ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donald Richie is known to most Americans in Japan as a trenchant and devastatingly honest film critic for the Nippon Times, but he actually considers literature his first love and music his second, films coming in third. Born in Ohio in 1924, he first came to Japan in 1946 and until 1949 worked as film reviewer and feature writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. During this time he also began publishing in the Japanese press, and toward the end of his first stay in Japan his book Essays in Contemporary American Literature, Drama and Cinema was published in Japanese. Returning to America to complete a degree at Columbia University, he again came to Japan in 1953 and intends to make his home here. At present he lives in Tokyo, continues writing for a number of Japanese periodicals, and is working on a new novel. His writing has also appeared in Theatre Arts, New-Story, Sight and Sound, Saturday Review of Literature, and various of the "little magazines," together with numerous articles published in Japanese.