Review - The Honorable Visitors: The plot to assassinate Charlie Chaplin and other Tokyo welcomes...
by Donald Richie
"To visit Japan... even now, in the age of jumbo jets and package tours, a faint air of the exotic clings to the project. You are going to a land somehow strange, somehow other. This quality of the different, the unfamiliar, can be an attraction, something to be enjoyed, or it can be a discomfort, something to be complained about. It depends on you."
Richie puts his delightful insights and delectable prose to good use in this charming collection of stories about the visits of famous Westerners to Japan following the opening of its closed borders in the later part of the 19th century.
Ranging from Ulysses S. Grant to Rudyard Kipling to William Faulkner, we get a cross section of the cross, the enamoured and the factually observant.
A gem of a short collection, it should be mandatory reading for all prospective and practicing travel writers or cultural critics.
Posted by Paul at January 20, 2005 07:33 PM