Donald Richie - The Japan Times

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Donald Richie

Donald Richie began writing regularly for The Japan Times in 1954, initially writing film and stage reviews. In the early '70s he began writing book reviews and continued contributing until 2009. He wrote more than 40 books on Japanese aesthetics, and he is widely considered the pre-eminent expert on Japanese cinema.

For Donald Richie's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 15, 2001

At long last, Tokuda Shusei

ROUGH LIVING, by Tokuda Shusei, translated by Richard Torrance. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, April 2001, 184 pp., $45 (hardcover), $21.95 (paper). This is, I think, the first translation into English of a novel by a writer that Japanese think is one of their finest. Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943) was thought by Kawabata Yasunari to be the most Japanese of all modern novelists; Nakamura Murao stated that, after Saikaku, only Shusei portrayed the true characteristics of the Japanese people.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 7, 2001

Paper and gold yield a life

PAPER SON: One Man's Story, by Tung Pok Chin, with Winifred C. Chin, with an introduction by K. Scott Wong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, pp. 184, 15 b/w photos, $15.96. In this account of his tribulations and triumphs in Gold Mountain (the Chinese immigrant's euphemism for the United States), Tung Pok Chin writes, "It is commonly said among us Chinese here in the United States that before World War II about 99 percent of all Chinese immigrants were paper sons."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 1, 2001

Ohkura brings kabuki to life

KABUKI TODAY: The Art and Tradition. Photographs by Shunji Ohkura, text by Iwao Kamimura, translated by Kirsten McIvor. Introduction by Donald Keene. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001, 194 pp., profusely illustrated. 5,800 yen. This lavish volume, as extravagant as the kabuki itself, is devoted to the photos of Shunji Ohkura, an artist who has applied himself to chronicling the various worlds of contemporary Japan.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 27, 2001

Farewell to the rabbit hutch

THE JAPANESE DREAM HOUSE: How Technology and Tradition are Shaping New Home Design, by Azby Brown and Joseph Cali. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 2001, pp. 132, profusely illustrated with Japanese-language translation insert, 6,000 yen. This big, beautiful, well-designed book tells and shows how new building techniques are changing the look and feel of Japanese housing. Gone are the days of the rabbit-hutch. For those who can afford it, the new prefab home is spacious, comfortable, even elegant -- as well as somehow Japanese.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 20, 2001

Drop in on Kanemura's Tokyo

SPIDER'S STRATEGY: Photographs by Osamu Kanemura, with a text by Arata Isozaki. Tokyo: Osiris Co. Ltd., 102 pp., 80 b/w plates, 3,780 yen. In his text accompanying this portfolio of photographs of Tokyo, architect Arata Isozaki writes of the difficulty of deciphering this city. Paris was finally properly read, he says, by Walter Benjamin and New York by Rem Koolhaas. This was accomplished when the authors abandoned academic means and insisted upon appearances.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 15, 2001

Let Tokyo Q be your guide

TOKYO 2001-2002: Annual Guide to the City, by the staff of Tokyo Q with Rick Kennedy. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 160 pp., 130 b/w images, $9.95. Tokyo, the largest city in the world, cornucopia turned upside-down, has always required a guide book. Not only are there competing attractions, but many of the best are hidden away. This is as true now as it was back when the city was called Edo and guide books were first appearing.

LIFE / Travel

Mar 7, 2001

Krabi: the next 'last paradise'

KRABI, Thailand -- The idea of an unspoiled, untroubled, untouched land has become necessary in our polluted times -- a space where nature as it was is still to be discovered and where we may once more become natural as well. It is a pleasing prospect, this visitable paradise.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 6, 2001

Carefully controlled exoticism

THE ORIENT STRIKES BACK: A Global View of Cultural Display, by Joy Hendry. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000, 256 pp., 40 illustrations (16 color). 42.99 British pounds (cloth), 14.99 British pounds (paper). A century ago, the West used to entertain and educate itself with random views of the East. World's Fairs and grand expositions displayed Formosan villages and Ainu tribal rites. Now the East, or at least Japan, is diverting itself with random views of the West.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 27, 2001

Soar with Madame Butterfly

MADAME BUTTERFLY: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San, by Jan van Rij. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 192 pp., 24 b/w photos, drawings, map, $24.95 (casebound). Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" has become more than just a pretty piece of music. It has turned into something of a popular icon for East-West relations. Poor faithful Cho-Cho-san, left behind by faithless Lt. Pinkerton, doing away with herself while Little Trouble, fruit of their union, all oblivious, waves the American flag.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 12, 2001

