A Beginner's Guide to Japan
Observations and Provocations
Published on 5. September 2019
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-5266-1153-6 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020
A playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture
Pico Iyer has been living around Kyoto for more than thirty-two years, but he admits at the outset of this book that he sometimes feels he knows less now than when he arrived. In the constantly surprising pages that follow, he shows how an evening with Meryl Streep, a walk through a ghostly deer park, even a call to the local Apple service centre can open up his adopted home in fresh and invigorating ways.
Why does anime make sense in an animist culture? How might Oscar Wilde reveal a culture too often associated with conformity? How can Japanese friends in a typical neighbourhood turn every stereotype on its head? His provocations may infuriate you - may even infuriate himself - Iyer confesses in his opening salvo, but maybe it's only by setting its love hotels next to its baseball stadia, its wild fashions against its eighth-century values, that Japan can be made new again for both the first-time visitor and the jaded foreign resident.
A playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture
Pico Iyer has been living around Kyoto for more than thirty-two years, but he admits at the outset of this book that he sometimes feels he knows less now than when he arrived. In the constantly surprising pages that follow, he shows how an evening with Meryl Streep, a walk through a ghostly deer park, even a call to the local Apple service centre can open up his adopted home in fresh and invigorating ways.
Why does anime make sense in an animist culture? How might Oscar Wilde reveal a culture too often associated with conformity? How can Japanese friends in a typical neighbourhood turn every stereotype on its head? His provocations may infuriate you - may even infuriate himself - Iyer confesses in his opening salvo, but maybe it's only by setting its love hotels next to its baseball stadia, its wild fashions against its eighth-century values, that Japan can be made new again for both the first-time visitor and the jaded foreign resident.
Reviews / Votes
Impishly provocative ... Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed ... Japan and the Japanese have long seemed to lend themselves addictively to interpretation by outsiders. By inviting all types of readers to see the flaws in that tendency from the outset, Iyer neatly sheds the burden of being right about everything while crafting a framework within which to enjoy the place -- Leo Lewis * Financial Times * Insightful and profound ... Iyer can nail Japan with lyrical eloquence * Japan Times * Candid and wholly absorbing, Iyer's inventive guidebook is more than a collection of cultural curiosities - it's a tribute to a nation that prizes social consciousness and sees life in temporality * Booklist * [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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Weight
322 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5266-1153-6 (9781526611536)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2019
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
€10.49
Available for download
Person
Pico Iyer is the author of more than a dozen books which have been translated into twenty-three languages. His four recent TED Talks have received more than eight million views so far. In the summer of 2019, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel Singapore. An essayist for Time magazine since 1986, Iyer writes regularly for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Granta and more than 200 magazines around the world.