emperor of the gaijin

I haven't been following closely, but Yomiuri has been publishing a series of essays that amounts to Donald Keene's memoirs. Today I happened one entitled "Oe Kenzaburo and Abe Kobo", and as so many of the previous essays have done it sort of blew my mind. The man was everywhere, like the Forest Gump of Japanese international culture. Check this paragraph, especially the last sentence out:

It was thanks to Oe, however, that I first became friendly with Abe Kobo who became after the death of Mishima my closest friend in the literary world. I had met Abe in New York in the autumn of 1964, when his novel "Woman in the Dunes" was published there. He, Teshigahara Hiroshi (the director of the celebrated film made from the novel), and a young woman, their interpreter, visited my office at Columbia. I was annoyed by the inference that I needed an interpreter and paid no attention to the young woman. Only years later did I learn she was Ono Yoko.

I'm still trying to get all these little quips and quirks of Japan emerging in the world conciousness into my head. He was there.