Looking for the Lost

Author: Alan Booth
Publisher: Vertical Inc
ISBN: 1568366159
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
A VIBRANT, MEDITATIVE WALK IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL OF JAPAN Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation, the everyday drama that brings this remote world to life on the page. Looking for the Lost is full of personalities, from friendly gangsters to mischievous children to the author himself, an expatriate who found in Japan both his true home and dogged exile. Wry, witty, sometimes angry, always eloquent, Booth is a uniquely perceptive guide. Looking for the Lost is a technicolor journey into the heart of a nation. Perhaps even more significant, it is the self-portrait of one man, Alan Booth, exquisitely painted in the twilight of his own life.

Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan

Author: Bruce Rutledge
Publisher: Chin Music Press
ISBN: 9780974199504
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Sixteen stories and essays by different writers destroy the many stereotypes about Japan.

Walking the Kiso Road

Author: William Scott Wilson
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834803178
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Step back into old Japan with this fascinating travelogue of the famous Kiso Road, an ancient route used by samurai and warlords The Kisoji, which runs through the Kiso Valley in the Japanese Alps, has been in use since at least 701 C.E. In the seventeenth century, it was the route that the daimyo (warlords) used for their biennial trips—along with their samurai and porters—to the new capital of Edo (now Tokyo). The natural beauty of the route is renowned—and famously inspired the landscapes of Hiroshige, as well as the work of many other artists and writers. William Scott Wilson, esteemed translator of samurai philosophy, has walked the road several times and is a delightful and expert guide to this popular tourist destination; he shares its rich history and lore, literary and artistic significance, cuisine and architecture, as well as his own experiences.

Hokkaido Highway Blues

Author: Will Ferguson
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1841952885
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 9

Book Description
It had never been done before. Not in 4000 years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. But, heady on sakura and sake, Will Ferguson bet he could do both. The resulting travelogue is one of the funniest and most illuminating books ever written about Japan. And, as Ferguson learns, it illustrates that to travel is better than to arrive.

Japan

Author: Alan Booth
Publisher: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780844296845
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
Japan is often imagined as a small country, yet the largest of its four main islands, Honshu, is larger than all of Great Britain. Alan Booth's remarkable guidebook provides a highly opinionated introduction to the country he has lived in for over 20 years.

Inventing Japan

Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 1588362825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo. What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.

Kanazawa

Author: David Joiner
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 161172953X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt’s future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover Mirai’s subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes. Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt’s search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. While continually resisting Mirai’s efforts to move to Tokyo, Emmitt becomes drawn into the mysterious death thirty years prior of a mutual friend of Mirai’s parents. It is only when he and his father-in-law climb the mountain where the man died that he learns the somber truth, and in turn discovers what the future holds for him and his wife. Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, with an intimacy of emotion inexorably tied both to the cityscape and Japan’s mountainous terrain, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.

Memories of Silk and Straw

Author: Junichi Saga
Publisher: Kodansha Amer Incorporated
ISBN: 9780870119880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Over 50 reminiscences of pre-modern Japan. This book presents an illustrationf a way of life that has virtually disappeared.

The Garden of Burning Sand

Author: Corban Addison
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1623651301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author John Hart raved that "If you like stories of good people struggling to do right in the world's forgotten places, there is no one better suited than Corban Addison to take you on the ride of your life." In The Garden of Burning Sand, Addison, the bestselling author of A Walk Across the Sun, creates a powerful and poignant novel that takes the reader from the red light areas of Lusaka, Zambia, to the gilded chambers of the Washington, D.C. elite, to the splendor of Victoria Falls and Cape Town. Zoe Fleming, an accomplished young human rights attorney, has made a life for herself in Zambia, far from her estranged father--an American business mogul with presidential aspirations--and from the devastating betrayals of her past. When a young girl with Down syndrome is sexually assaulted in a Lusaka slum, Zoe joins Zambian police officer Joseph Kabuta in investigating the rape. Piecing together clues from the victim's past, they discover an unsettling connection between the girl--Kuyeya--and a powerful Zambian family who will stop at nothing to bury the truth. As they are drawn deeper into the complex web of characters behind this appalling crime, Zoe and Joseph forge a bond of trust and friendship that slowly transforms into love. Opposed on all sides, they find themselves caught in a dangerous clash between the forces of justice and power. To successfully prosecute Kuyeya's attacker and build a future with Joseph, Zoe must risk her life and her heart--and confront the dark past she thought she had left behind.

The Inland Sea

Author: Donald Richie
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
ISBN: 1611729165
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
"An elegiac prose celebration . . . a classic in its genre."—Publishers Weekly In this acclaimed travel memoir, Donald Richie paints a memorable portrait of the island-studded Inland Sea. His existential ruminations on food, culture, and love and his brilliant descriptions of life and landscape are a window into an Old Japan that has now nearly vanished. Included are the twenty black and white photographs by Yoichi Midorikawa that accompanied the original 1971 edition. Donald Richie (1924-2013) was an internationally recognized expert on Japanese culture and film. Yoichi Midorikawa (1915-2001) was one of Japan's foremost nature photographers.