Masks

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masks

Title: Masks
Japanese Title: 女面 (Onnamen)
Author: Enchi Fumiko (円地 文子)
Translator: Juliet Winters Carpenter
Publication Year: 1983 (America); 1958 (Japan)
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 141

Juliet Winters Carpenter, the translator of Enchi Fumiko’s novel Masks, is one of the most eloquent translators of Japanese literature alive today. Carpenter has translated everything from Tawara Machi’s groundbreaking collection of tanka poetry, Salad Anniversary (Sarada kinenbi, 1987) to Asa Nonami’s hard-boiled police thriller The Hunter (Kohoeru kiba, 1996). My advice to all lovers of Japanese literature would be: if Juliet Winters Carpenter has translated it, you need to read it!

Enchi Fumiko is one of the most highly regarded writers of literary fiction in Japan. Her father was a scholar of classical Japanese literature, and Enchi grew up devouring the books in his library, from the medieval Tales of Moonlight and Rain to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Her pen name, Fumiko, means “child of letters” or “child of literature.” When she grew up, she undertook the translation of the monumental eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji. She is famous for incorporating allusions to classical literature into her own fiction, which was highly praised by writers like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Mishima Yukio.

Enchi’s work is known for its tightly woven plots, subtle writing, strong visual imagery, and masterful use of symbolism. An Enchi novel is like a structuralist literary critic’s dream come true. There is an incredible amount of information packed within each paragraph, and her novels and stories have inspired a wealth of interpretations. Enchi is an intellectual of the highest magnitude yet also possesses the ability to imbue her fiction with great emotional weight.

Although Enchi is primarily known in Japan for her novel The Waiting Years (Onnazaka, 1939), for which she won the prestigious Noma Literary Prize, Masks has its own spooky charms. Although the work’s title refers to the masks of Noh drama, particularly the “madwoman” masks that lend their names to the chapter titles, the novel draws many of its themes and allusions from the Tale of Genji. The parallels Enchi draws between The Tale of Genji and the cultural climate of postwar Japan are fascinating. Not only does the author create distinct connections between her characters and the characters of the Heian romance, but she also makes use of themes such as spirit possession and romantic substitution to subvert the gendered expectations of the patriarchal and misogynistic societies that hold sway in both The Tale of Genji and postwar Japan.

Although Masks is primarily narrated from the point of view of a male college professor named Ibuki, who is cast in the role of Genji, its true hero is an older woman named Mieko, a powerful Rokujō-like figure with a painful past and veiled intentions. As Mieko’s daughter-in-law and protégée, Yasuko, explains to Ibuki,

Believe me, she is a woman of far greater complexity than you – or anyone – realize. The secrets inside her mind are like flowers in a garden at nighttime, filling the darkness with perfume. Oh, she has extraordinary charm. Next to that secret charm of hers, her talent as a poet is really only a sort of costume.

Masks centers around Mieko’s attempt to use this “secret charm” of hers in order to set into motion a deep and complex scheme of revenge, creation, and rebirth. What Mieko is able to accomplish by the end of the novel is both terrible and beautiful. If nothing else, the events that occur during the final dramatic quickening of the work are thought-provoking and will force the reader to consider multiple ethical questions.

Masks is perhaps one of the best introductions to Japanese literature, and more specifically Japanese women’s literature, ever published in translation. No matter where your literary interests lie, this is a novel you need to experience.

Twinkle Twinkle

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twinkle-twinkle

Title: Twinkle Twinkle
Japanese Title: きらきらひかる
Author: Ekuni Kaori (江国香織)
Translator: Emi Shimokawa
Publication Year: 2003 (America); 1991 (Japan)
Pages: 171

About thirty pages into Twinkle Twinkle, I thought to myself, “Are all contemporary Japanese books written by women this depressing?” It’s an interesting literary trend. In America, writers like Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, 2005) and Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees, 2004) craft literary paeans to female sisterhood, hope, and endurance, while contemporary Japanese female authors seem to be losing the struggle to gaman, or to deal with the hardships presented to them by Japanese society until they are able to claim some immaterial reward in the far-off future. In short, the new breed of Japanese women writers seems to be cracking under the strain of contemporary Japanese society, which has been slow to acknowledge new gender roles, even as the economic structures that have supported these gender roles have crumbled. Ekuni Kaori’s novel Twinkle Twinkle perspicuously demonstrates the effects of this societal paradox.

