an outsider, began to consider returning to the United States. 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. Seidensticker taught at Stanford as professor of Japanese from 1962 to 1966. He then joined the faculty at the University of Michigan and remained there for 11 years before being drawn away in 1978 to join the faculty of Columbia University as professor of Japanese. He retired from Columbia in 1985 and was thereafter professor emeritus. During retirement he divided his time between Hawaii and Japan. In 2007, while taking a walk near Shinobazu Pond in the Ueno district of Tokyo, he fell and later died because of head injuries. He was 86. Translator Seidensticker is widely regarded as one of the greatest translators of classic and modern Japanese literature into English. His translations have been described as "brilliant" and "elegant." One contemporary scholar noted that in Seidensticker's translations, "You could feel the emotions and nuances that the original writer wanted to convey." He has even been described as "the best" translator of Japanese literature. Seidensticker won the National Book Award in category Translation for his edition of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain (a split award). He also translated The Decay of the Angel, the last volume of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and several of Mishima's stories. Seidensticker translated Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters and Some Prefer Nettles and authored important criticism on Tanizaki's place in 20th-century Japanese literature. The New York Times obituary allowed the translator to speak for himself: The last work he supervised translating into English was You Were Born for a Reason on Japanese Buddhism. Japanologist Seidensticker wrote widely on Japan, its people, as well as the city of Tokyo. His first major non-translation work, "Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879–1959" (Stanford University Press, 1965), was a biography of Kafū Nagai, the Japanese writer who is noted for his sensitive depictions of the denizens of Tokyo's pleasure quarters. It was the first study to examine the life and works of Nagai to appear in any Western language. As the book includes a number of Seidensticker translations of Nagai's short stories and novellas, it is neither pure biography nor criticism. Seidensticker, to his