Donald Richie is known to readers of The Japan Times for his regular reviews of books dealing with Asia, and more particularly Japanese culture. We are in indebted to him for his wide-ranging, penetrating, yet usually sympathetic, reviews of a wide range of works. He is known especially for his writings on the Japanese cinema, of which he was one of the earliest and most distinguished scholars/critics. Anyone with a serious interest in Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa, for example, will have profited from his writings on those directors.
As valuable to me as his professional writings are his nonacademic, nonfiction journals, essays, character-sketches and travel writings, which make up such a substantial portion of his oeuvre. Everyone will have his or her favorites, but for me "The Inland Sea" travelogue (though it is much more than that) and the collection of sketches of Japanese persons, famous and unknown, that now appears under the title "Japanese Portraits" occupy pride of place.
Those of us who have studied the film works and rejoiced in the nonfiction may have had little exposure to another aspect of this multifaceted writer: his stories and novels. I have, over the years, encountered the very early "Where Are the Victors?," depicting the beginning days of the Occupation; "Tokyo Nights," an account of the world of bars and lounges, with their formidable Mama-sans, hostesses, waiters, and customers, Japanese and foreign; and "Kumagai," a retelling of a story that features in noh, kabuki, and setsuwa (traditional folk) tales from an unusual point of view -- economic, one might say, rather than erotic-romantic.