A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations - Softcover

Iyer, Pico

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1526611511 ISBN 13: 9781526611512

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1526611511
• ISBN 13: 9781526611512
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240