The other Jonathan Clements, who died on Sunday of complications from lung cancer, served for twenty years as a finance journalist for the Wall Street Journal. In semi-retirement he embarked upon a new career as an internet guru, dispensing monetary advice through his website Humble Dollar.

People often used to get us mixed up. We were both authors, both born in Britain, although he had lived in America for so long that his speech had drifted into a sort-of midlantic twang. But whereas I wrote about Japanese cartoons and Chinese history, he wrote about finances, investments and pensions.

Invariably, we would get each other’s mail. I would get occasional requests to address learned audiences about handy hacks for the American tax system, something about which I knew absolutely nothing. He would get asked to show up at a convention where people dressed as anime elves. Only last year, I found him angrily haranguing my US publicists for Rebel Island, after they had hash-tagged him in on the release of a history of Taiwan, to which he reacted like an old man exhorting them to get off his lawn. The publishers of my Empress Wu audio book also refused to admit that he hadn’t written it in their publicity tweets, leading him to spend much of his final months on Twitter shouting at them: “For the umpteenth time, you’ve got the wrong Jonathan Clements.”

In the strangest cross-Clements incident, I was left flustered and speechless when an elegant Japanese lady tried to pick me up in a Swiss cinema, assuming that I was him. “That never happens to the real me,” he fumed.

At one point in our correspondence, we embarked on a wacky quest to find the other other Jonathan Clements, a now-deceased author of 1960s erotica, whose Keep it Kinky and Dearest Mummy, I’ve Been Ravaged have repeatedly skewed our online search results, and continue to do so. Finance Jonathan would eventually publish the results on his own website as a page called Imposters, listing people like me who claimed to be him. Back when I had a website of my own, I had a reciprocal imposters page, decrying him for impersonating me.

In May 2024, he was eating his breakfast when he suddenly felt off-balance. A trip to the doctors for what was presumed to be a routine issue, turned out to be serious. He had lung cancer, which had already metastasised to his brain.

“What would you do if you were told you might have just 12 months to live?” he wrote. “For me, this isn’t a theoretical question.” He immediately began retooling his website, shutting down its donations function, and setting up as a slower, but more targeted series of updates about estate management and legacy planning.

“Cancer is obviously not what I want,” he told me. “But I have the privilege of knowing roughly how much time I have left, and that time offers the chance to get a few last things done that are important to me.”

His final months saw some of his best ever work – a detailed account of estate planning and “sadmin”, by a man making the very best of the knowledge that his days were numbered. He got married to his long-term partner, and wrote a thoughtful piece about how long he would have to stay alive for his bride to benefit from his pension. He left behind deeply useful columns about how to make life easier for the people we leave behind. This included obituarists, for whom he wrote a detailed farewell elegy on his website, leaving an account of his life as he would like it to be remembered.

““I want to take the time that I have left,” he said, “and squeeze as much happiness out of those days as possible.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. Other Jonathan Clementses are available.