The book The Inland Sea abounds in anecdotes and allusions, observations and meditations, as well as encounters between Richie and inhabitants of the Inland Sea region, many of them intimate and revealing. These, of course, could not be recreated in the film without falsifying its intentions. On the other hand, there are scenes in the film—one in a schoolroom, for example—that are not in the book at all. Richie himself acknowledges the new creativity at work here when he remarks that there have been “some selective framings, a bit of shooting around.”

The book nears its end with two long epiphanic scenes that both feature women. The first involves a bar hostess Richie meets and whose personality attracts him (to the extent, in fact, that he almost immediately fantasizes a life with her, “running a wildly successful Hiroshima bar, the only one with an American bartender”). After a half-earnest attempt to seduce her—one of many humorous scenes in which our hero attempts to pick someone up for the night—they reach a deeper understanding, and to his amazement, all the East-West, Japanese-American barriers disappear, and they are simply coequals in a bond of mutual respect. It is at this moment that he can declare—in both the book and the film—that “I would never find them, the real Japanese, because they were always around me, and they were always real.”

Then, as a sort of coda, comes ecstasy. Richie meets an elderly woman and a child, and together they simply, naturally, converse, without any expectations or prejudices regarding one another. Later in the evening, the three of them visit the otherworldly, impossibly beautiful Itsukushima shrine, illuminated by hundreds of candles and, thanks to the surging tide, seeming to float with its famous torii (gateway) in the sea. And he knows that his journey is over. Though, near the film’s end, we do see Itsukushima, there is no attempt to replicate the meaning of the scene in the book. Rather, the voice-over here (as with the puzzle pieces mentioned above) provides us with a metaphor for the film itself: “One is meant to wander, turning at random along these straight and open corridors filled with the rustling of the forest, the whispering of the sea.”

The book includes twenty gorgeous, starkly black-and-white photographs of the Inland Sea region by Yoichi Midorikawa, many of them almost abstract, able to be read as if they are hanging scrolls. The point is that the book’s text seems to cry out for some sort of visual accompaniment. The photographs do not illustrate the book so much as complement it. The film does both. Just as the book contains at times a bittersweet nostalgia for a lost way of life—or one that perhaps never existed—so part of the film’s power lies in its evanescence, the exquisite passing of its images, all of it a reflection of the appreciation for the fleetingness of the natural and beautiful that is so central to the Japanese sensibility.

One is struck by how often in the book Richie asserts his idea that “only in appearances lies the true reality” (or the variant “the ostensible is the real”), and while that theme is present in the film, Carra seems to make a conscious thematic shift to emphasize her medium’s natural subject, time. This is most readily felt in the recurrence of the phrase “not yet” (or the variant “not quite yet”). The phrase recurs in the book too, but not as often as in the film. With these words, Richie appears to be acknowledging the truth of his impossible quest—that he is looking for “real” Japanese people who existed long ago and whom he hopes to find still in abundance in the Inland Sea region: “rough and lively, lusty, impatient, enthusiastic, open, loving, and hating people.” (These are, by the way, the Japanese qualities he so prizes in his writing on the films of Shohei Imamura.) Richie’s “not yet,” then, becomes his plea of resistance—a resistance and a vacillation that can also be felt in that dreamy disjunction between the 1991 image and the 1971 text—against accepting what he sees as Japan’s full-scale turn against its own nature.

The film and the book are journeys of both search and escape (as Richie acknowledges at the beginning of the former). At the end of the book, he declares simply, “I don’t care if I never go home” (meaning Ohio), but the film closes with Richie at home, his new home of Tokyo, where he chose to stay, he said, because “Tokyo is not Japan.” Does he contradict himself? Very well, then, he contradicts himself. One wonders, too, what Richie would think of the Inland Sea region today, awash like everywhere else in mobile phones, social media—and bridges.