In "The Japan Journals," American writer Donald Richie has acted to the letter on Rimbaud's conviction that the first study for the man who wants to be a poet "is to know himself, completely. He must search for his soul, scrutinize it."
We are lucky to have had Richie in Japan for so long. He proves the point that age and the inevitability of physical decline need not be chained to intellectual erosion. The writing remains, as in the work of Richie's age-peers like Norman Mailer and John Le Carre, as virile, as incisive as ever.
Attentive, a student of the ways of this Japanese world, Richie's journals represent "a fluid succession of presents," as James Joyce would have it. And like those of the great Irishman, these entries, intentionally or by the sheer persistence of time -- the volume of days and years -- achieve Joyce's avowed aim in "Dubliners" of creating "some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own."