Twinkle Twinkle follows the fortunes of the newlywed couple Shoko and Mutsuki. Mutsuki is gay and quite in love with his boyfriend. Shoko is highly emotionally unstable and is quite open about the fact that she doesn’t want to be in a romantic relationship with anyone. Although the pair lives together, and although they are quite affectionate towards one another, their marriage is nothing more than a legal convenience. In fact, the only reason they agreed to marry in the first place was to escape from the pressure imposed upon them by their parents. Through the first months of their married life, Shoko and Mutsuki make friends and lose friends, battle their respective families, and learn how to live with one another in the strange situation they’ve created.

Because Shoko and Mutsuki take turns narrating the chapters, the reader is able to gain a very interesting perspective into their relationship and their individual personalities. I found myself becoming frustrated with the characters and sympathizing with them in turn. Mutsuki is kind, but passive and somewhat clueless. Shoko displays the classic symptoms of borderline personality disorder, which occasionally devolves into depression and alcoholism, but she is honest, true to her herself, and genuinely means well in her interactions with others. Both of the two main characters, as well as the cast of supporting characters, are expertly realized, and I felt that I came to know them quite well over the course of the novel, as if perhaps they were friends of mine in real life.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Yes, the characters occasionally have fun and enjoy each other’s company, but the challenges they face are quite real, extremely frustrating, and never entirely resolved. Although the novel has something of a happy ending, I found myself fearing for the fate Shoko and Mutsuki several years down the road. Also, I found it hard to accept Shoko’s extreme behavior at times, and the all too accurate portray of her emotional instability was difficult to deal with. The hardheadedness of her traditional Japanese parents was even worse.

Overall, though, I think Twinkle Twinkle provides a welcome antidote to the bubblegum fluff of shōjo manga, “light novels,” and the works of novelists like Yoshimoto Banana. Don’t let the bright cover of this book fool you – Ekuni’s novel contains more insight into the dark side of contemporary Japanese society than you may find comfortable.

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

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Tile: Origins of Japanese Literature
Japanese Title: 日本近代文学の起源
Author: Karatani Kōjin (柄谷行人)
Translator: Brett De Barry, et al.
Publication Year: 1993 (America); 1980 (Japan)
Pages: 219

Is this book really an academic work? I wonder. If I had to guess, though, I would have to say no. Origins of Japanese Literature belongs to a genre of non-fiction writing called hyōron in Japan. This sort of writing, while focusing on an academic topic, is more of a discussion than a well-researched argument with a thesis. The writer, generally a professor, draws on his or her vast knowledge of a subject in order to discuss it at length, centering on a few key ideas that other, more scrupulous scholars, can be inspired by.

The chapters in a book of the hyōron genre tend to be only loosely tied together thematically, as they were written over the course of several years in the life of the writer for various occasions. One chapter may have been an afterward to a zenshū (“Collected Works”), one may have been a guest lecture, and another may have actually been written as an academic paper. Footnotes and other references are few and far between, although many texts are quoted at length. As a result, reading a book of hyōron is like sitting down with a professor over a cup of tea in his study and listening to him talk about whatever he finds interesting at the moment. If you share the same interests and know enough about the topic to catch the references, it can be quite an enjoyable experience.

Karatani Kōjin is, for the moment, very interested in Japanese modern literature, or the literature of Japan during the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods. During the Meiji period especially, Japan underwent the process of modernization at an extraordinarily rapid pace. Along with Western science and technology came modern ideas such as “nation,” “an interior self,” and “literature.” The formation of “literature” is especially interesting to Karatani, because, through literature, we can see the development of so other important elements of modernity.

If Karatani can be said to have a central thesis in this work, it would involve something that he calls “The Discovery of the Landscape,” which is the title of his first chapter. Before the onset of modernization, Japanese artists and poets, such as Buson and Bashō, understood the physical landscape of the natural world to be a reflection of their inner selves, which extended outward indefinitely. In pre-modern literature, for example, there is no distinction made between narration and speech, nor is there any distinction between the voices of different characters. Karatani argues that, during the process of modernization, Japanese artists and writers came to see the physical landscape as something outside of themselves that they could depict objectively and realistically. Other people, in the form of fictional characters, could be treated in the same way. Naturally enough, this discovery of exteriority led to a discovery of interiority, and these two phenomena together worked to create all sorts of modern concepts, such as illness, confession, the child, and literature itself. It’s an interesting argument, even if you don’t happen to agree with it.

