Quieter

"The Japan Journals: 1947-2004" by Donald Richie.

How grateful I am for this remarkable record of a life. It is the gift of the long view, life as it will be in retrospect, how the sum of little observations and activities grows into a significance and weight, how friendships unreel across decades, and how it is possible to have always a clarity, a self-honesty, that survives all the changes around.

Donald Richie is someone who always floated on the periphery of my awareness. When I went to Japan for the first time, my first feelings and observations were already captured in Richie's writings 40 years before. He recorded for the first time what we all fell for the first time. He was Gaijin Prime, the one who came, and stayed, and made a life.

I read his words and I relate so closely to his life lived as an outsider. When, after 55 years in Japan, he is told during an interview with a grad student, "You discovered the virtues of being an outsider. It was the benefits of stigma you discovered here."--I read those words, and I nod, because I know of those benefits.

Leafing through this book, and encountering Richie's acquaintances a couple hundred pages apart, as he experienced them a few decades apart, you get the benefit of this long view, the way experiences echo back and forth across the years. The value of writing down things you want to remember becomes oh so clear. Richie has had an extraordinarily rich life, but perhaps that is because he has taken time to pen his thoughts. He had a remarkable range of acquaintances, and the book is filled with mundane glimpses into the lives of fame and accomplishment. But more than those glimpses of celebrity, I love Richie's eye for the changes and subtleties of daily life: the homeless, the protitutes, the policemen in the park, and the rude youth on their cell phones.

Perhaps we all enjoy similar riches, and would know it, if we stopped to capture them.

It takes some bravery to write about one's personal life: and for that courage I am very grateful. There are passages where Richie considers the state of love and his marriage which are heartwrenching and true. Consider:

There is not enough of this. The discussions you have inside your head are yours alone, and one day you pick up a book and realize that someone else has that same type of urgent personal dialog. It is the type of personal dialog that does not find a public voice, unless it finds a pen, or a song.

A remarkable life, and a remarkable read.