Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere (Free Press, 336 pages, $29.99) by John Nathan, translator of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, quietly appeared during this year’s fake memoir season. Unlike fake memoirs, or most memoirs for that matter, there’s nothing particularly tragic or timely to Nathan’s story and its lack of story arc feels cleansing.

Leaving Harvard in the early 1960s, Nathan ended up in a Tokyo still recovering from its occupation and became the first American to gain entry into the University of Tokyo. From there, he quickly began translating Japan’s ascendant literary giants. Also stumbling into the role of ersatz ambassador between western and eastern lit, Nathan was Saul Bellow’s one-time tour guide through Tokyo. According to Nathan, Bellow could not pick up a woman to save his life.

With no small amount of wit, Nathan brings to life the sense of fraternity that marked the isolated avant-garde of Japan. Before the end of the 1970s Nathan branched out into film, co-directing a movie with Hiroshi Teshigahara and producing several documentaries. Modern or not, any story of an occidental gentleman journeying to the east carries the whiff of pith-helmeted exoticized malarkey, yet Nathan avoids such traps with his detailed and engaged writing. He judges himself and his own oddness against his adopted background and not the other way around.

With his job as a translator, Nathan is a natural Zelig figure in the background of photos of more famous personas. His most satisfying work was with Oe but his most entertaining, and strained, work was with Mishima. When Nathan changed his mind about translating what he thought was a subpar and pretentious book, Mishima exploded, declaring, “You made a promise. A samurai doesn’t break his promise.” To which Nathan wanted to reply — the correct translation escaping him — that he “was a Jew from Thompson Square Park and not a samurai.”

Later, New York publishing turned out to be no less unhinged when Grove Press’ Barney Rosset asked Nathan to travel to Bolivia in the midst of a civil war to obtain Che Guevara’s diaries. Back in the States for good, Nathan found the ultimate slacker paradise of tenured academia while still marginally involved in film enough to hang with Werner Herzog and to attend Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley wine parties.

Nathan has stepped to the front of the photograph with an enjoyable tale that’s rewarding in its subtlety. 

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