hear of the death of Professor Seidensticker, one of the greatest names in the translation of Japanese literature and also one of our best-loved members, at the age of 86 on Sunday, August 26, 2007. He had been in a coma for four months since fracturing his skull in a fall near his home in Tokyo.

Prof. Seidensticker was born in Castle Rock, Colorado, in 1921. He was about to graduate from the English Department in the University of Colorado in December 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. He signed on with the U.S. Navy and entered its wartime language school, in this way getting his first introduction to Japanese. With the ending of the war he was sent to Kyushu as a language officer with the Marine Corps, and his time in Sasebo convinced him that he should make a career of Japanese. After further study of Japanese at Columbia and Harvard Universities, he returned to Japan in 1948, and spent the first two of the next fourteen years with the Diplomatic Section of SCAP. After that he was partly a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and partly teaching at Sophia University, while also doing a little freelance translating and writing. He then returned to the States and began a teaching career, first at Stanford University and later at the University of Michigan.

His first serious work as a professional translator resulted from his being approached by Alfred Knopf in New York. The year 1955 saw the publication of his translations of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles, and this was followed the next year by Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, and subsequently by other novels of theirs and also Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility and other works. When Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm in 1968, it was Seidensticker's translations of his works that were considered to have been influential in making them known outside Japan. Apart from this, he is probably best known for his mammoth effort of translating The Tale of Genji, a 15-year undertaking which he said he found exhausting but never boring. Another popular two-volume work of his, original writing this time, is Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake and the sequel Tokyo Rising (Tokyo after the great 1923 earthquake).

Seidensticker was also a worthy contributor to the ASJ in the early postwar decades. He first spoke to the Society about the Kagero-Nikki: Journals of a 10th-Century Noblewoman, his first attempt at a long translation. It was published in 1955 as Volume 4 of Series III of the Transactions. In June 1973 he addressed the Society on "The Great Amateurs: Satow, Aston, Eliot and Sansom", and this was published in 1975 in Vol. 12, Series III. A paper he read to us, "On Kawabata Yasunari", was published in February 1970 in Special Bulletin No. 2, one of six such which appeared at a time when there was a delay in publishing The Transactions. He also read a paper to the Society in 1976 on "The Japanese and Nature, with Special Reference to The Tale of Genji", but this was not published. Those who attended the late Fr. Neal Henry Lawrence's STAIFA meetings may also recall his speaking on one occasion on his translation of Genji. Even in his eighties he continued to be much in demand as an entertaining and provocative speaker; in September 2003, for example, he spoke at length on "My Sort of Translating" to the Society of Writers, Editors and Translators, and also gave a short speech at its 25th anniversary celebrations in October 2005.