Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

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 premier translators of Japanese literature, he offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. By turns elegiac and funny, reflective and crisp, Tokyo: From Edo to Showa is an important cultural history of Asia's greatest city. Originally published in two volumes, Seidensticker's masterful work is published here for the first time in a single edition-as the author always hoped it would be. This new edition also contains a preface by Donald Richie, acknowledged expert on Japanese culture and a contemporary and 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, 1921û2007, was a distinguished translator and scholar responsible for introducing the works of a number of important modern Japanese novelists to the English-speaking world.

Donald Richie, novelist, essayist, journalist, and film scholar, was born in Ohio 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. He still lives and writes in Tokyo.