NOTA |
(★)(two volumes in one, The Emergence of the World´s Greatest City)(Edward Seidensticker´s ´Tokyo : From Edo to Showa´ tells the story of Tokyo´s transformation from the Shogun´s capital in an isolated Japan to one of the most renowned modern cities in the world. With the same scholarship and style that won him admiration as one of the premier translators of Japanese literature, he offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. Originally published in two volumes, Seidensticker´s masterful work is published here for the first time in a single edition. This new edition also contains a preface by Donald Richie, acknowledged expert on Japanese culture and a close friend of Seidensticker, and a foreword by Paul Waley that puts both the book and author in perspective for today´s readers. ◆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. Donald Riche was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924, but has spent most of the last sixty years witnessing and reporting on the transformation of Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first century economic and cultural powerhouse. Paul Waley is a geographer at the University of Leeds in Britain who spent many years living in Japan. During that period he wrote a historical guidebook to Tokyo,´Tokyo Now and Then.´ He visits Tokyo regularly, researching and writing both on the history of the city and on Tokyo´s changing dynamics in contemporary Japan.) |