We Have Recently Made Changes to Our Website, If you are unable to find something Specific, Please Search Below

Web onlypunjab.com

Donald Richie, Celebrated Expert in Japanese Film and Friend
Publish Date : 10/27/2004 3:36:00 PM   Source : Culture and Community News

Donald Richie, who was instrumental in introducing Akira Kurasawa and other prominent Japanese filmmakers to the West, releases his long-awaited personal journals full of famous names and yet full of people who make up the wonders of Richie's adopted home.

"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." — Tom Wolfe

"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." — Pico Iyer

"No writer about Japan matches Richie’s breadth of knowledge, depth and variety of experience, and his love of the people he writes about." — Ian Buruma

October 2004 (Berkeley, CA) — Stone Bridge Press, publishers of books about Japan for 15 years, is honored to publish the private journals of Donald Richie, the eminent film historian, novelist, and essayist best known for his instrumental role in introducing Japanese film to the West and as the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Inland Sea. In October he received an honorary doctorate of fine arts at Bard College.

Donald Richie has been observing and writing about Japan from the moment he arrived in Tokyo on New Year's Day 1947, as a young typist for the U.S. Civil Service who would soon join the staff of The Pacific Stars and Stripes. Detailing his life, his attachments, and his ideas on matters high and low, The Japan Journals is a record of both a nation and an evolving expatriate sensibility.

"I wanted to find some sort of pattern in my life," said Mr. Richie when asked why he kept a journal. "I was not looking at larger events but at the particulars of everyday life. I handle the big subjects through very small forms. That’s very Japanese, like ikebana or bonsai."

A friend of the famous — Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata, Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, novelist Yukio Mishima, composer Toru Takemitsu, Kabuki star Tamasaburo Bando, to name a few — Richie also enjoyed Tokyo's varied demimonde, and he counted taxi drivers, students, cops, hustlers, transvestites, and prostitutes among his acquaintances, not to mention his fellow expatriates. Several men and women he grew especially close to, falling in love and then into friendship over the decades.

As Japan modernizes and as the author ages, Richie’s tone grows elegiac, and The Japan Journals becomes an overwhelmingly poignant experience of a complicated life well lived and captivatingly told.

"What Japan was giving the world in the '60s and '70s was a kind of alternative to Western modernist civilization. It gave us things that are now stereotypes, things like temple gardens, Zen, quietude. Japan was regarded as an exporter of these 'spiritual intangibles.' As the economy grew, Japan shifted to an exporter of the material. Now, it is becoming known as a major exporter of trendy mass entertainment like anime and manga," Mr. Richie said about Japan's influence in the West. "Just in my lifetime, these three tsunami have changed Japan and the way it appears to the world."

About the Author

Donald Richie, ex-curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is best known as the leading Western authority on Japanese film, but he has also written on many others aspects of the country in books and essays. He still lives in Tokyo.

About the Editor
Leza Lowitz has written, co-edited, or co-translated eleven books on Japan and currently lives in Tokyo. Her most recent publication is Green Tea to Go, a collection of short stories.

The Japan Journals: 1947 - 2004 is written by Donald Richie and edited by Leza Lowitz. It is available in October 2004, casebound, with 75 black and & white photographs. It is 512 pages, and retails for $29.95. ISBN 1880656-91-4

The Japan Journals: 1947 - 2004 is Donald Richie’s fifth book with Stone Bridge Press. The others are: Tokyo Story: The Ozu/Noda Screenplay, The Inland Sea, The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan, and A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan. He has also written Ozu, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, The Japanese Tattoo, and The History of Japanese Film.

www.stonebridge.com

To schedule an interview with Donald Richie,
please call Jaime Starling, 510-558-7826 or email e-mail protected from spam bots