Michael Booth is the author of seven non-fiction books including the award-winning, international best-sellers The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, and Sushi and Beyond: What the Japanese Know About Cooking. His books have been translated into more than 15 languages, the most recent is Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines around the world, including The Sunday Times, Condé Nast Traveller, Asahi Shimbun, and Politiken. He is the Denmark correspondent for Monocle magazine and Monocle 24 Radio.
By Michael Booth
From the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a lively tour through Japan, Korea, and China, exploring the intertwined cultures and often fraught history of these neighboring countries. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, is the enmity between these three "tiger" nations, and what prevents them from making peace.
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By Haruki Murakami
I suspect for a lot of people this will be the first fiction by a Japanese author they read. Murakami’s world can be dream-like, sometimes supernatural so, often, you don’t always notice the emotional impact of his stories. Norwegian Wood is one of his more ‘straightforward’ narratives, a timeless depiction of young love and all its agonies.
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By Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori
What stays with you long after you read this is the authentic voice of the protagonist, and the compelling attention to detail of her life. Like all the best fiction, Murata-san takes you to an unfamiliar place, and makes it real and relevant.
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By Yasunari Kawabata
Sometimes the Nobel committee does get it right. There is a stillness and a rare beauty to this tale of an ageing master of the board game go, fighting a losing battle, literally and figuratively. It manages to say so much about traditional Japanese mores and culture.
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By David Mitchell
Mitchell is one of the greatest living English novelists, a virtuoso prose stylist and compelling explorer of ideas. He has often written about Japan, where he once lived. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet evokes a very curious place and time in Japanese history, the late eighteenth century, when the country was mostly closed to the world, apart from Dejima, a tiny man-made island in Nagasaki harbour which served as a quarantined Dutch trading post. I could also add another of his books set in contemporary Japan, ‘number9dream’ - a vivid, violent quest set in the Tokyo underworld.
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By Min Jin Lee
Until I started researching my own book about East Asia, I was quite ignorant about the experience of the Koreans in Japan, the ‘Zainichi’. This heart-rending family saga spanning most of the 20th century gave me greater insight than any history book.
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