Synopses & Reviews
"Richie should be designated a living national treasure."-
Library Journal"Wonderfully evocative and full of humor... honest, introspective, and often poignant."-New York Times
"No one has written with more concentration about the peculiar quality of exile enjoyed by the gaijin, the foreigner in Japan."-London Review of Books
"To read [The Donald Richie Readerand 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
Donald Richie has been observing and writing about Japan from the moment he arrived on New Year's Eve, 1946. Detailing his life, his lovers, and his ideas on matters high and low, The Japan Journalsis a record of both a nation and an evolving expatriate sensibility. As Japan modernizes and as the author ages, the tone grows elegiac, and The Japan Journals-now in paperback after the critically acclaimed hardcover edition-becomes a bittersweet chronicle of a complicated life well lived and captivatingly told.
Donald Richie, the eminent film historian, novelist, and essayist, still lives in Tokyo.
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"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
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"No writer about Japan matches Richie's breadth of knowledge, depth and variety of experience, and his love of the people he writes about."Ian Buruma
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"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
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"His unpublished Japan Journalsyield some pure gems."Publishers Weekly, May 2001
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"...Entries are alert and sometimes surprising glimpses of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers. Richie should be designated a living national treasure, but failing that, his books should be acquired by every large public and academic library with an interest in Japan."Library Journal
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"During the last fifty years, Donald Richie has been our greatest guide to the East. An outsider turned insider -- a beautiful and subtle writer with an eye for the wild life as well as an ear for the silences of Japan."Michael Ondaatje
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"During the last fifty years, Donald Richie has been our greatest guide to the East. An outsider turned insider -- a beautiful and subtle writer with an eye for the wild life as well as an ear for the silences of Japan."Michael Ondaatje
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.