Let the spring light the fires

THE PILLOW BOOK OF SPRING AND LAUGHTER: Eroticism in Meiji, Taisho and Showa Japan, by John Stevens. Tokyo: The East Publications, Inc. 156 pp., profusely illustrated, color plates/b/w photos. 4,200 yen. We associate spring pictures ("shunga") with the Edo period, lovers usually fully dressed with just an aperture or two for maneuvers, equipped as we would all like to be but seldom are, earnestly engaged with a dedication that is a far remove from the normal spheres in which we operate.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 6, 2001

Modernism revealed

FICTIONS OF DESIRE: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafu, by Stephen Snyder. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, 196 pp., $42 (cloth), $17.95 (paper). Recently, it has been argued that the 18th-century realist tradition (Balzac, Dickens and on to now) is not the only such tradition; there is also an earlier, nonrealist one, exemplified by Sterne, Diderot and Fielding and taking writing rather than realism as its subject. As Stephen Spender put it, "the mode of perceiving itself becomes an object of perception."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 30, 2001

The brocaded body beautiful

PEAU DE BROCART: Le Corps Tatoue au Japon, by Philippe Pons. Paris: Seuil, 2000, 142 pp., plates (color, b/w) 60, FFr 230 (cloth). Rene Magritte has spoken of someone clad "only in the robe of her skin," and this concept of surface as substance is observed by the tattooing tradition of Japan, the craft that created the brocaded skin of which this beautiful book speaks.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 23, 2001

Gender, identity, plain old eros

MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN MODERN JAPAN: Cultural Myths and Social Realities, by Mark J. McLelland. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000, 268 pp., b/w plates 17, 15.99 British pounds (paper). Mark McLelland begins this pioneering study by quoting Alfred Kinsey to the effect that nature rarely deals with discrete categories, that it is the human mind that invents these and then tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 16, 2001

A lesson for our swollen egos

SOUTHERN SILK ROAD: In the Footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein and Sven Haedin, by Christoph Baumer. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2000, 152 pp., profusely illustrated with color plates, drawings, maps, $35 soft cover. This is the revised and expanded English edition of Baumer's "Geisterstaedte der Suedlichen Seidenstrasse Entdeckungen in der Wueste Takla-Makan," originally published in 1996. Since then, the author returned to his site for a second expedition and this is the result.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 8, 2001

Tomorrow today in Tokyo

TOKYO X. Photographs by Shunji Ohkura. Afterword translated by Ralph McCarthy, captions translated by Shii Ichiba, envoi by Giles Murray. Tokyo: Kodansha Intl., 2000, 216 pp., 251 plates with endpapers, 3,800 yen. In the afterword to this remarkable collection of pictures, the photographer says that "in the unprecedented chaos in the economy" he found a "phantasmal Tokyo that had been assimilated whole by computers and transformed into a virtual city."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 1, 2001

Eye-openers for the new year

GREETINGS FROM EROS!: Hokusai and the Erotic Calendar-Print. Richard Lane, bilingual (Japanese/English) text. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000. Unpaginated, profusely illustrated -- color plates, b/w photos, 3,800 yen. Sending calendar prints as New Year salutations was one of the amenities of traditional Japan. Much like the contemporary New Year's cards with which your mailbox is presently crammed, these "nengajo" were seasonal reminders of good will. And just as yours will end up in tomorrow's trash, these somewhat more elaborate greetings were also discarded. This is what makes them now so rare.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 26, 2000

Music for the eyes and ears

TRADITIONAL JAPANESE MUSIC AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, by William P. Malm. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000, 354 pp., with 89 b/w photos and CD of musical examples, 5,000 yen. This is the new, revised and updated edition of the book that has been the standard text on traditional Japanese music and musical instruments since it was first published in 1959. Its width and grasp have never been superseded. Though later single studies have perhaps dug deeper, there has never been another general account of Japanese music this useful. After years out of print, it returns with an updated bibliography and a CD that allows the reader to hear many of the musical examples in the text.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 19, 2000

Wowed by the Lao and Siam

A DIPLOMAT IN SIAM, by Ernest Satow. Introduced and edited by Nigel Brailey. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2000, 206 pp., with maps and line drawings, $23. In the spring of 1886, Ernest Satow wrote to his friend W.G. Aston in Japan that his recent journey to the Lao states had been "on the whole a pleasant one, and proved to be very necessary from an official point of view. But it took a terribly long time."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 13, 2000

The willow world stripped bare

GEISHA: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, by Lesley Downer. London: Headline Books, 2000, 370 pp., 20 British pounds. A common question asked about geisha is: Do they or don't they? Their attraction seems balanced between artistic prowess and sex appeal, but just how often is the latter properly appreciated, when and by whom? This and many other questions regarding the geisha are satisfied in this remarkable history of the world of flowers and willows.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 5, 2000

Handful of history

COLUMBIA CHRONOLOGIES OF ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, edited by John S. Bowman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 752 pp., $85. Oh, "if men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" Thus Samuel Taylor Coleridge on history.

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