The best books that evoke a deep, personal discovery of Japan

Fêted essayist and travel scribe Pico Iyer is smitten in this account of his first year living in Japan. He comes to study the mysteries of Zen at a monastery in Kyoto, but the lofty quest doesn’t last long. Everything changes for the young narrator when he meets and falls in love with the lady of the book’s title who would later become his wife. Alongside telling the tale of this budding romance, Iyer delicately shares his wide-eyed discovery of Japan, from the quirky to the sublime, making the book a love letter of sorts to the country itself. Even today, the book’s sense of wonder conjures memories of my own experience arriving in Japan, when I too was charmed by the magic and newness of it all.    

In this award-winning memoir, first penned in Japanese, artist, collector, and Japanologist Alex Kerr recounts three decades of experience backstage of Japan’s rich cultural and artistic life. He rubs shoulders with Kabuki stars, art dealers, and literati, leads readers through Osaka’s demimonde, and pulls back the curtain on Tokyo boardrooms during the dizzying bubble years. But the heart of the book revolves around something more ephemeral: an ode to Japan’s fading traditional culture, found in the secluded temples of Nara, Kyoto’s hidden corners, and most palpably, Shikoku’s remote, vine-tangled Iya Valley, which Kerr made his home. This book gave me a profoundly nuanced and personal view of Japan’s well-worn beauty––slowly conceding to modernity––that I needed as a student in hypermodern Tokyo two decades ago.

Written by the 20th century’s leading interpreter of things Japanese, this travel memoir has a timeless, elegiac quality. Donald Richie lived in Tokyo, but he based this work on a series of trips through the waterways and fishing villages of the glittering Inland Sea. Beyond his beautiful sketches of the seascape itself, his warm, human interactions with fishermen, aunties, merchants, and monks give voice to a disappearing side of Japan. They also serve as a mirror into the metaphorical inland sea within himself––the good, bad, and ugly––which he freely reveals. Seeing the world Richie describes vanish evermore in the decades since, the book’s resonance only grows with age. This is why I find myself diving back into it again and again.

This travelogue brilliantly narrates Alan Booth’s southward trek across Japan, end to end, from Cape Soya in Hokkaido to Cape Sata in Kyushu. The book’s subtitle, A 2,000 Mile Walk Through Japan, speaks volumes. The journey, which some would call masochistic, is practically measured in blisters. We see Booth, fluent in Japanese, trudge through rain and shine along backcountry roads, from greasy spoons to lonesome karaoke bars, collapsing into countless futons along the way. His journey comes to life with colorful characters, boozy local festivals, and pithy realizations about his adopted homeland, at turns entertaining, illuminating, and hilarious. For me, this book captures the joy of discovering the salty, unexpected side of Japan. It also cements Booth’s status as one of the (unsung) travel writing greats.  

When it comes to the seasons, Japan often conjures images of the pink, transient wave of cherry blossoms that ripples through the islands each spring. Iyer, however, suggests in this mature follow-up to The Lady and the Monk that autumn, with its blazing yellow ginkos and red maples, is when Japan’s essence most clearly shines through. He brings us into a sleepy corner of Nara where he lives with his wife Hiroko, plays ping-pong with spry local seniors, and grapples with the decline of his mother-in-law and sudden loss of his father-in-law. At its core, this is a book about ageing, time, and the quintessentially Japanese knack for seeing beauty in impermanence. Having cycled through more than a decade of autumns in Japan myself, Iyer’s musings ring true.