Edward George Seidensticker (February 11, 1921 – August 26, 2007) was a noted post-World War II American scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature.

[1] Seidensticker is closely associated with the work of three major Japanese writers of the 20th century: Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima.

By high school, cognizant that he was neither athletic nor mechanically adept, he began to slip away during spare time to read Dickens and Thackeray, among others.

It was assumed that he would study law, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and several uncles, but he chose economics, then switched to English, a choice that displeased his family.

The navy was amenable because the forced relocation of citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry was underway along the West Coast, and most of the program's instructors were in danger of being caught up in the expanding net.

The "Boulder Boys," as the men who attended the language school were fondly called (a handful of women later joined the program as well),[4] were given the choice of becoming officers in the Navy or Marine Corps.

"[5] Seidensticker received basic training with the Marines in North Carolina, after which he was shifted to Camp Pendleton on the West Coast.

They were given duties to translate captured documents and to interrogate prisoners of war, a task Seidensticker found increasingly distasteful.

Near the end of his deployment, after the island had been declared "secure," he climbed Mount Suribachi, the site of Joe Rosenthal's iconic flag-raising photograph.

"[7] About a month after General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Tokyo to assume control of Japan, Seidensticker landed with the Marines at Sasebo, a naval base city in Nagasaki Prefecture.

On his return to the United States, Seidensticker enrolled at Columbia University and took a master's degree in 1947 in what was then known as "public law and government."

He joined the U.S. Foreign Service and, after further studies during a summer at Yale University and a year at Harvard, was placed in Tokyo assigned to the Diplomatic Section of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP).

In May 1950, roughly two years after he arrived in Japan, Seidensticker decided the Foreign Service was not his calling and he resigned on his own initiative.

[9] After his short Foreign Service tenure, Seidensticker studied Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo on the GI Bill and later under a Ford Foundation grant.

In 1962, when an invitation was extended by Stanford University to substitute for a professor on special assignment, he readily accepted and returned to the U.S. after having lived full-time in Japan from 1948 to 1962.

One contemporary scholar noted that in Seidensticker's translations, "You could feel the emotions and nuances that the original writer wanted to convey.

As the book includes a number of Seidensticker translations of Nagai's short stories and novellas, it is neither pure biography nor criticism.

A biography and bibliography are included in a commemorative work created by those whose lives he affected, New Leaves: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker (1993).