John Nathan

a biography

Mishima

Yukio Mishima

Ivan I. Morris

Meredith Weatherby

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ; Confessions of a Mask

The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Finally back in print: The definitive biography of the legendary Japanese writer-legendary as much for his tumultuous life and macabre suicide as for his Nobel-nominated writings.

Mishima: a Biography

An expert on Japanese culture uses his access to Sony's archives to chart that company's fascinating rise from the ashes of post-war Tokyo to a major international distributor of electronics and mass culture. Tour.

The Private Life

Sony

John Nathan arrived in Tokyo in 1961 fresh out of Harvard College, bringing with him no practical experience, no more than two connections, no prospects, and little else to recommend him but stoic, unflappable pluck. Japan at that time was still in the shadow of the Occupation, and only a handful of foreigners were studying the country seriously. Two years later, Nathan became the first American to pass the entrance exams to the best school in Japan, the University of Tokyo. He went on to translate two of Japan's greatest contemporary writers, Yukio Mishima and Nobel laureate Kenzaburõ Õe, and direct several series of films in and about Japan in collaboration with world-famous directors and businesses; earn an advanced degree at Harvard and a professorship at Princeton; and become a Hollywood screenwriter. Nathan was given unprecedented access to the inner sanctum of Sony for his book Sony: The Private Life, and he explored the damaged psyche of postbubble Japan in his acclaimed Japan Unbound. During his decades of passionate engagement with Japan, Nathan became close friends with many of the most gifted people in the land -- politicians and business leaders as well as painters, novelists, directors, rock stars, and movie stars -- and was privileged to travel, in their very special company, inside domains of Japanese life not normally open to foreigners then or now. In his unique chronicle of that journey, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, he details the adventures sublime, profane, and uproarious, many of a distinctly Japanese nature, that characterized his career, which was singular in its success as much as in its chaos. Along the way, he brings the most exciting era in recent Japanese history vividly into focus with wry humor, penetrating insight, and pathos. John Nathan is not the only foreigner to have developed a rich, full, deeply nuanced understanding of Japan. But his experiences are certainly extraordinary and in fact irreproducible, and his memoir is the most personally satisfying story yet told of Japan (and elsewhere). From Nathan's lifetime of wisdom, compassion, and brazen resolve, we learn the value of traveling within our own mental and emotional borders as well as without the many places we call home.

A Memoir

Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere

Explores the cultural changes that have taken place in Japan throughout the last decade as demonstrated by various economic groups and institutions, predicting what Japan's changing world role will mean for the future.

A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose

Japan Unbound

Originally published: Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1974.

A Biography

Mishima a Biography

The Life and Works of Yukio Mishima

John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of Natsume Sōseki, the father of the modern novel in Japan. This biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated twentieth-century modernism.

Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist

Soseki

a biography by John Nathan

A Bintel Brif

Daniel is in love with his best friend Amelia, but his secrets may be the one thing to tear them apart. Will Daniel make the right choices to procure her safety when faced with pure evil? Is the love he holds for her strong enough to protect them from the dark realm?

A Tale of Kindred Spirits

When a Ghost Falls in Love

Mishima : A Biography

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

Sōseki

An expert on Japanese culture uses his access to Sony's archives to chart that company's fascinating rise from the ashes of post-war Tokyo to a major international distributor of electronics and mass culture. Reprint.

John Nathan

Books

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