Ryszard Kapuscinski

"The most important thing is to write. And to write, I need the stories." -- From Los Angeles Times Obituary.
Just learned of the death of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.
I read his book, "The Soccer War," a few years ago when I was looking for more information on the little-known war that broke out between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 over the outcome of a soccer game.
Kapuscinski covered wars and third-world governments all over the globe. The Soccer War not only included detailed accounts of his time on the ground in Honduras during the 1969 war, but also chronicled his time in the former Congo, where he recounts reactions to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
It's hard to imagine his writing, which captured the absurdities of the conflicts he witnessed, appearing in objective newsprint. He was a much better writer than the label "correspondent" would suggest. And as the Times obit has noted, he didn't do too bad, making it to 74 years old after tempting fate with his life so many times for the sake of his occupation.

Donald Richie on the Death of Yukio Mishima

Came across this in the recently published Japan Journals by Donald Richie.

"'Japan is gone, vanished, disappeared... [T]here is nothing left to save.'
When I first learned of his suicide that is what I first remembered - that he already knew that there was nothing more to save. His may have been a political statement, an aesthetic statement, but it was also a despairing personal statement.
...And it is true that a real romantic is he who compares things as they are with things as they ought to be and then has the strength of character to live by those standards which he himself finds better."