Fiction. Asian Studies. In this collection of twenty-seven short stories Donald Richie has shown people set in their ways but caught off guard by life itself. The minimality of the form emphasizes that moment of truth which James Joyce called an epiphany--the revelation which he said was the only reason for writing, or reading stories. The people are almost all Japanese--and Richie is not. Yet, though the peculiarities of culture may form them, it is a common humanity which is his subject. If, as Henry James once said, a story consists of a movement toward an understanding, then these small works are true stories--each plants a bonsai-like seed which grows in the mind and achieves its own full form.