Edward Seidensticker, 1921–2007, was a distinguished
translator and scholar who was responsible for introducing the
works of a number of important modern Japanese novelists to the
English-speaking world. At the time of the writing of this book, he
was spending half of the year in New York where he was Professor of
Japanese at Columbia University and half of the year in Tokyo.
Donald Richie, novelist, essayist, journalist, and film
scholar, was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924, but has spent most of the
last sixty years (except for time at Columbia University in the
early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern
Art in 1968-73) witnessing and reporting on the transformation of
Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first century economic and
cultural powerhouse. He is the author of some forty books of
fiction and non-fiction, dozens of speeches and essays, and
hundreds of book, film, and arts reviews. Recent collections
include The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
(2001) and Japan Journals 1947-2004 (2004), based on his detailed
record of his life in Japan. He still lives and writes in
Tokyo.
Paul Waley is a geographer at the University of Leeds in
Britain who spent many years living in Japan where he worked as an
editor, translator and writer. During that period he wrote a
historical guidebook to Tokyo, Tokyo Now and Then, later
republished in revised form as Tokyo, City of Stories. He visits
Tokyo regularly, researching and writing both on the history of the
city and on Tokyo's changing dynamics in contemporary Japan.
"These two volumes by Edward Seidensticker may well be the envy of
every university press: they are books which deserve to be on every
scholar's shelf, which should be assigned regularly to students in
classes and which are desirable reading for amateur historians and
tourists alike." —Thomas Stanley, Director of Walk Japan
Limited
"Seidensticker is of course one of the most respected translators
of Japanese literature into English, and the beauty of his landmark
Genji and Kawabata editions long ago helped draw me into the world
of Japanese literature. Tokyo was the city he loved and lived in
for most of his long life and here he gives it his unwavering
attention over many many pages." —Goodreads
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