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"Arguably the greatest living travel writer" ( Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan , Iyer draws on his years of experience--his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections--to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to
pique the interest and curiosity of those who don't know Japan--and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

The Enigmas of Arrival There are eleven arrows on the sign above you, as you disembark in Kyoto Station. They point left, right, straight ahead and backwards. In the middle is a question mark. * Platform 0 is close to Platforms 31 and 32, and a large "Restaurant Guide" board informs you that there are one hundred and seven dining options around the station alone. There are also twenty-­two hotels in the immediate vicinity, just one of which offers fifteen banquet halls, five hundred and sixteen rooms, a halal menu, a clinic, a photo salon and a church. * So much is available, almost nothing can be found. You're in a living Web site of sorts--­boxes and links popping up on every side, leading to art gallery and "Happy Terrace," to five-­story post office and thirteen-­floor department store--­but nobody's given you the password. * There are snatches of English, French, German everywhere, but serving almost as decoration--­like colors or sounds--­and surrounded by characters in three non-­overlapping alphabets. The net effect is of a hundred and one people speaking a thousand and two languages, none of which they understand. * There are no addresses, it's said, in Japan--­or, worse, there are collections of numbers, but sometimes they refer to the chronology of construction, sometimes to something else. When my daughter, my wife, and I write down the address of the flat we've all shared, each one of us inscribes a completely different street name. * Before the West arrived, there were twice as many T-­junctions and dead ends in Tokyo as there were thoroughfares. A castle town needs to confound invaders. After World War II, the city was reconstructed along the pathways that had come up around the rubble of bombed buildings, rendering the terrain even more impenetrable. * On the train into Kyoto, I point out to my Japanese wife a sweet ad full of teddy bears, one sporting a badge, another next to a bright-­red ambulance. "Yes," she says. "It says that if you see a child who's been beaten, please call that number. If you do not, the child may die!" "And that picture of the cute fox and bear exchanging whispers?" "A lawyer," says Hiroko. "If you have some kind of accident, he can help." Dressing the Part I board the train on Saturday, and face a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform, lines of businessmen with badges on their lapels and squadrons of young women in dark suits. The next day I board the same train, to be greeted by a young guy in sockless canvas shoes and his date clomping along in high-fashion snowshoes (in a place where snow is almost unknown). Everyone's taken on a part, but in the off-hours, even close friends may be acting in different plays. * Hence couples on honeymoon in Japan traditionally wear matching outfits every hour of their trip. Even girls on a Sunday shopping spree often sport the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots. Fashion becomes less about standing out than fitting in, at least within the micro-­group of which you are a part. * After a rabbit appeared in Japan in 1873, the craze for the creatures grew so intense that a single animal fetched the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars. After a woman threw herself off the roof of a Tokyo apartment complex in 1970, roughly one hundred and fifty others threw themselves off the same roof. * For a foreigner, this means that clothes don't make the man here; they simply mark the role. But roles shift at the speed of light in Japan, as people adopt a radically different voice (even a different word for "I") for colleague and secretary and boss. If it's treacherous to judge a book by its cover, how much more so if it's a foreign book and has a dozen covers to go with every audience. * In 1999, I sought out the man said to have invented karaoke, to tell him that my editors at Time had chosen him as one of the "100 Asians of the Century." He handed me in response a business card advertising his services as a dog trainer. * That mild-­mannered matron with her hands in her lap, dressed as for church, is, my wife explains to me, a wild thing, ready to do anything with anyone. And that rail-­thin twenty-­three-­year-­old model in fishnet stockings, perfectly made up, turns out, her startled Californian boyfriend tells me, never to have had a boyfriend before. * Whenever we're abroad, I have to spend hours persuading my wife to dress down, since dressing up will make everybody around us feel underdressed. For her, putting on a designer outfit to go to the ATM is as much a sign of courtesy as wearing black to a funeral or speaking in complete sentences. * Two out of every five Japanese men pluck their eyebrows--­and the first geisha, in the thirteenth century, were men. "It is best that you carry powdered rouge in your sleeve pocket," an eighteenth-­century manual for samurai advises. "We sometimes are of bad color when sobering up, lying down or rising." * My wife said she'd never seen a real man in Japan, an American friend who grew up in Tokyo tells me--until she met a Kabuki actor who specialized in taking the part of women. Excerpted from A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations, Provocations, Fallacies by Pico Iyer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Having lived in Japan for decades, the widely traveled and erudite, Oxford-born Iyer (The Art of Stillness) presents this lovely pocket compendium of oddities and insights of Japanese life. Save for a few short essays, the book is comprised of standalone, paragraph-long entries grouped into loose thematic chapters, such as "On the Streets," "At the Counter," and "Behind Closed Doors." Iyer's range is broad as he discusses the signage upon disembarking Kyoto station ("There are eleven arrows on the sign above you... they point left, right, straight ahead and backwards. In the middle is a question mark") as well as Japanese passion for baseball, in which there is a surprising amount of violence directed at baseball umpires (an American umpire had to be carried off after being hit "by a bicycle flung from a fan"). He also engages in deeper ruminations such as the role anime plays in Japanese life ("anime is the natural expression of an animist world"), the appreciation for the beauty of silence ("Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out"), and how the Japanese pursuit of perfection can make it "wonderfully welcoming" to outsiders but also "unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down." Provocative and elegant, Iyer's guide succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to be authoritative. (Sept.)

