Books on Japan

Japanologist, translator, and documentary filmmaker John Nathan offers a memoir packed with engaging stories from his years in Japan and elsewhere. There’s a noticeable ebb and flow as he reflects on the paths his life has taken, at times humbly patting himself on the back, at others chastising himself for what he sees as wrong turns. He’s a bold writer, and Living Carelessly  is compelling for its honesty, sharp insights, and wry tone. Nathan has lived a large life, though h

Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie  traces his connection to Japan’s megacity over more than half a century, covering his relationships, notable encounters, and work on a number of influential books and articles about Japanese culture, sport, and politics since the 1960s. Whiting doesn’t pull punches. He offers an unvarnished look at many layers of Tokyo, along with key figures and events, from the construction boom leading up to the 1964 Summer Olympics to the activities of yakuz

Journalist Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan  is a remarkable achievement on several fronts. Adelstein arrives in Tokyo in the early 1990s to study at Sophia University, then lands a job reporting in Japanese for the Yomiuri Shimbun . He works relentlessly to build connections and extract information from police departments and various layers of the underworld, all while navigating media red tape and the threat of reprisals against

This is probably the pinnacle of Japan travel memoirs by non-Japanese writers. Donald Richie, well known for his books and essays on Japanese cinema and as a former film critic for The Japan Times , first came to Japan in the late 1940s. He returned in the 1950s and remained there until his death in 2013 in Tokyo at the age of 88. I had recently read A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories  (2004) and The Image Factory  (2003), both interesting but not nearly as substanti

Exotics and Retrospectives  (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn’s earlier works on Japan. It opens with the author’s account of his arduous climb up Mount Fuji (3,776 meters). Because it’s more personal in nature, I preferred it to the dozen or so other essays in the collection, which, in Hearn’s oftentimes meandering yet lucid style, cover a wide range of subjects—from Japan’s singing insects and frogs, and reflections on death and Buddhism, to his notions and flights of fancy on

The Image Factory: Fads & Fashions in Japan  (2003), by Donald Richie, takes a penetrating and frequently humorous look at Japan’s styles and crazes, from Tamagotchi  digital pets, cosplay, manga, and yamanba  (mountain hag) girls, to cell phones, pachinko, fake foreigners, the kawaii  mindset, and the sex trade. Writing about fashion, as Richie points out in the book, is to write about the past, particularly in Japan, where styles are rapidly adopted and discarded. As such,

A Japanese Mirror , published in 1984, is Ian Buruma’s dissection of the myths that imbue the darker segments of Japan’s culture. He doesn’t hold back; his cuts are sharp and deep. The “mirror” here can represent a number of things: a reflection of the nation’s history in its present; its heroes and villains reflected in society; or art reflecting life and vice versa. It also suggests the way society wants to see itself and, conversely, how it doesn’t want to see itself (the

A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories  (2005) is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Donald Richie. Richie was an authority on Japanese film and culture and is well known for his travel book The Inland Sea  (1971). He passed away in Tokyo on February 19, 2013 at the age of 88. These stories, some of which are no longer than a couple of pages, are centered on moments of realization or small shifts in understanding. They focus on everyday Japanese people. A few reflec

Lafcadio Hearn lived a wandering life. Born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the United States and became a successful newspaper writer, living in and writing about Cincinnati and New Orleans. Defying a law against interracial marriage, he married an African American woman in his early twenties (1874). He later divorced and made his way to Japan, where he had a family and is known to this day as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published

A Tokyo Romance  (2018) is Ian Buruma’s memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 at the age of 23, studied cinema at Nichidai in Ekoda, and met figures such as Donald Richie, Akira Kurosawa and Yoshiko Yamaguchi, along with a hodgepodge of artists and avant-garde performers, as he refined his spoken Japanese. Buruma covers an array of topics here, including the “role” of the gaijin  in Japan and the question of whether an outsider can truly immerse themselv