A Beginner's Guide to Japan
Observations and Provocations
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020
How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem?
Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon?
Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect?
After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before.
'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having lived in Japan for decades, the widely traveled and erudite, Oxford-born Iyer (The Art of Stillness) presents this lovely pocket compendium of oddities and insights of Japanese life. Save for a few short essays, the book is comprised of standalone, paragraph-long entries grouped into loose thematic chapters, such as "On the Streets," "At the Counter," and "Behind Closed Doors." Iyer's range is broad as he discusses the signage upon disembarking Kyoto station ("There are eleven arrows on the sign above you... they point left, right, straight ahead and backwards. In the middle is a question mark") as well as Japanese passion for baseball, in which there is a surprising amount of violence directed at baseball umpires (an American umpire had to be carried off after being hit "by a bicycle flung from a fan"). He also engages in deeper ruminations such as the role anime plays in Japanese life ("anime is the natural expression of an animist world"), the appreciation for the beauty of silence ("Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out"), and how the Japanese pursuit of perfection can make it "wonderfully welcoming" to outsiders but also "unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down." Provocative and elegant, Iyer's guide succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to be authoritative.
