By STEPHEN MANSFIELD
Special to The Japan Times
Writer, commentator and film specialist Donald Richie has had a good year, on that saw, among other things, the publication of "The Japan Journals" and his receipt of the Rising Sun With Gold Rays, a prestigious award honoring a lifetime of achievement in the arts. Here he shares his thoughts.
On the topic of expatriate writers, one thinks of Paul Bowles in Tangier, Gerald Brenan in Grenada, James Joyce in Trieste. What expat writers would you like to see yourself compared to?
Well, all of the above (laughing). The one that I feel closest to is probably Christopher Isherwood. Mainly because his influence on me was crucial, something I go into in the journals. Reading the Berlin stories when I was 18 years old was key to my development. I've always been very grateful to Christopher. I got to know him and became his friend much later. Another, a sort of antimodel I had in mind, was in fact Paul Bowles. Like me, he wrote music, loved it more than anything else. I probably have self-destructive tendencies the same as Paul did, though they don't take the same form. Paul's was drugs, mine is different. Maybe I'm a sexaholic instead of a drug addict!
Some people have described your mid- to late work as elegiac, a literary word for sentimental. I find the tone of your writing more inquisitive than nostalgic, more interested in describing mutating forms than preserving them. A valid observation?
I think yours is valid. The people who call me elegiac are the people who cannot imagine an 80-year-old being anything other than elegiac. If you're not sentimental at that age, you have to be made so. Every time I see that word, I keep wondering how it relates to me (mock exasperation). I don't think it applies.
You've hinted in the past at the lack of a New York- or Paris-style literary circle, or salon, in Tokyo. Do you still feel this is a deficiency?
Only in the sense that having one would keep me on my toes (smiles). Your peers would be reading you and telling you about it. I have peer friends in New York who question how I can live here and keep up with current ideas. But keeping up with current ideas has never occurred to me. I'm like Robinson Crusoe. Everything I need I construct for myself. I didn't even attempt to explain that, for me, all these flavors of the month are alike. And that the idea of keeping up with them is limiting and ludicrous.
