De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach". "The great myth of Leach", he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsmen".