A Beginner's Guide to Japan

A playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture

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.

Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020

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

'Both deep and witty ... Iyer makes a perfect cultural translator' Times Literary Supplement