For those of you interested in modern Japanese literature, Origins of Japanese Literature reads like a “Greatest Hits” playlist, as Karatani touches on most of the canonical modern authors while delving not so much into their fictional work as into the fragments of literary thought and criticism they left behind. Brett De Barry and her team of translators has done an excellent job of rendering Karatani’s text into polished and enjoyable English, and Ayako Kano in particular has undertaken the grueling task of annotating the text. The translators have helpfully provided a glossary of key figures and movements in the back of the book, and Fredric Jameson has not so helpfully provided an interesting yet characteristically unintelligible foreword at the front.

Real World

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real-world3

Tile: Real World
Japanese Title: リアル ワールド (Riaru wārudo
Author: Kirino Natsuo (桐野夏生)
Translator: Philip Gabriel
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 2003 (Japan)
Pages: 208

Having already reviewed Rebecca Copeland’s translation of Grotesque, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and write an entry for Philip Gabriel’s new translation of Kirino Natsuo’s novel Real World. Real World is not as long or as grand of a story as Grotesque; and, as a result, it is much less intense. I would argue, however, that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Grotesque is extremely graphic and upsetting for hundreds of pages. Real World is about 250 pages shorter, less graphic, and less upsetting. That being said, it is an extraordinarily dark novel, and just as heartbreaking as Out and Grotesque.

Fans of fragmented narratives will appreciate the structure of Real World, which is divided into eight different chapters, each narrated by a different character. The characters in question are Worm, an underachieving student at an elite high school who “snaps” and murders his mother, and a group of four high school girls who help him run from the law. Of these five characters, Worm is the least interesting. Yuzan is a lesbian from the wrong side of the tracks who has tried to find love in Tokyo but failed, leaving her disillusioned with life. Kirarin is a perfect princess in school but leads a shady side life of compensated dating in Tokyo. Terauchi is smart kid with a bright future, but she has been deeply scarred by her mother’s extramarital affair. The “main” narrator, who narrates the first and last of the eight chapters, is Ninna Hori. Ninna is perhaps the most normal of the five, but she too is more than a little jaded with the social roles she is expected to fill, and her comments about herself and her friends are full of insight. She is also the only character left to pick up the pieces at the end of the novel.

I found Real World to be not only an engrossing read but also a refreshing look into Japanese youth culture, which is so often glimpsed through rose-tinted anime sunglasses in America. Being a high school student is no more glamorous in Japan than it is in America, and Japanese students have just as many problems as America students (and perhaps more). Moreover, Japan is not just a country of cherry blossoms and vermillion torii gates but also of ugly convenience stores and crappy train station cram schools. Kirino’s novel is superlatively anti-romantic. Please don’t let the topic of high school students allow you to think for a moment that Real World is a novel for kids; it doesn’t get much more “adult” than this. Each narrative voice is realistic, mature, and fully-realized, and, even though the subject matter is undeniably gloomy, the quality of Kirino’s writing (and Gabriel’s translation) makes this book and extremely interesting and enjoyable read.

The Story of a Single Woman

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Title: The Story of a Single Woman
Japanese Title: 或る一人の女の話
Author: Uno Chiyo (宇野千代)
Translator: Rebecca Copeland
Publication Year: 1992 (America); 1971 (Japan)
Pages: 132

Translator Rebecca Copeland aptly remarks in her introduction to The Story of a Single Woman that this novella “is the Uno Chiyo story, the story she has told countless times before in earlier works.” Indeed, this semi-confessional narrative of love pursued against overwhelming societal resistance runs not just through Uno’s oeuvre but through the work of pre-bubble women writers in general, at least as it is portrayed in anthologies like Noriko Mizuta Lippet and Kyoko Iriye Selden’s Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction. What is special about The Story of a Single Woman, however, is how Uno is able to recount her narrative in a dashing and gallant narrative voice with a minimum of self-pity.

The novella’s heroine, Kazue, is born and grows up in a tiny mountain village named Takamori (not to be confused with the city on the island of Kyūshū) in the early twentieth century. Her mother dies when she is still an infant, and her father, a sake brewer of some renown, quickly remarries himself to a young woman. Oddly enough, it is not Kazue’s stepmother who harasses the child, but rather her father, who controls the family with an iron will and forces everyone to behave with perfect decorum, even as his fortunes decline. At the behest of her father, Kazue is married off to one of her cousins while still in her early teens; but, because her young husband is not yet interested in girls, Kazue walks back home and never looks back. When her father dies, she takes a job as a teacher in a larger town. Perhaps her newfound independence goes to her head, because she soon starts visiting a young male teacher at his residence, unchaperoned. The malicious gossip created by this affair forces Kazue to resign her job. She retaliates by moving to the newly colonized state of Korea to launch a career as a journalist.

