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The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
Compiled and edited by Arturo Silva
Stone Bridge Press, 238 pages, $19.95 ($29.95 hardcover)

There are only a handful of names that come to mind when conjuring the Westerners 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. Others such as Donald Keene, John Dower, Edward Seidenstecker and Donald Richie have made their contributions through most of the latter half of the 20th century.

Many of these writers are celebrated academicians - MIT professor Dower won a Pultizer Prize for his history, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II," 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." The book 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. 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 a 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 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.

Along the way, there are 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 (an 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.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, June 2001.