A Beginner's Guide to Japan
Observations and Provocations
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A Beginner's Guide to Japan
Narrated by:
Sartaj Garewal
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Narrated by:
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Sartaj Garewal
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By:
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Pico Iyer
About this listen
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.©2019 Pico Iyer (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Best book on Japan
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This book does indeed contain a number of interesting observations. The problem i had with this book was having to sieve through the somewhat verbose and rather arty prose to get from it what I had been expecting. The author is clearly a very intelligent man, but the book has so many quotes from rather obscure writers that it becomes as much a lesson in philosophy as something of real easily digestible substance.
Narration was fine, although I didn't really like the accents, particularly the American ones, affected here.
In summary, the book felt more like a piece of modern art: More style than substance and, at times, came across as a little pretentious in how the relevant information was delivered.
If you can get this in a sale,as I did, and you have a strong interest in Japanese culture, then by all means get this book. It does have some interesting facts as well as present the listener with a flavour of the oddities of Japanese culture, but there is a fair bit of wading through some waffle to get there.
You'll Need A Sieve To Get What You're Looking For
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