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The Japan Journals 1947 - 2004 DONALD RICHIE edited by Leza Lowitz 510 pp, 6 x 9", paperback, 75 b&w photos, ISBN 1-880656-97-3, $18.95 also in hardcover |
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"One of his era’s most influential and ubiquitous writers on Japan.” “This essayist, film critic, fiction writer, screenwriter, portraitist . . . has built an honest, revealing body of work that spans the entire postwar era.” "One of America’s major interpreters of the Japanese experience.” "Richie creates an utterly appealing persona: intelligent, curious, and unflinchingly honest when it comes to accounting for his darker side.”
Now, having reached his celebratory eightieth year, this long-time observer of others has decided to open his private journals to public view. Spanning his entire time in Japan, Richie’s writings show a man who is still intellectually engaged and still passionately romantic. In the 1940s Richie eagerly violated U.S. Occupation rules against “fraternization” to sneak into movie theaters and concerts. His early work as a reporter for Stars and Stripes in Tokyo led to a career as a writer and critic. Interested in film, books, art, and music, he got to meet (and write in his Journals about) scores of Japanese luminaries, among them authors Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki, composer Toru Takemitsu, Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, and directors Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Nagisa Oshima. As Richie’s reputation grew (he was instrumental in introducing Japanese film to the West), he became the “go-to guy” for American and European artists passing through town. In the Journals are snippets of conversations from many of these encounters, portraying a whining Truman Capote, a self-absorbed Stephen Spender, a delightful Marguerite Yourcenar. Here, too, are examples of Richie’s famously deft travel sketches of landscapes, buildings, and the Japanese urban scene and sense of style. Although large events loom over this chron-ology and there are many meetings with the famous and influential, the Journals are primarily about the details of ordinary life and people. Richie enjoyed Tokyo’s varied demimonde, and he counted taxi drivers, students, cops, hustlers, transvestites, and prostitutes among his acquaintance, 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. Reading The Japan Journals, absorbing its details, is a bit like viewing a fast-moving world through another person’s eyes. Japan is changing rapidly and so, more slowly, is the observer, bit by bit coming to terms with his age and era, with what drew him to and keeps him in this foreign land. The later sections of The Japan Journals become more fragmented, dreamlike, and freshly drawn. There is some despair, even bitterness . . . so many funerals of old friends, so many neighborhoods gone . . . at how much Japan has lost since those early postwar years. Richie ambles about his favorite Ueno Park, thinking and observing. Gradually, his tone grows elegiac, turning The Japan Journals into an overwhelmingly poignant experience of a complicated life well lived and captivatingly told, by the only man who could tell it. 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 other aspects of the country in books such as The Inland Sea and the collection released in 2001 as The Donald Richie Reader. During his more than fifty years residence in Japan, Richie kept a detailed record of his life there — The Japan Journals. 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.
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