Donald Keene, a renowned scholar of Japanese literature whose writing and translations inspired generations of students with an interest in Japan, has died aged 96.

The New York-born Keene, recipient of the country’s highest cultural award, died of heart failure at a hospital in Tokyo early on Sunday, reports said.

Keene is best known for his translations of dozens of works of classical and modern Japanese literature, and for winning global recognition for the 11th century Tale of Genji, generally considered to be the world’s first novel.

The work by Murasaki Shikibu, Keene wrote in a 2008 memoir, had served as his own introduction to Japanese literature, when, as an 18-year-old student, he bought a two-volume translation for 49 cents in a Times Square bookshop.

Keene was instrumental in promoting Japanese studies, a field of academia that was barely recognised when he became an undergraduate student of French and Greek literature at Columbia College in the late 1930s.

His prolific output spanned about 25 books in English, including translations of both classical and modern writers – including his friends the novelists Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata – and 30 books in Japanese.

His first anthology of Japanese literature was published in 1955, and his biography of the Meiji Emperor appeared in Japanese in 2001 and in English the following year.

Keene, a lifelong pacifist, worked as an interpreter for the US navy during the second world war, interrogating Japanese prisoners of war and translating diaries and documents.

He earned his PhD from Columbia in 1949, and taught at Cambridge University before returning to Columbia in 1955, where he taught for more than five decades.

“Professor Keene played the leading role in the establishment of Japanese literary studies in the United States and beyond,” the university’s Donald Keene center of Japanese culture said on its website.

“Through his scholarship, translations, and edited anthologies, and through the work of students he trained and inspired, he did more than any other individual to further the study and appreciation of Japanese literature and culture around the world in the postwar era.”

In 2008, Keene became the first foreigner to receive the Order of Culture from the Japanese government, in recognition of his contribution to literature.

He gave his final lecture as an emeritus professor at Columbia in 2011, the year he settled in Japan in a show of solidarity with a country reeling from the tsunami and nuclear disasters of March that year. “I gradually thought of Japan as a place where I would like to live, and also where I would like to die,” he said in a 2015 interview.

Keene became a Japanese citizen the year after he moved to Tokyo, and adopted a Japanese man, Seiki Keene, as his son and heir in 2013.