Anthony Chambers

Anthony H. Chambers, Professor of Japanese in the School of International Letters and Cultures, is an internationally known scholar and translator of Japanese literature. He attended Pomona College, International Christian University (Tokyo), Stanford University, the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Study (Tokyo), and the University of Michigan, where he received his PhD under the direction of the late Edward Seidensticker. He came to ASU in 1971 as the university's first professor of Japanese literature. In 1975 he moved to Wesleyan University, where he chaired the Department of Asian Languages, then returned to ASU in 1998. He has also taught at the Associated Kyoto Program and the Kyoto Center (now the Kyoto Consortium) for Japanese Studies. He is particularly noted for his studies of the novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), including 'The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction' (Harvard, 1994); for his translations of Tanizaki's fiction, including 'Naomi' and 'The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi' (Knopf, 1985 and 1982); and studies and translations of several classical masterpieces, including Ueda Akinari's 1776 collection of gothic stories, 'Tales of Moonlight and Rain' (Columbia, 2007), for which he received the 2007 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the outstanding translation of classical Japanese literature.