Edward George Seidensticker fut un érudit distingué, un historien et un traducteur de premier plan de la littérature japonaise d'après-guerre. Son travail a joué un rôle déterminant dans la rendre accessible aux lecteurs occidentaux. Seidensticker s'est concentré sur une profonde compréhension de la culture japonaise et de son héritage littéraire. Ses traductions sont très appréciées pour leur fidélité et leur mérite littéraire.
Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan's greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death- a mother lost in mourning, a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish, a night of infidelity, a young lieutenant who ends his life.
An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combining an acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.
A continuation of the author's history of Tokyo explains how the city recovered from both a major earthquake and Allied bombing raids in World War II
Certain conjunctions of time and place exert a special fascination--Paris in the twenties, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Weimar Berlin. Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the Earthquake of 1923 is one of these. Until 1867 the city was called Edo--it was the shogun's capital, the biggest city in a country almost completely closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries. Then, helter-skelter, it became a modern metropolis brimming with Western fads, ideas, and technologies, exuberantly inventing and imitating even as it yearned for the past it was destroying. East and West met here as never before--or since.