Full disclosure: I've known Donald Richie for more than 20 years and, like many people who have known him for a long time, I count him among my good friends. Once, he helped me write a full-length book on the history of Japanese poetry out of a slim collection I had made of English translations of Basho's single haiku (yes, the one about an old pond and a frog). Another time, I committed an affront that would have prompted a different person to drop me. He simply waved it off with a smile. Richie is generous, considerate and tolerant.
The first book I read of Richie's many volumes was "The Inland Sea" (1971), which I came across in the small library in the agency where I work. It was among the books our Tokyo office had bought for its New York branch, assuming, obviously, that it was a tourist guide or else one of those books written to "introduce Japan to the West."
The Tokyo office wasn't completely off the mark; "The Inland Sea" does introduce Japan to the West. But it does so in such a way that whoever was in charge in Tokyo would have hastily decided not to send the book to New York had he read it.