Synopses & Reviews
No one has written more, or more artfully, about Japan and Japanese culture than Donald Richie. Richie moved to Tokyo just after World War II. And he is still there, still writing. This book is the first compilation of the best of Richie's writings on Japan, with excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950s) and his unpublished private journal, plus fiction, Zen musings, and masterful essays on culture, travel, people, and style. With a critical introduction and full bibliography.
Donald Richie's many books include The Films of Akira Kurosawa, The Japanese Tattoo, and the PBS favorite The Inland Sea. Vienna resident Arturo Silva lived in Japan for 18 years.
To read The Donald Richie Reader and The Japan Journals] is like diving for pearls. Dip into any part of them and you will surely find treasures about the cinema, literature, traveling, writing. The passages are evocative, erotic, playful, and often profound. __ Japanese Language and Literature
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Review
"Richie has long been one of the most insightful Western commentators on Japanese culture. His particular field is film criticism, but he has also written fiction and travel accounts, as well as essays on general culture... Whatever the subject, the author's graceful style and understanding of his material shine through." -The Library Journal
Review
"This wonderful book can be read as a work in progress of almost fifty years. No writer about Japan matches Richie's breadth of knowledge, depth and variety of experience, and his love of the people he writes about. The book of a lifetime, which will last." -Ian Buruma
Review
"Richie is the only foreigner I know who can take [Japan] on its own terms, as few newcomers do, yet bring to it a freshness that almost every long-time resident has lost." -Pico Iyer, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Review
"Donald Richie is the Lafcadio Hearn of our time, a subtle, stylish, and deceptively lucid medium between two cultures that confuse one another: the Japanese and the American." -Tom Wolfe
Synopsis
No one has written more, or more artfully, about Japan and Japanese culture than Donald Richie. Richie moved to Tokyo just after World War II. And he is still there, still writing. This book is the first compilation of the best of Richie's writings on Japan, with excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950s) and his unpublished private journal, plus fiction, Zen musings, and masterful essays on culture, travel, people, and style. With a critical introduction and full bibliography.
Donald Richie's many books include The Films of Akira Kurosawa, The Japanese Tattoo, and the PBS favorite The Inland Sea. Vienna resident Arturo Silva lived in Japan for 18 years.
andldquo;To read [The Donald Richie Reader and The Japan Journals] is like diving for pearls. Dip into any part of them and you will surely find treasures about the cinema, literature, traveling, writing. The passages are evocative, erotic, playful, and often profound.andrdquo; andndash; Japanese Language and Literature
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Synopsis
No one has written more, or more artfully, about Japan and Japanese culture than Donald Richie. Richie moved to Tokyo just after World War II. And he is still there, still writing. This book is the first compilation of the best of Richie's writings on Japan, with excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950's) and his unpublished private journal, plus fiction, Zen musings, and masterful essays on culture, travel, people, and style.
Synopsis
U.S. author tour in September-October 2001 with events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Events are planned at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Harvard University, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, among others. The book will be launched at BEA 2001.
Synopsis
The best of an extraordinary expatriate writer: Richie on Japanese film, culture, eroticism, everyday life, and more.
Synopsis
50 years of writing about Japan, from postwar to the age of Pokand#233;mon.
About the Author
Donald Richie has been writing about Japan for over 50 years from his base in Tokyo and is the author of over 40 books and hundreds of essays and reviews. He is widely admired for his incisive film studies on Ozu and Kurosawa, and for his stylish and incisive observations on Japanese culture.
Table of Contents
In addition to editor Arturo Silva's extended appreciation of Richie-"The Great Mirror"-the book presents a hundred excerpts and miscellanea that wind thematically through Richie's long writing career: In "Prologue," Richie writes of his childhood longings in Ohio and about being a foreigner in Japan. In "Japan: Early" are some of the first accounts from Richie's unpublished Japan Journals and one of his finest essays on style and aesthetics, "Japanese Shapes." "Japan: Film" contains a selection from Richie's brilliant book on director Yasujiro Ozu, a memoir of Richie's career as a film critic, and some notes for a speech on Buddhism in Japanese film (Richie studied Zen with Daisetsu Suzuki in Kamakura). In "Japan: People" are portraits of actors Toshiro Mifune and Chishu Ryu, of an early expatriate (Pierre Loti), and of a few ordinary Japanese met along the way. The section "Japan: Fiction" highlights Richie's prowess as a storyteller, wit, and acute observer of himself and others. Included are several "Zen inklings," plus excerpts from the collection A View from the Chuo Line, the delightful Tokyo Nights, and the excursionary novel-Richie's masterpiece-The Inland Sea. In "Japan: Later" are several pieces on nontraditional Japan: Tokyo, modern Hiroshima, sex, and television. Included here is Richie's own list of "the best books on Japan." Finally, in "Epilogue," Richie discourses on a key Asian aesthetic-emptiness-and how it has been filled in and destroyed by Japan's rampant modern materialism. There are reflections on time and change, including a piece from the Japan Journals dated New Year's 1999, thus circling back to that December arrival in Okinawa more thanfifty years earlier. Scattered throughout the pages of the Reader are the miscellanea-The Body, The Gods, The Japanese, The Foreigners-samplings from The Japanese Garden, The Erotic Gods, Tokyo, A Taste of Japan, and other important Richie works. At the end of the book is a bibliographical note in which Arturo Silva comments on Richie's entire creative output, including his forays into music criticism and experimental filmmaking.