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.
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.