Rand Castile, a curator of Asian arts who was compared with Sherman Lee, died May 16. He was 78. I came here in 1968 because he and his wife, Sondra Myers, sponsored me.
I met Rand a year earlier in Kyoto, because of James Byars. Later an internationally renowned conceptual artist, of whom Rand once said, "If I were not convinced he is a genius, I would think he is a madman," Byars was, when I first met him, an eccentric American. He walked about in a tuxedo, wearing a Lincolnesque top hat and a red rose in his lapel, occasionally handing out large, scarlet square envelopes he held under his arm. Opening one, you found a smaller envelope, say, blue. Open that one, you found an even smaller one, say, white. They were all made by a famous Japanese paper craftsman, says Shinobu Sakagami, who has just published a book, "James Lee Byars: Days in Japan."
One day Byars invited me to his happening, "A White Carpet," telling me to do something white. It was there that I met an unusually handsome man of medium height, Rand Castile. After introducing himself and finding that I was an English major at Doshisha University, he asked if I could help him as an interpreter in the coming days. He was studying chado, the way of tea, at Urasenke, and he wanted to visit some of the chashitsu (tea huts).