Village Japan: Everyday Life in a Rural Japanese Community

In this elegiac account that is part travelogue, part memoir, British poet and writer Malcolm Ritchie recounts his and his wife's unforgettable three-year-sojourn in Sora, a remote farming and fishing village on the Japan Sea coast. Ritchie weaves together anecdotes, conversations, lyrical verses, and character studies to vividly and hauntingly evoke the rhythms of life in a traditional rural Japanese community. Underlying this portrait is the author's growing awareness that the aged inhabitants of Sora and the surrounding villages are the custodians of a fragile, barely surviving, way of life, one that is still informed by the cadences of the natural world, under the tutelage of its ancient gods. The book is a paean to a once noble culture all but effaced by Western industrial/technological materialism - the "cultural carcinogens" of the West - which Asian countries such as Japan have all too willingly embraced. Village Japan pays lyrical homage to a side of Japan rarely experienced or glimpsed by foreigners today.

In the nooks and crannies of fast-paced contemporary Japan, an older way of life barely survives in remote rural communities. In the mid-1990s, British author Ritchie and his Japanese wife sojourned for more than two years in Sora, a fishing and farming village on the Japan Sea coast peopled mostly by the elderly. Through his own rambles around the countryside and conversations with his neighbors, whose foibles and idiosyncrasies he sketches sympathetically, Ritchie steeped himself in local customs, festivals, lore, and religious practices centered on Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Although his book is filled with keen observation and fascinating detail, it is not an anthropologist's village studyAit is a Buddhist meditation, an elegy. In tones of gentle reproof, Ritchie laments the imminent loss of a holistic way of life that connected community and cosmos. This beautiful book belongs in public and academic libraries.ASteven I. Levine, Univ. of Montana, Missoula
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