A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

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

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.

Both deep and witty ... Iyer makes a perfect cultural translator * Times Literary Supplement * Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed * Financial Times * A must-read ... Iyer at once opens up a new avenue for those familiar with the country while stoking the curiosity of would-be visitors * Elle * Insightful and profound ... Iyer can nail Japan with lyrical eloquence * Japan Times * [A] lovely pocket compendium of oddities and insights of Japanese life ... Provocative and elegant, Iyer's guide succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to be authoritative * Publisher's Weekly * With an elegant, understated manner, Iyer offers poignant reflections on his adopted country and its maddening contradictions and shifting parts ... Iyer's subtle observations reveal a great deal about what is beyond the surface of how some Westerners view the Japanese * Kirkus * Pico Iyer is a writer like no other, sui generis -- Jan Morris, praise for Pico Iyer To me [Pico Iyer] was the complete traveller - highly educated, humorous, detached, portable, positive, alert, subtle, a great noticer and listener, calm, humane and fluent in his prose. And he had been everywhere -- Paul Theroux in 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star', praise for Pico Iyer Iyer's thoughtful nature leads him to peel back layer upon layer, nodding toward the infinite * New York Times Book Review *