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.

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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;...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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