 |
The best of an extraordinary
|
||||||||
"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 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." "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." "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." "Richie's writings are rendered with a quiet but persistent energy, and the collection, profiting from his versatility, never gets tiresome. His unpublished Japan Journals yield some pure gems, while a selection of his under-acknowledged fiction is also represented ... For those who wish to go along the half-century-long ride with the author, it is a satisfying sampler of the expatriate writer's scope and depth."
Over the past half century, no one has written more, or more artfully, about Japan than D
WHEN I first arrived to Japan in 1975, beginning a stay that was to last ten years, Donald Richie was, in our smallish world of English- language writers, editors, and communicators, something akin to a god. He already had numerous books to his credit. He wrote regular reviews in newspapers. Plus, he was the guy who had brought Kurosawa and Ozu out of the postwar cold and turned them into internationally recognized artists. But there was something a bit scary about the man too. After all, he had been in Japan like, forever, since 1946 for crying out loud. The Great Expatriate. How in touch could he be? Perhaps he was beginning to go native? So now I'm in the wonderful position of helping celebrate this great AMERICAN writer. Richie may have left Ohio, but he retained his keen Midwestern eye and spent his time in Japan creating marvelous word pictures of his adopted home and descriptions of its twisting mentalities. His language was pure, beautiful English, designed with an economy of expression and a maximum of content. Attuned to subtle details, but always with an eye on the big thump-thump of understanding, Richie sculpted his essays with perfect timing and poise, ending adroitly, with a punch if appropriate, with a sigh if that caught the mood right. And he did this for 50 years! For more than 50 years! Such a long time away from home. It was language I suppose, the English language as written, that connected Richie with Richie, and thus made any physical distance from America irrelevant. Editor and compiler Arturo Silva cites Richie's belief that "the ostensible is the real." In other words, to connect is to see, to describe is to interpret. So life is always there, where the pen sits on the edge of your paper. We are so proud and delighted to be offering THE DONALD RICHIE READER. . . . All of us who have spent time in Japan or who are interested in Japanese culture owe Donald Richie an enormous debt of gratitude. How wonderful that he got there before us to pave the way, to describe and interpret in the wonderful English language, without any loss of sonority or sense after so many years away. In our still small word of scriveners about Japan, he's still a god. The Great Expatriate who never really left home
In this celebratory publication, we now have the chance to observe Richie himself -- the man, the novelist, essayist, journalist, and film scholar -- and through him the Japan that has evolved from postwar turmoil to postmodernist materialism. 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:
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, Donald Richie considers himself primarily an observer--"the ostensible is the real." Through his eyes we have come to see Japan and, in a larger sense, the whole human spectacle. And now, through The Donald Richie Reader, we get a glimpse of this extraordinary expatriate writer and his magnificent writing life.
DONALD RICHIE was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924 and has lived in Japan since 1947, except for time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968-73. The author of some thirty books and dozens of essays, Richie is especially well known for his instrumental role in introducing Japanese film to the West and for his travel memoir The Inland Sea, which has been adapted into a popular PBS documentary. Donald Richie still lives and writes in Tokyo. ARTURO SILVA is an American writer who lived in Japan for eighteen years. He currently resides in Vienna, where he is finishing an experimental novel, Tokio Whip. |
|||||||||
| Other titles of interest
A Lateral View by Donald Richie Wabi-Sabi by Leonard Koren |
