BOOKPATHS

Kyoto, Japan

Pico Iyer explains his fascination for Kyoto.

Residents inevitably see things differently than visitors. But nowhere are the perceptions more disparate than in Japan. After 22 years of living here, I’m still known as a gaijin (outsider or foreigner) and generally feel as if I’m stumbling through the city’s exquisite surfaces like a bull in an Imari china shop. But as I walk down the narrow, lanterned lanes today, the city has an even richer and more intimate power than when I first wandered them as a dazzled sightseer. – from “In Kyoto, Feeling Forever Foreign,” by Pico Iyer, Smithsonian Magazine

Japan

“On the western coast, farm from bustling Tokyo,” Francine Prose finds a “serene Japan” and connections to writer Lafcadio Hearn.

Hearn’s image is everywhere in Matsue; his sweet, somewhat timid and melancholy mustachioed face adorns lampposts through the city, and in souvenir shops you can even purchase a brand of tea with his portrait on the package.  It is generally assumed that Hearn’s place in the heart of the Japanese derives from the fervor with which he adopted their culture and attempted to make it more comprehensible to the West. – from “Serene Japan,” by Francine Prose, Smithsonian (September 2009)

Hiroshima, Japan

Hiroshima, by John Hersey (New York:  Vintage, 1989; first published in 1946)

Hiroshima is John Hersey’s moving, nonfiction account of the impact of the 1945 bombing on six survivors.   A must read.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the 'Osaka Asabi' on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, 'Stimmen der Zeit'; Dr. Terufmi Saski, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.  A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. – from Hiroshima, by John Hersey

Publisher’s Website

Kyoto, Japan

Kyoto "celebrates a 1,000-year love affair” with The Tale of Genjii.

A walk through downtown Kyoto in early November underscored the novel’s lasting power. Posters of the ingénue Yuki Shibamoto, the face of the national celebration, gazed from windows in office buildings and bridal shops. At the Museum of Kyoto, visitors inspected illustrated scrolls and painted screens from across the centuries depicting Genji’s exploits, and they walked out with playing cards and refrigerator magnets bearing images of Japan’s own Casanova. At the Starbuck’s on Sanjo, a schoolboy in a Harry Potter uniform paged through a manga inspired by Genji’s adventures. – from “Kyoto Celebrates a 1,000-Year Love Affair, by Michelle Green, The New York Times

Tokyo, Japan

Ben Macintyre follows “Ian Fleming’s footsteps in Tokyo.”

“Half a century later, I set off in his footsteps to Japan, the high point of his odyssey - to compare Fleming's experience of Tokyo with the modern city, to trace the Far Eastern roots of James Bond, and to drink a dry Martini, shaken not stirred, at the coolest Tokyo bar I could find.” – from “In Ian Fleming’s Footsteps in Tokyo,” by Ben Macintyre, The Times

Japan

Fiona Campbell lists her “top 10 books set in Japan.”

Japan

Listen to Debbie Elliott’s interview with Jeffrey Angles about Japan : a Traveler’s Literary Companion, a book he co-edited with J. Thomas Rimer.

“The memoirs and short fiction in Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion focus on the power of place: Osaka's working-class marketplace, for instance, or the lasting impression made by a rare snowfall in the rural islands.” – from NPR website (All Things Considered)