Booklist Review

Although celebrated travel writer Iyer (Autumn Light, 2019) has lived in Japan for over three decades, he admits, I know far less about it than when I arrived. In hundreds of vignettes and several longer essays, Iyer pinpoints many ways his adopted home baffles Westerners, even as it both embraces Western culture and influences it with such phenomena as anime and Zen philosophy. He even ponders the similarities between Oscar Wilde's wit and Japanese aphorisms. Stitching together observations, statistics, and personal encounters with meditative precision, Iyer depicts a paradoxical culture that finds communion in silence, passion in solitude, and animation in lifeless objects. People act out their fantasies in love-hotels; businesses endear themselves to the public with cartoon mascots, and deceased family members are spoken to as though they're still alive. The longer narratives recount Iyer's often humorous attempts to integrate into Japanese life. A call to his local Apple store turns into a days-long misadventure illustrating the painstaking nature of service in Japan. Elsewhere, he explores Naoshima, an island famous for its immersive art museums, and reflects on the blurred line between art and nature. 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.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The accomplished journalist and author, who has lived in Japan for more than 30 years, pursues the elusive Japanese character.With an elegant, understated manner, Iyer (Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, 2019, etc.) offers poignant reflections on his adopted country and its maddening contradictions and shifting parts. He moves from the public to the private realms, ambling among themes such as travel, dress, animism, language, role-playing, and playing ball. He often inserts a quote that has nothing to do with Japan but that sizes up the place and sense perfectlye.g., he cites Oscar Wilde, who "saw the folds within emotions and knew that social life was a theater where the emotions are very real." Iyer's subtle observations reveal a great deal about what is beyond the surface of how some Westerners view the Japanese"as robots," which the author explains to be "less because the Japan are so machinelike and dependable than because inanimate things in Japan possess so much spirit and life." Iyer marvels at the "culture of shared obedience" and service; at the country's astonishing number of vending machines and every imaginable kind of convenience store; and at the company called Family Romance, which employs 1,400 actors "to be family members for clients who are going through hard times." Being in Japan reminded the author of his time visiting West Point Military Academy: "the courtesy, the sense of orderheld up by an unbudging sense of hierarchythe devotion to tradition," and also how the cadets "were brought together into a unitthat spoke for a commitment to something larger than themselves." Iyer also sees the troubling flip side to this "streamlined" and cooperative society, such as its exclusivity and insularity, which keep it "out of step with the larger global community," especially in its treatment of women, outsiders, and minorities.Marvelously nuanced reflections on a nation "in constant motion." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.