Product Description

From the author of "The Roads to Sata", this book tells the story of an odyssey to the vanishing heart of Japan.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65488 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 389 pages

Customer Reviews

an excrutiangly funny tramp thru Japans contemporary reality
Tramping past yet more concrete polyhedrons on Honshu's bleak northern coast as the mist drips from his frozen nose, or slithering down a muddy mountain in sweat-sodden socks in Kyushu's steambath summer, this master of irony shares with us each blister as we accompany him on his eccentric - and essentially pointless - quest to walk in the footsteps of two longgone minor heroes of Japan. His deadpan retelling of encounters on the way, the irony of the abyss between the romanticised past and the awful contemporary urbanised present, caused this reader to laugh indecently loudly on a Tokyo train. This is a brilliant and exquisitely personal travelogue in which Booth, periodically restored by beer and hot baths, opens up for us a Japan that few outsiders experience. With lugubrious fatalism, he details his dogged but doomed search for the romantic past behind the concrete present of Japan in the 1990s. A very funny read from a man who knew his territory and was - despite all the odds - deeply attached to it. Wallow in it - loudly - wherever you are.