This is merely the start of Kazue’s amorous adventures. Throughout the novel, she is brave and cheerful and never defeated, even though her many lovers, who also must yield to the social constraints of the time, abandon her one after the other. Scattered throughout the account of Kazue’s attempts to establish herself as a serious author while following her heart from one relationship to the next are vivid and lovely descriptions of life in the Japanese countryside and cities that would be forever shattered by the Pacific War and its legacy.

Overall, The Story of a Single Woman is a quick and enjoyable read. Even though its tone carries the somewhat Victorian literary flavor of the immediate postwar period, it manages to be quite erotic at times. Very occasionally, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. What I found interesting about this book is that, although the real-life Uno Chiyo is infamous as a femme fatale, her literary avatar Kazue comes across mainly as a brave young woman who cannot help but suffer from her insistence on playing a man’s game in a man’s world. Although this story doesn’t have a happy ending (although I should add that it doesn’t have a sad ending, either), it is remarkably true to life and even a little uplifting in its honesty.

Warriors of Art

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Title: Warriors of Art
Author: Yamaguchi Yumi (山口裕美)
Translator: Arthur Tanaka
Publication Year: 2007 (America)
Pages: 175

Warriors of Art is, simply put, a beautiful, interesting, and exceptionally well-edited introduction to contemporary Japanese artists. The forty artists presented by the book represent a wide range of styles, media, and themes. A large percentage of the artists are internationally renowned and probably somewhat familiar to many Americans, who should be able to identify their styles if not necessarily their names. The book is illustrated with works instantly accessible to the casual reader, and the image quality could not be better. Every image has been reproduced in full color (where applicable) against a white background. At $35 (and deeply discounted on Amazon), Warriors of Art is also available at an affordable price.

The five page general introduction to the collection is promptly followed by a parade of artists appearing in alphabetical order. Each artist has been allotted four pages, the first of which contains a half-page, two column introduction. I have to say that, even though I generally don’t find much use for the text in art books, I genuinely enjoyed reading each of the artist introductions. These introductions put the work of the artist into perspective with biographical details and offer a few extremely apt interpretive comments, referring only to the pieces reproduced within the book. An average of five works follow each artist’s textual introduction, although the number tends of vary from artist to artist.

As for the actual content of the book, I found it extremely disturbing. Sometimes I was mesmerized by a piece, my reaction being something like “!!!!!!!!!.” Sometimes I found myself quickly turning the page because I found myself deeply upset by a particular work. As Yamaguchi says in her introduction to the book, “A glance at the work of the forty artists introduced in the book reveals recurring images of the cute, the grotesque, the erotic, the violent.” I think her description of “recurring images of” might more accurately read “a constant and overwhelming deluge of” images of cuteness and terror, eroticism and subtle (and not so subtle) aggression. In fact, one of the first plates in the book, an anime-style picture by Aida Makoto called The Giant Member Fuji versus King Gidora, depicts a female character from the anime Ultraman crying as she is both disemboweled and sexually violated by a golden hydra of Godzilla fame. Things carry on in much the same vein from there.

Even though Warriors of Art is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart (or the underage), the images are colorful, eye-popping, and deeply engaging. Questions of national identity, sexual identity, and personal identity are tackled again and again by these artists, whose experiments with style, composition, and color yield shocking results. Even a brief look at the works in this book calls the duality of high art and popular culture into question. Certainly, even though the entirety of Warriors of Art can be read less than two hours, I found myself captivated with it for days, returning to it for fresh surprises and new insights.

After Dark

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Title: After Dark
Japanese Title: アフターダーク
Author: Murakami Haruki (村上春樹)
Translator: Jay Rubin
Publication Year: 2007 (America); 2004 (Japan)
Pages: 244

I honestly can’t decide whether I like After Dark. With a few major exceptions (like “Barn Burning”), I don’t like Murakami’s short stories. According to several interviews, Murakami considers himself a novelist and primarily uses short stories as practice. Although his short stories are more polished than he gives himself credit for, I can understand why Murakami would say that. Compared to the huge imagination and forceful imagery of his novels, Murakami’s short stories tend to feel somewhat shallow.

