The Inland Sea

by Donald Richie

Release Date: 01 September, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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Beautiful and Real Description of Japan

One of the great values of this book is that it was written at the beginning of the 1970s, and thus shows a rural Japan even less influenced by the west than now. Richie travels from island to island within the Inland Sea of Japan. His insights and comments on the country are intriguing and entertaining. The reader is able to view this truly remarkable region of Japan through the eyes of a foreigner. Richie's language ability in Japanese allows him to become one with the Japanese in conversation (or at least as much as is possible for a foreigner in Japan to become one with the people), and his English writing ability keeps the reader full of emotions - from laughing to feeling lonely, to (perhaps for some) lusting after Japanese schoolgirls. This book really is beautifully written, once the reader gets used to Richie's sometimes abrupt style. This book is different from other travelougues about Japan because the author is not afraid to be honest with his feelings towards the country (though Alan Booth's works are worth reading). Anyone interested in the Japan of today or yesterday should read this book, because life in the Inland Sea is and was definitely distinct (if not better in many ways) from life in Tokyo or Osaka, today or yesterday.

Reads like a feverish dream

I'm glad that this book has been re-issued. I purchased an original copy from the 1970s and it did not sit on my shelf for long before it was in my hands and burning its way into my head.

Richie has made a career writing about Japan, and this is without doubt a masterful travel book filled with germaine research. But it is also a 70's recreation of a trip the author had taken as a younger man.

Since years had passed between the actual travel and the book writing, Richie brings a great deal of his reflections on Japan overall.

Richie is a sensualist and is unabashedly honest about his humanity. He has an affair and finds himself falling into lust for an island girl. But his frankness is redemptive - he's probably telling the story that many authors would skirt around.

And whatever shortcomings the author may have in his life, he makes up for them with his compassion. He visits a leper colony and has empathy for a girl who has been cured but can never return to Japanese society.

The writing, like the photography, is impressionistic. Sometimes Richie will go into a ponderous tangent - such as the time he spends a couple pages talking about the beauty of Japanese skin -but the result overall is moving and somehow heartening.

And unlike the deluded Japan travel book (the Lady and the Monk) by the author of this book's introduction, this book seems real.

In fact, the cover of the original text from the 70s was the following text spread diagonally across the cover: "An intimate view of the "real" Japan by Donald Richie who reflects upon the total Japan experience while sailing the inland sea."

That's the best description possible of this worthwhile book.