The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan - Softcover

Richie, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880656612 ISBN 13: 9781880656617

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, 2001

Synopsis

Essential essays by the inimitable Donald Richie, who wrote on with unparalled acuity on Japanese art and culture.

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excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950s) and his unpublished private journal, plus fiction, Zen musings, and masterful essays on culture, travel, people, and style.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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

Because this collection is carefully panoramic and because 50 years is a hefty chunk of time both for a man and for a country healing itself, this volume is part anthology, part autobiography and part longitudinal social criticism a happy convergence for a book less than 300 pages long. It seems that since arriving in Japan in 1947 as a postwar occupier, Richie has not stopped noticing, dissecting and introducing to the West aspects of Japan, both tangible and otherwise. The result is clearly seen in cross-section here, divided into a number of thematic sections. There are "serious" and dedicated writings on Japanese film, as well as more desultory analyses of social oddities and of gardens and architecture. There are Zen stories retold; spontaneous musing on tattoos, Disneyland and the sex industry; portraits of people mundane and famous; and, peppered through it all, brutally honest reflections on the human frailties of being a not-so-accidental tourist. The humility of the outsider enables him to observe without feeling threatened or resorting to solipsistic (and cheap) comparisons to the West, while his self-assuredness as an incisive observer enables him to get closer to the Japanese, one feels, than even the Japanese themselves. For these reasons, Richie's writings are rendered with a quiet but persistent energy, and the collection, profiting from his versatility, never gets tiresome. His unpublished autobiographical Japan Journals yield some ture gems, while a selection of his underacknowledged fiction (which Richie defines rather loosely) is also represented. The collection should not serve as a substitute for reading Richie's strongest works (on Ozu's film, for example) in their entirety, but for those who wish to go along for the half-century-long ride with the author, it is a satisfying sampler of the expatriate writer's scope and depth.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Richie has long been one of America's major interpreters of the Japanese experience. While best known for his writings on Japanese film, he has also been an essayist, novelist, reporter, editor, and travel writer, and his travelog The Inland Sea was made into a PBS documentary. This intensely personal and introspective collection reveals that Richie does not simply skim the surface in the tradition of gushing and clich d travel-magazine commentary. Instead, he digs deeper and sometimes raises more questions than he can honestly answer. Richie's curiosity about Japan has led him to the ordinary as well as the exotic, from rock and sand gardens, to TV commercials, to love hotels ("soaplands") and facial gestures. And although this collection is just a sampling of his impressive range and depth, it will also entice those with serious interests in both the country and the writer. Recommended for larger public libraries and all academic libraries supporting Japanese studies. Harold M. Otness, formerly with Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880656612
• ISBN 13: 9781880656617
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Silva Arturo