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A Beginner's Guide to Japan

Observations and Provocations

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A Beginner's Guide to Japan

By: Pico Iyer
Narrated by: Sartaj Garewal
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Bloomsbury presents A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer, read by Sartaj Garewal.

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.(P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Asia Guided Tours China Imperial Japan
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Critic reviews

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 (Leo Lewis)
Insightful and profound … Iyer can nail Japan with lyrical eloquence
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
[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
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
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
All stars
Most relevant
This is by far the best book I have read on Japan. Excellent narration. Thank you

Best book on Japan

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Hmm... This wasn't quite what I was expecting when I heard the sample. I've always been fascinated by Japan and its people. It's true to say that the more I learn about the people and their culture, the less I understand. Japan is an enigma to most westerners and so whenever I have an opportunity to read something that sheds light on the place and the people, I jump at it.

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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I want to change my review having read it but audible doesn’t let you remove a review so I’m writing this instead.

Audible not letting me change review

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Way too short for the cost. The jumpy writing style is annoying, flicking jarringly between unrelated points every few seconds, few of them elaborated on to any satisfactory degree. Not sure what the point of it is. The narrator is good though.

Disappointed

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