This was meant to be a tribute to a living writer, one whose main concern beside health issues, was his own legacy.
It was with a heavy heart that I heard from Donald Richie's longtime friend and editor Leza Lowitz that he had passed away on the morning of Tuesday, this week. He was 88. Temperamentally grouchy about hospital environs, he spent his last days, as he no doubt would have wished, in the surroundings of his own home in Tokyo's Ueno district.
I remember that apartment well. The first time I visited, the door opened onto a tiny entrance with a bookshelf where normally there would have been a shoebox. Passing through a dark kitchen, one emerged from the shadows into a small living room lined with more bookshelves, a narrow cot, a table and two chairs. A seated Buddha figurine, a rather fine piece from Sri Lanka, sat on a red-stained wooden chest, gazing with an expression of compassion upon the confined but sunlit space. It would have been an otherwise unremarkable place, except for one thing. Looking down from the room's eighth floor balcony, Shinobazu Pond lay suspended beneath, with its expanse of sacred lotuses and shrine to Benten, deity of the arts and music. Little wonder he talked of it as a living mandala.