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. At the time of the writing of this book, he was spending half of the year in New York where he was Professor of Japanese at Columbia University and half of the year in Tokyo. Donald Richie, novelist, essayist, journalist, and film scholar, was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924, but has spent most of the last sixty years (except for time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968-73) witnessing and reporting on the transformation of Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first century economic and cultural powerhouse. He is the author of some forty books of fiction and non-fiction, dozens of speeches and essays, and hundreds of book, film, and arts reviews. Recent collections include The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan (2001) and Japan Journals 1947-2004 (2004), based on his detailed record of his life in Japan. He still lives and writes in Tokyo. Paul Waley is a geographer at the University of Leeds in Britain who spent many years living in Japan where he worked as an editor, translator and writer. During that period he wrote a historical guidebook to Tokyo, Tokyo Now and Then, later republished in revised form as Tokyo, City of Stories. He visits Tokyo regularly, researching and writing both on the history of the city and on Tokyo's changing dynamics in contemporary Japan.