Japan for Book Lovers & Literary Travelers

About this book

Japan is the world's great reading journey: a river at Uji where the Tale of Genji ends, a barrier pass where poets announced themselves for a thousand years, a snow-country tunnel that opens a novel in a single sentence, castle towns that schooled Sōseki and exiled Ōgai, a lagoon that rose out of the sea after Bashō had already praised it. This guide gives the book lover and literary traveller 200 complete journeys, each built as a working method: the literary case for the ground, exactly how the journey is built around its text, its season and timing with its fallback, and the manners owed to the residents whose morning is your famous paragraph. The classical map from the Genji to the whole of the Narrow Road, Tokyo read quarter by quarter in prose, the modern authors' country from Hokkaido to Shikoku, journeys by kind of writing from haiku to the detective's timetable, the reading road of trains and ferries, literature in its seasons and special days, and a full handbook of local collection desks, graves, poem stones and notebook craft. Hours, fees and exhibition dates change, so none are asserted as fixed facts; every entry names the official source for its subject — while the durable part, how to plan, match, read and behave in any Japanese literary town, is guaranteed in full.