I spent yesterday up in Sendai, walking the streets of the city and visiting my former professors at Tohoku University.  I also had a nice dinner with my in-laws.  It's always nostalgic to visit the city that was my first home in Japan, back in 1984-5.  I lived there again twice, in 1993-4 and 2000-1.  Walking around the downtown area, I kept tripping up on little fragments of memory....

   As often happens when I'm on the road, I've lost track of what's going on in the world.  I haven't been reading newspapers or watching the tv news, and so, until my in-laws mentioned it over dinner last night, I'd had no idea that Kato Shuichi had passed away last Friday.

   A giant of postwar literature, he was 89.  He first emerged as a poet in the mid 1940s, but is better known for his sharp literary and cultural criticism.  His three-volume history of Japanese literature is still the best thing of its kind available in English.  He was also the model of a public intellectual, using his knowledge and skills to speak to a wide audience of readers on important issues.   He was also, incidentally, a medical doctor (he helped treat radiation victims in Hiroshima) and a skilled pianist.

   I had the privilege of meeting him on a couple of occasions.  In 1995 (the second time I lived in Sendai), I made my debut public paper presentation as a graduate student at a conference sponsored by the Fukuoka UNESCO organization.  I was nervous enough to have to present my scholarship in public, and in Japanese no less.  When I learned on top of this that Kato was going to be my discussant, I went into full-blown panic mode.

   I flew into Fukuoka the day before the conference.  The organizers took us out to dinner that night, and we all ended up at a very chic hostess bar.  I basically fell in love with Kato then and there.  He was dressed in a black turtleneck and a gray blazer, and he enthralled us all with stories about visiting an Italian film director (was it De Sica?) in the 1950s with Kurosawa Akira and realizing that cinema was the first truly universal, transnational art form.   Kato was 76 at the time and hands-down the sexiest man in the bar.  It was as if there was a spotlight on him, and everyone in the place was spellbound, wanting only to listen to him speak.  I remember thinking, boy, that's how I want to be when I'm in my seventies....

   The next morning, the conference was supposed to start at 9:00.  I was the first scheduled paper presenter.  I went down to the conference center's cafe for breakfast at about 8:30 and found Kato sitting alone at a table.  He beckoned for me to join him.  He told me that he found my paper very stimulating (it was an early draft of the chapter on Toson's Before the Dawn that I later published in my Dawn That Never Comes) and asked me all sorts of questions about it.  I thought I must be dreaming.  I also kept glancing at my watch, because it was now 9:00, and then 9:05, and then 9:10.... I realized, though, that I would be okay so long as I stuck with Kato.  They couldn't start the symposium, after all, until he walked into the room. 

   Finally, about 9:15, I suggested to him that perhaps we should move on to the conference room.  I managed to stumble through my presentation that morning, and Kato then provided an all-too-kind analysis of my paper and those of the other presenters.  I thanked him profusely when it was all done.  He very kindly said that having a paper that made him think had made the trip to Fukuoka worthwhile.  Sheer flattery, I'm sure, but I lapped it up.  He later wrote some kind comments about it in one of his newspaper columns. 

   I saw Kato again five years later at a subsequent Fukuoka UNESCO conference.  At the reception, I went up and reintroduced myself, thanking him again for his kindnesses at the earlier event.  His eyes lit up in memory, and he said "Oh, yes!  The Toson conference!  That was really interesting."   Kato had aged a bit:  his ears were harder of hearing and he was now using a cane.  But the lights were clearly still blazing inside.

   Kato was a fine writer and an internationally famous scholar.  That he took the time to encourage a completely unknown American graduate student tells you something about what kind of a person he was.    He was also one of our last living links to that generation of young intellectuals who took on the gargantuan task of rebuilding Japanese letters after the disasters of 1937-1945. 

   Rest in peace, Mr. Kato, and thank you.