'Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere' by John Nathan

and Elsewhere

A Memoir

John Nathan

Free Press: 320 pp., $26

IT'S not often one gets the lowdown years later on an authority figure who was briefly a source of fascination. You know you've hit pay dirt when the inside scoop includes a ribald description of his most embarrassing moment -- an ungainly giant with a spastic colon grappling with a Japanese squat-toilet.

Back in 1975, when I was a sophomore at Princeton, I ventured into a course called Modern Japanese Literature in Translation. The professor was no one's image of an academic -- a huge hulk in his mid-30s with long sideburns and a mess of dark hair.

If John Nathan was big, his personality was even bigger -- and his demands on his students were completely outsized. His reading assignments were terrific but outrageously extensive -- a syllabus on steroids, averaging three or four books a week. Regretfully, even the most conscientious among us cut corners. Nathan boomed bitter disappointment at our lack of preparation. After graduating from Harvard in 1961, he was the first foreigner admitted as a regular student to the University of Tokyo since the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905; the workload in the Department of National Language and Literature made our assignments look like a cakewalk.

Although Nathan seemed temperamentally unsuited to academia, he was clearly brilliant and often mesmerizing. His passion for his subject, if not for his students, spewed forth like lava; he wanted to cover everything. I remember the excitement of hearing anecdotes about his friendships with Yukio Mishima, Kenzabur{omacronl} {omacronc}e and K{omacronl}b{omacronl} Abe and of reading stories by {omacronc}e in typescript, newly translated by Nathan -- who, while still in his 20s, had introduced {omacronc}e's work to American readers with his 1968 translation of "A Personal Matter."

After Nathan left Princeton in the late 1970s to devote himself to filmmaking, he directed a trio of documentaries about the Japanese. In 1999, he published "Sony: The Private Life" and in 2002 a translation of {omacronc}e's "Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!"

All this is covered in his memoir, whose title, "Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere," indicates a degree of self-awareness and candor that proved an irresistible lure to this former student, who found him a somewhat careless professor.