Mrs. Eileen Kato

Mrs. Kato was born in Co. Mayo, Ireland, and was brought up in a bilingual background of  Gaelic and English. From early childhood she was steeped in Irish myth and legend,  and in the poetry of Yeats.

She had her secondary schooling in Sligo, the place which Yeats considered as home, and where he is buried. In 1953 she received her  B.A.  from the Galway College of the National University of Ireland,  with special honours in spoken and written French. From there she went to the University of Poitiers with a French Government scholarship, and there she received her M.A. the following year. She then proceeded to the Sorbonne with a travelling studentship from the NUI, but broke off her doctoral studies in 1956 to marry a Japanese diplomat. Her husband was a great Noh aficionado, and the first of her innumerable visits to Noh was on the  third day after her arrival in Japan in 1958.

They were in New York from  1963-67, and she attended Columbia University, studying under Donald Keene and Ivan Morris, and received a second M.A., in Japanese Studies. Further postings were to Paris, Beijing, Cairo and Brussels, before her husband痴 death in 1991. Wherever she went she took the opportunity to deepen her knowledge of Yeats and the Noh, and also kept up her study of Gaelic literature. 

Among her published works are translations of two of the plays in Twenty Plays of the N・Theatre, edited by Donald Keene (1970), and two of the plays in Traditional Japanese Theater, edited by Karen Brazell (1988). She has also translated two books by Shiba Ryar・ The Heart Remembers Home (1979) and Drunk as a Lord (2001). Those members who heard her speak in 1996 on 鄭 Comparative Look at Ono no Komachi and the Old Woman of Beare・(published in Vol. 11 of the Transactions) can attest personally to the quality of her scholarship.