A Beginner’s Guide to Japan

Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020

How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem?
Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon?
Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect?

After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before.

'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pico Iyer is the author of more than a dozen books which have been translated into twenty-three languages. His four recent TED Talks have received more than eight million views so far. In the summer of 2019, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel Singapore. An essayist for Time magazine since 1986, Iyer writes regularly for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Granta and more than 200 magazines around the world.