To me, After Dark felt more like a short story than a novel. Perhaps the problem is the length of the book. Weighing in at approximately 250 double-spaced pages, Murakami’s latest novel should perhaps be more properly considered a novella. Another consideration might be the novel’s timeframe. The main action of After Dark takes place in the span of seven hours. To be precise, it starts 11:59pm and ends at 6:52am, as the chapter headings (each labeled by hours and minutes) inform us. Within this short period, the reader learns a great deal about the book’s protagonists, including a brief outline of the more sordid highlights of their pasts. Unfortunately, I was so entranced by these characters that I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to see them in action, I wanted to hear their voices, and I wanted to see them standing around cooking spaghetti. I wanted to learn their life histories slowly, and not in bullet points.

My main concern with the book, however, was the treatment of what I like to call the “Murakami myth.” A recurring theme throughout almost every Murakami novel is the woman who disappears into the neverland of her unconscious. After Dark’s disappearing woman takes the form of Eri Asai, the older sister of one of the two protagonists. Eri, who has fallen into a deep sleep from which she will not wake, is the subject of the novel’s even-numbered chapters, which detail the uncanny events which befall her during the night. Although Murakami never resolves the mysteries surrounding his disappearing women, I felt that After Dark’s Eri subplot was more undeveloped than usual. In fact, it left me quite frustrated, and it felt almost randomly thrown into the main action of the story. Although the Murakami myth generally adds a wonderful level of depth to his novels, I felt that, in this case, it was a misguided attempt to flesh out a novella that perhaps should have more properly been a short story.

That being said, the main action of After Dark is more than interesting enough to justify the existence of the book. In short, two lost souls manage to connect in the late night / early morning hours of Shinjuku. Several passages, such as the description of a Japanese Denny’s and the interactions between the employees of a love hotel, stand out like gems. The vast majority of this book doesn’t sparkle, though; it glows softly like street lamps, or eerily like the static on a TV screen. In other words, this isn’t one of Murakami’s masterworks, but it does have a quiet charm that should appeal even to those of you who aren’t necessarily Murakami fans.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno

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Title: Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook
Authors: Patrick Macias and Izumi Evers
Illustrations: Kazumi Nonaka
Publication Year: 2007 (America)
Pages: 147

When a friend gave me this garishly pink little book as a present, I saw the name “Patrick Macias” on the cover and immediately prepared to be disappointed. Macias has authored and co-authored numerous books on Japanese popular culture. Two that might be familiar are Cruising the Anime City: An Insider’s Guide to Neo-Tokyo (2004) and TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion (2001). These books are not only boring but were also outdated on the day they were published, primarily because Macias’s fascination with Japan’s popular culture during the seventies and early eighties fails to hold the attention of those of us who want to know what’s going on in Japan right now. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that Macias’s earlier books might have been better served if they were marketed as cultural histories instead of as guides to contemporary popular culture.

While it’s true that Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is only up-to-date as of around 2005, and while it’s true that this book contains quite a bit of cultural history, I found it to be one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a long time. Maybe it’s because of all of the bright and eye-popping photography. Maybe it’s because of Kazumi Nonaka’s fun and plentiful illustrations. Maybe it’s because of the concise prose and scandalous quotations. Or maybe it’s because of all the pink. In any case, once I picked up this cute and trim guidebook, I had a hard time putting it down.

One thing that I found especially charming about this book were all the suggestions the authors offer as to how to achieve these schoolgirl looks yourself. Far from being helpful, these sections actually serve to pinpoint how outrageous the fashions are. Another fun, recurring segment are the illustrated “A Day in the Life” inserts, which usually end with captions like “Mom says, ‘Take a shower! You two smell awful!’”

So, if you’ve always wanted to know what’s going on inside the heads of the Gothic-Lolita princesses, or if you’ve always been curious about how exactly the Mamba girls put on their makeup, this is the book for you. Even if you’ve never had the leisure to wonder about those things but have spent time in Tokyo, this is also probably the book for you. And if you really, really love pink, then I honestly can’t recommend this book enough. Go out and get it before it goes out of print. For the win. I’m serious.

Grotesque

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Title: Grotesque
Japanese Title: グロテスク
Author: Kirino Natsuo (桐野夏生)
Translator: Rebecca Copeland
Publication Year: 2008 (America); 2003 (Japan)
Pages:467

First of all, I would like to say that Grotesque is a very, very dark novel. It’s also filled with descriptions of all sorts of physical and emotional abuse, as well as numerous scenes of disgusting, extremely upsetting sex. In short, this novel is not for the faint of heart.

