Critic Donald Richie reflects on Asia in 'Travels in the East'

The writer Donald Richie wore many hats: film curator and director, critic, essayist, writer of fiction, composer, cultural commentator extraordinaire and inveterate traveler.

An inquisitive soul, his journeys were undertaken not only for leisure, but also as writing missions. In "Travels in the East," Richie appoints himself interpreter to a continent that has undergone an almost surgical change since the author first set foot on it in 1946. Among vanishing cultures and cities transformed beyond recognition, Richie finds old landscapes, buildings and micro-cultures whose essence has not yet yielded to the urgencies of tourism. For Richie — and I suspect many others — "travel is freedom from captivity." The unknown streets and alleys of foreign cities, Asia's open topographies and wildernesses, providing a new map of the self.

Collected here, these short, literary travel essays show the author as a master miniaturist. In his introduction, he notes that his vision of travel is influenced by a sense of passing time, a result he suspects, of living most of his life in Japan, a "country that has made a hankering for the elegiac into a fine art."

The work of a supremely inquiring mind, this anthology concludes with an ensemble of essays on Japanese destinations, which, like much of Richie's other work, should be required reading.

Read archived reviews of Japanese classics at jtimes.jp/essential.