Since the publication in English of Yukio Mishima's 1954 romance novel, "The Sound of Waves," there has been a fondness for visualizing Japan's Inland Sea, with its islands of olives, oranges, sunburned fisherfolk and noonday siestas, as somehow Mediterranean in flavor, its water passages carrying the traveler on an Ionian journey. Nancy Phelan, in her 1969 travelogue "Pillow of Grass," was similarly moved, the writer finding "figs, persimmons, mandarins and pomegranates ripening around tiered olive groves, redolent of Greece, with its fine filtering dust and glaring sun." Donald Richie's book "The Inland Sea" contains a little of this longing for an antique land, a place whereupon "somewhere near the sea . . . I will find them: the people the Japanese ought to be, the people they once were."
Over 30 years since its first publication, this new edition of Richie's neglected classic is both contemporary and archival. Tinged with a prescience of imminent loss, elegiac but unsentimental, "The Inland Sea" is both somber poetic meditation and acidulous literary entertainment. The places Richie visits are not so much destinations as departure points, the setting for a combination of composed detail and richly discursive passages on the mingled blessings of culture.
Richie's themes, as elsewhere in his writing, are the primacy of the intellect, the centrality of sex, and the hidden patterns and compositions of life discernible to those with the requisite artistic clairvoyance. Like the late writer Alan Booth, Richie is adept at drawing people out, coaxing his subjects into revealing more than they might have intended. "As always in Japan," he writes, "a little scratching under the asphalt highway or the concrete high-rise apartment house brings history bubbling to the surface."