“A tour de force combining a commanding mastery of historical fact and detail, a comprehensive understanding of the human spirit, and a poetic quality of expression that transforms the hearts of all those it touches.” —The Japan Foundation Newsletter Kumagai Naozane was a Japanese warrior famous for having taken the head of the young and handsome samurai Atsumori. This episode has become one of the best-known and best-loved stories in the Japanese historical classic, The Heiké Story (Heike Monogatari). This book is a fictionalized version of Kumagai’s own attempt to come to terms with his past—that real past which is his and that other past which he hears the monks inventing as they compose the text which will eventually become The Heiké Story. As the warrior remembers his past and compares it to its fictional parallel, he evokes the wonders of the city of Heiankyo (Kyoto); the wars which raised the Taira (Heike) clan to power and later reduced it to ruin at the hands of the Genji clan; the battles at the Uji River; life in the imperial court of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa; and the celebrated final Taira battle—the naval encounter at Dannoura, where the infant emperor Antoku was delivered to the depths of the sea. Among the many pleasures of this brilliantly colored chronicle is how the common humanity of this honest, hopeless man transcends his time and milieu to speak to us, here and now.

"Wonderfully evocative and full of humor, but also honest, introspective, and often poignant."--The New York Times

"Substantially the book that devotees of the director have been waiting for: a full-length critical work about Ozu's life, career and working methods, buttressed with reproductions of pages from his notebooks and shooting scripts, numerous quotes from co-workers and Japanese critics, a great many stills and an unusually detailed filmography."—Sight and Sound Yasujiro Ozu, the man whom his kinsmen consider the most Japanese for all film directors, had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution. The Japanese family in dissolution figures in every one of his fifty-three films. In his later pictures, the whole world exists in one family, the characters are family members rather than members of a society, and the ends of the earth seem no more distant than the outside of the house.

“Richie should be designated a living national treasure.”—Library Journal "Wonderfully evocative and full of humor... honest, introspective, and often poignant."—New York Times "No one has written with more concentration about the peculiar quality of exile enjoyed by the gaijin, the foreigner in Japan."—London Review of Books "To read [The Donald Richie Reader and The Japan Journals] is like diving for pearls. Dip into any part of them and you will surely find treasures about the cinema, literature, traveling, writing. The passages are evocative, erotic, playful, and often profound."—Japanese Language and Literature Donald Richie has been observing and writing about Japan from the moment he arrived on New Year’s Eve, 1946. Detailing his life, his lovers, and his ideas on matters high and low, The Japan Journals is a record of both a nation and an evolving expatriate sensibility. As Japan modernizes and as the author ages, the tone grows elegiac, and The Japan Journals—now in paperback after the critically acclaimed hardcover edition—becomes a bittersweet chronicle of a complicated life well lived and captivatingly told. Donald Richie, the eminent film historian, novelist, and essayist, still lives in Tokyo.

Word and Image in Japanese Cinema examines the complex relationship between the temporal order of linguistic narrative and the spatiality of visual spectacle, a dynamic that has played an important role in much of Japanese film. The tension between the controlling order of words and the liberating fragmentation of images has been an important force that has shaped modern culture in Japan and that has also determined the evolution of its cinema. In exploring the rift between word and image, the essays in this volume clarify the cultural imperatives that Japanese cinema reflects, as well as the ways in which the dialectic of word and image has informed the understanding and critical reception of Japanese cinema in the West.

This illustrated multicultural children's book presents classic Chinese fairy tales and other folk stories--providing a delightful look into a rich literary culture. Chinese folklore tradition is as colorful and captivating as any in the world, but the stories themselves still are not as well-known to Western readers as those from The Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, or Hans Christian Andersen. Tales of a Chinese Grandmother, written by Frances Carpenter, presents a collection of 30 authentic Chinese folktales. These classic stories represent the best of the Chinese folk tradition and are told here by the character Lao Lao, the beloved grandmother of the nineteenth-century Ling household. A sampling from a long and proud tradition, these Chinese folktales are sure to delight adults as well as children of all ages. Chinese children's stories include: How Pan Ku Made the World The God that Lived in the Kitchen The Daughter of the Dragon King The Grateful Fox Fairy The King of the Monkeys The Wonderful Pear Tree Ko-Ai's Lost Shoe Heng O, the Moon Lady The Old Old One's Birthday