Renowned Author and Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures Has Passed Away Author: Mike Walters Special Thanks to Doreen Hernandez and the Asian Studies Center of the University of Pittsburgh

Keiko Iwai McDonald, professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh and an esteemed scholar of Japanese cinema, passed away following a fishing accident on September 14, 2008. She was 68 years old. Dr. McDonald authored eight books (including Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films, Mizoguchi, and Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context) as well as more than forty articles and book chapters. She was also the recipient of a number of awards, such as the Asian Studies Teaching Excellence Award (1998), the Tina and David Bellet College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Award (2002), and was three times named a Fulbright fellow. What follows is a personal remembrance from a former student... I first heard the Japanese expression mono no aware in Keiko McDonald’s “Introduction to Japanese Literature” class in the fall of 2000. Although, as with many Japanese expressions, a direct English translation does not come easily to hand, a close translation is “the impermanence of things”—the idea that life is fleeting and fragile, that what we have today can very easily be taken from us tomorrow. It is a recurring theme in Japanese art and literature, an emotional symbol that can pop up in the least expected places: a full moon on a medieval scroll, the cherry blossoms in a woodblock print, or the closing dialogue in a Yasujir? Ozu film. It is also the emotion that arose most strongly when I learned of Dr. McDonald’s death. Reactions to Dr. McDonald’s sudden passing were swift and unanimous: shock, disbelief, deep sadness, pain that someone was lost whose imprint was so outsized and dynamic that it would be simply impossible to replace her. As if such a thing could even be contemplated; her character was so unique, her touch so personal, that the cliché “irreplaceable” was more accurate in her case than in most. There was neither a student she taught (or listened to—she happily called herself a “student of students”) nor a colleague she helped who did not remember her as utterly special. Flamboyant. Dynamic. Always smiling. Even her physical appearance left a long-lasting impression: a smallish Japanese woman with beaming, glinting eyes beneath a jet-black pageboy bob, seemingly always in a hurry to get somewhere or other, hustling down hallways and across streets in bright pink tennis shoes, often dragging an oversized suitcase on wheels behind her when she wasn’t simply running the sidewalks and park paths of Pittsburgh (she was a trophy-winning marathon runner). It seems like everyone has a memory of Keiko-sensei—as she was known to colleagues, students, and friends alike—that is unique in its own way and yet, somehow, linked to all the others by a common chain of kindness, of unfailing patience.

In the eight years I knew her, Keiko-sensei was professor, advisor, and in some way, friend. Over those years I accumulated a number of memories but I think my favorite comes from the fall of 2005. I had just started as a graduate student and was working at Pitt’s Asian Studies Center. The Pittsburgh Japanese Film Series, an annual event that Keiko had helped to start a few years before, was about to begin and the list of films had just been announced. To my surprise, on the program was the then recently-released fiftieth anniversary Godzilla film, GODZILLA: FINAL WARS. I wrote to Keiko-sensei, explaining to her that kaij? eiga had long been a pastime of mine and that I was interested in writing a note for the program. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, honestly—that the movie was showing as part of the Film Series was surprising enough, but it seemed unlikely that a detailed program note would be considered necessary. Anyway, if something were needed, I thought, Keiko-sensei would probably write it herself, or draw the information from the internet. So I was surprised when I received an e-mail reply from Keiko, enthusiastically accepting my offer and encouraging me to do it. It was typical Keiko, though—generous and eager to help, to give an untested grad student a chance. On the night that the film premiered, Keiko stood on stage in the small auditorium in front of an audience mostly consisting of students and kids, but also parents and grandparents who were there either because they had loved Godzilla as children, or because they loved their children and grandchildren who now loved Godzilla. From the mezzanine where I sat, Keiko-sensei looked smaller than usual, her hands clasped in front of her, her head bobbing and nodding as she surveyed the audience. She began her introduction without a microphone, her voice rising and falling as she struggled to project it around the auditorium. Her introduction was warm and funny, direct and unpretentious, showing no hint of condescension to the film and no ivory tower arrogance. She was too affectionate, too fair for that. It’s been three years and most of her speech that night has faded in my memory, but one part remains very vivid. Speaking of the fifty years that had passed since Godzilla’s debut in 1954, she described it as a time when “most of you” (here speaking to the audience) “were barely a gleam in your father’s eye.” As occasionally happened when Keiko delivered a lecture, the vowels became elongated, so that “gleam” and “eye” became something like “gleeeeeeam” and “eeeeeeeye”. She smiled her huge smile, finished her introduction, her head still nodding as she spoke, and quickly left the stage as the lights came down and the Toho Studios logo flickered onto the screen. It was a very memorable night for me, not only for the film itself and the opportunity to share my love of the genre, but also because of Keiko-sensei’s great generosity in taking a chance on me in the first place. It was vintage Keiko, though. Her adored husband, Charles, said at her memorial service some two weeks after her death that she loved the university, that she loved all of us. And we loved her right back. D?mo arigat? gozaimashita, Sensei. Thank you for everything.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ For anyone who would like to make a donation in Keiko`s memory, checks may be made out to the University of Pittsburgh (with a memo stating that the check is for the Keiko McDonald Memorial Fund) and sent to: Matt Smith, Financial Gifts Specialist University of Pittsburgh 316B Craig Hall, 200 South Craig Street Pittsburgh, PA 15260 or, via online donation at giveto.pitt.edu/keiko.php All donations will be used to assist students at Pitt in their study of Japanese language and culture.