Donald Richie has lived in Japan since the mid-1940s and is an internationally recognized expert on this country and its peoples. His writings have taken many forms including essays, fiction, film criticism, travel writing, and book reviews. This volume of essays, first released in 1971, has been published in a new edition with an afterword by the author, a map, and 18 images from the award-winning documentary Inward Sea. In his laudatory introduction, Pico Iyer salutes Richie for the relaxed way he approaches his experiences in Japan — he opens himself to whatever strikes his fancy rather than having an axe to grind or an agenda to fulfill. Iyer concludes: "Richie writes, hauntingly, immortally, about the Japanese feeling for sadness, their gift for being pleased, their thoughtfulness, and (as he puts it, elsewhere, of Kurosawa) their 'knowing tranquility' and at some point one begins to realize that he's writing of himself."

Armchair travelers will relish Richie's observations about the undeveloped communities along a narrow stretch of water between three of Japan's four major islands. The author adores the innocence of the residents in these off-the-trail places where the speed and the intensities of urban living have not become dominant. "These islands are extraordinarily beautiful, and a part of their beauty is that it is passing. Already the modern mainland is reaching out, converting each captured island into an industrial waste."

Richie finds hints of the Japanese character in public bath houses and coffee shops. He climbs the steep stairs to Shinto shrines, arriving at the top puffing and gasping for air. "This is as it should be," he observes. "One arrives as though new born, helpless, vulnerable."

The author is touched when people give him souvenirs. He wonders if part of the contentment of rural people is that no one ever taught them "to expect more of life than life can in fact offer." Richie marvels at the lack of genuine communication between men and women, noting that in this society, only geishas (bar hostesses) know how to talk to men. And, near the end of his travels, the author commends the Japanese for their reverence of nature. With its admirable mix of cultural commentary and personal insights, it is easy to see why The Inland Sea is considered to be a classic on Japan.