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9
July , 2001
JAPAN
THROUGH THE PAGES OF A BOOK
My bookcases are jammed with books about Japan.
I have tourbooks, history books, biographies, fiction, literary compilations
and art books all vying for my attention. I own books about all periods
of Japan from ancient times to the country's post-war economic boom and
bust. There are out-of-print books I've picked up at used and antique
bookstores, new titles from local shops and books that caught my attention
on Web sites such as Amazon.com.
| A search on Amazon for the word "Japan" found 3730 books available for purchase. |
There are simply too many books about Japan for one person to absorb - a search on Amazon for the word "Japan" found 3730 books available for purchase. But I try my best to keep up. Some of my favorite recent books include "A Boy Called H," an autobiography of a childhood spent in Japan during World War II by Kappa Senoh, and John Dower's "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II," which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Many of the more recent books about Japan are ones written by Westerners attempting to analyze the mind of the Japanese through their culture or the way they conduct business. Some are critical about Japan, and some reveal history in revised ways with the inclusion of new documents and data (like the current wave of titles that show a more negative view of Emperor Hirohito's involvement in WWII). Of all the books, there are only a handful by Westerners who have an empathy for the country and who have written extensively and intelligently about Japan.
Lafcadio Hearn, an Irishman who settled in Japan in 1890 and eventually married a Japanese woman and changed his citizenship and name to Yakumo Koizumi, was the earliest. He wrote passionately about his observations and experiences. Others such as Dower, Donald Keene (the most respected Japanese literary scholar in the West), Edward Seidenstecker (whose histories of the city of Tokyo, "Low City, High City" and "Tokyo Rising" are great reading) and Donald Richie have made their contributions through most of the latter half of the 20th century.
Many of these writers are celebrated academicians - Dower is an MIT professor, and Columbia University hosts the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture.
Donald Richie's reputation is both more hallowed and more common - he is credited as the man who introduced Japanese cinema and such masters of the art as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu to the West as a critic and as the curator of film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but he is also to this day a weekly book reviewer for the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper in Tokyo.
Both Richie's life and rich, remarkable writings are celebrated in a new volume of his essays and fiction, "The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan," which is edited by and introduced by Arturo Silva, a fan.
"The Donald Richie Reader" is a fascinating and often poetic look at Japan through an intelligent outsider's perspective, and he's been described as the modern Lafcadio Hearn because he shares the same empathic passion for the culture and a similar romantic's tone. Like Hearn, Richie has lived in Japan for most of his life since he first arrived on New Year's Day 1947, as a civilian "gaijin" ("foreigner") amidst the post-war military occupation forces.
The book is chockfull of insights offered from Richie's personal point of view. He writes about a traditional street festival of men in a small town, but inevitably reports on it as the outsider who snuck into the proceedings to experience the crush of bodies only to return to being an outsider when daybreak comes. "From the Japanese point of view, the ideal arrangement is for the visitor to come, do his business and go home," he wrote in a 1993 essay, "On Intimacy and Distance: On Being a Foreigner in Japan."
For Richie, home has been and still is Tokyo. He captured eloquently the sight of a city being reborn back then in a 1947 piece, "Japan Journals." The essay described the intersection called the Ginza that has become a world-renown shopping district, which back then had an unobstructed view of the famous Mount Fuji. The view was clear because of the war. "Between me and Fuji was a burned wasteland, a vast and blackened plain where a city had once stood."
Since those early years, Richie has written hundreds of essays and works of fiction, including definitive books about both Kurosawa and Ozu, and a classic personal travel journal, "The Inland Sea," that was made into a PBS series. Included in this book's sampling are excerpts from "The Inland Sea" as well as the fabulous prologue of the Ozu biography, as well as a 1960 piece on how Richie came to be such an expert on Japanese film. There is also a sweet memoir of Richie's childhood in Ohio, a drab upbringing that primed him to appreciate and embrace the culture shock of Japan.
The book compiles thoughtful writings on Japanese aesthetics, individuals both famous (the actor Toshiro Mifune) and not (a hilarious story about an obnoxious apartment building neighbor), traditional festivals, and sexuality.
The writing is not academic but it's old-fashioned in a romantic way (that echo of Lafcadio Hearn), and rewards slow reading and mulling over afterwards. The book is also designed in a way that rewards a thoughtful absorption, not a hungry devouring. Silva has included a number of fragmentary pieces - tidbits from both published and unpublished works - which are presented as sidebars throughout the chapters, so you can digest the main story or take a brief break and cleanse the mental palate.
Either way, anyone interested in modern Japan will be well-nourished by "The Donald Richie Reader," even the second or third time through.
"The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan" is published by Stone Bridge Press, and is available for $19.95, $29.95 hardcover through your local bookstore or Amazon.com. And don't forget - you can read Richie's vibrant and insightful books reviews every week in the Japan Times.