Lafcadio Hearn's Japan - (Tuttle Classics) (Paperback)

Through Lafcadio Hearn's Japan, discover turn-of-the-century Japan through the eyes of a talented and eloquent observer.

About the Author

Donald Richie, novelist, essayist, journalist, and film scholar, was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924, but has spent most of the last sixty years (except for time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968-73) witnessing and reporting on the transformation of Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first century economic and cultural powerhouse. Arriving in Tokyo on New Year/s Day, 1947, he worked as a feature writer and film critic for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. After graduating from Columbia, he returned to Japan as film critic for the Japan Times. Although he is especially well known for his analysis of Japanese cinema and for his instrumental role in introducing Japanese film to the West, he is also considered the doyen of cultural observation, helping to define modern Japan and Japanese culture for Western readers while steadfastly believing that "the ostensible is the real," or what you see is what you get. He is the author of some forty books of fiction and non-fiction, dozens of speeches and essays, and hundreds of book, film, and arts reviews. Recent collections include The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan (2001) and Japan Journals 1947-2004 (2004), based on his detailed record of his life in Japan. He still lives and writes in Tokyo.