A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

October 6, 3 pm Visit our website for venue: livetalksla.org

Pico Iyer is the author of eight works of nonfiction and two novels. A writer for Time since 1982, he’s a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, and the Financial Times.

The acclaimed author of The Art of Stillness offers a unique, indispensable guide to the enigma of contemporary Japan. After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer can use everything from anime to Oscar Wilde to show how his adopted home is both hauntingly familiar and the strangest place on earth. A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations 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.

“Arguably the world’s greatest living travel writer.” —Outside