A Beginner’s Guide to Japan

Author Pico Iyer
Narrator Sartaj Garewal
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 3 hours and 27 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Travel and holiday, Travel tips and advice: general.

Get in the xigxag app

This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.

Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}

How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

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.

Critics Review

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
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 from the same

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.