Description
Book SynopsisWinner 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 Trade ReviewBoth 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 *