The novel essentially consists of the nameless narrator’s account of the murder of her younger sister, Yuriko, and her pseudo-friend from high school, Kazue, each of whom were marred by deep psychological imperfections. These emotional deficiencies were exacerbated by the harsh and competitive nature of the exclusive private high school that the two attended. In the end, both Yuriko and Kazue became prostitutes and were both ultimately murdered by the same unsavory client.

Putting the sensationalism of the novel aside, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Grotesque is the voice of the narrator. The reader quickly becomes inured to the sex and violence, but the cold and bitter tone of the narrator, as well as her pronounced disgust with her fellow human beings, continue to add a tinge of horror to the novel until the very last page. The narrator occasionally interrupts herself to present “evidence” concerning the two murder cases: the diary of her sister, the testimony of the murder suspect, and a letter from her old classmate. These stories within the story allow the reader to experience the voices of the novel’s other main characters, each of whom is just as disturbing as the main narrator.

In America, Kirino is mainly known for her first translated work, a massive chunk of a murder novel called Out (アウト, translated by Stephen Snyder). Like Out, Grotesque is long and depressing, and it would be a stretch to call any of the characters sympathetic. Unlike Out, however, Grotesque has a much smoother style, courtesy of translator Rebecca Copeland, and is therefore much easier to read. Also, compared to Out, the characters of Grotesque are much more artistically presented. Namely, in this novel, Kirino chooses to explore her characters’ depravity instead of merely wallowing in it. Moreover, I found the portion of the book that concerns the narrators’ experiences at their high school to be extremely entertaining. As I said earlier, Grotesque is not for the squeamish, but those readers who can deal with the darkness will be pleased to find an occasional glimmer of good writing and entrancing character study.

I should note that the version of Grotesque I reviewed is the British version, which I purchased in Japan. The American version of the book has been edited to remove all references to male child prostitution. Don’t let this deter you from reading the novel, though – the passages that were cut aren’t particularly riveting or important.

Old Kyoto

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Old Kyoto, by Diane Durston

Title: Old Kyoto
Author: Diane Durston
Photographs: Lucy Birmingham
Publication Year: 1986 (originally), 2005 (revised edition)
Pages: 244

Though I am in Kyoto
I miss Kyoto…
Cry of the cuckoo

This poem by Bashō begins the “Afterward” to Diane Durston’s guidebook to the ancient capital city of Kyoto. I believe it’s a fitting epigraph, as this book obviously wasn’t written for tourists. Even though it occasionally attempts to make provisions for day trippers or overnight guests who only speak a small amount of Japanese, I wouldn’t recommend this book to a casual traveler. To those of you who have lived in Kyoto but have since returned home, I would offer another epigraph: Ignorance is bliss.

I spent a year in Kyoto three years ago, and for me this book doesn’t evoke nostalgia as much as it inspires regret. The sembe store right next to the Starbucks. The bamboo weaver’s studio on the way to McDonald’s. The famous ramen stand right next to the movie theater. All the secrets and culture and history that I just didn’t see. If you still live in Kyoto, or if you’re planning on living in Kyoto, or if you’re never, ever going to even visit Kyoto, this is a wonderful book. If you’ve had your chance and can’t go back, or can only spend a day or two, I’d think twice before tempting yourself with Old Kyoto.

One of the nice things about this book, however, is that it’s not simply a travel guide. Durston has divided the book into sections of the city (central, east, north, west, and south) and divided each section into shop, restaurant, and ryokan listings. Each listing is fairly long (three pages), so Durston has plenty of space to explain what’s interesting about the particular location. If a certain ryokan is one of the most exclusive hotels in all of Japan, Durston is going to tell you what’s so amazing about it. If the owner of a particular restaurant has a strong personality, she’s going to tell you about what a character he is. If a craftsman’s shop has been in business for hundreds of years, she’s going to tell you about the shop’s history. If a ceramic dealer specializes in tanuki statues, she’s going to tell you all about the tanuki culture in Japan. Durston is supremely knowledgeable, yet always humble and engaging. Moreover, I think she has written a wonderful essay on the history of Kyoto, which serves as an introduction to the book.

Old Kyoto is so interesting and so well-written that I believe it’s something that should be read cover to cover. The numerous photographs that accompany each entry, although printed in black and white, are a lovely bonus. For anyone who enjoys reading about Japan, or for anyone who enjoys reading good travel writing, I highly recommend this book. Get it before it goes out of print again!