1970s New York, and young Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle takes to driving a taxi in search of an escape from his insomnia, his barren apartment and his gnawing sense of self-disgust, which threatens to erupt in revenge against the sordid, unlovely world th
The acclaimed director of Mishima, American Gigolo, Hard Core, Blue Collar, and Cat People , and also the screenwriter for Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader here analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasajiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer—an
"Earns its place on the very short shelf of books on Japan that are of permanent value."—Times Literary Supplement. "Richie is a stupendous travel writer; the book shines with bright witticisms, deft characterizations of fisherfolk, merchants, monks and
In an epilogue provided for his incomparable study of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Donald Richie reflects on Kurosawa's life work of thirty feature films and describes his last, unfinished project, a film set in the Edo period to be called The Ocean Was Wa
On November 25, 1970, Japan's most renowned postwar novelist, Yukio Mishima, stunned the world by committing ritual suicide. Here, Marguerite Yourcenar, a brilliant reader of Mishima and a scholar with an eye for the cultural roles of fiction, unravels th
Donald Richie has been observing and writing about Japan from the moment he arrived on New Year’s Eve, 1946. Detailing his life, his lovers, and his ideas on matters high and low, The Japan Journals is a record of both a nation and an evolving expatriat
This provocative book is a tractate—a treatise—on beauty in Japanese art, written in the manner of a zuihitsu, a free-ranging assortment of ideas that “follow the brush” wherever it leads. Donald Richie looks at how perceptual values in Japan were
"Substantially the book that devotees of the director have been waiting for: a full-length critical work about Ozu's life, career and working methods, buttressed with reproductions of pages from his notebooks and shooting scripts, numerous quotes from co-
