A Beginner’’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

The essential introduction to Japan, site of the 2020 Olympics, from "arguably the greatest living travel writer" (Outside Magazine)

After three decades in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country like few others. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he draws on his years of experience--his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections--to illuminate his adopted home like never before. This is a playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. Iyer's adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, make for a constantly surprising series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don't know Japan and to remind those who do of the wide range of fascinations the country and culture contain.

PICO IYER is the author of eight works of nonfiction and two novels. A writer for Time since 1982, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He splits his time between Nara, Japan, and the United States.