The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan

The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan

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excerpts from his critical work on film (Richie helped introduce Japanese film to the West in the late 1950s) and his unpublished private journal, plus fiction, Zen musings, and masterful essays on culture, travel, people, and style.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