Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020
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.
'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.