Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Mark Robinson
Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook
.
A beautifully illustrated celebration of some of the author's
favourite Tokyo-based
izakaya
, with over sixty recipes for
their rustic food.
Robb Satterwhite
What's What in Japanese Restaurants
.
Handy guide to all things culinary; the menus annotated
with Japanese characters are particularly useful. Satterwhite,
a Tokyo-based epicure, is also the author of
Not Just a Good
Food Guide Tokyo
, one of the more up-to-date English guides
to the city's restaurant scene, and he also manages the
excellent resource
W
bento.com/tokyofood.html.
Julian Worrall and Erez Golani Solomon
Twenty-first
Century Tokyo: A Guide to Contemporary Architecture
. The
most up-to-date survey of some of the city's outstanding
modern buildings and structures. Also look out for the more
dated
Tokyo: A Guide to Recent Architecture
by Tajima Noriyuki.
JAPANESE FICTION
Mishima Yukio
After the Banquet, Confessions of Mask,
Forbidden Colours, The Sea of Fertility
. Novelist Mishima
sealed his notoriety by committing ritual suicide after
leading a failed military coup in 1970. He left behind a
highly respectable, if at times melodramatic, body of
literature, including some of Japan's finest postwar novels.
Themes of tradition, sexuality and militarism run through
many of his works.
Ì
Murakami Ryū
Coin Locker Babies
and
In the Miso
Soup
. Murakami burst onto Japan's literary scene in the
mid-1980s with
Almost Transparent Blue
, a hip tale of
student life mixing reality and fantasy.
Coin Locker Babies
is his most ambitious work, spinning a revenger's tragedy
about the lives of two boys dumped as babies in adjacent
coin lockers, while
In the Miso Soup
is a superior thriller
along the lines of
American Psycho
, set in Tokyo.
Kirino Natsuo
Out
. Four women working in a bentō
factory just outside Tokyo discover that committing
murder is both easier and much more complicated than
they could ever have imagined, in this dark, superior
thriller that mines a very dark seam of Japan's underbelly.
Follow-up books are
Grotesque
, about the deaths of two
Tokyo prostitutes, and
Real World
, a grim thriller about
alienated Japanese teenagers.
TOKYO IN FOREIGN FICTION
Ì
Alan Brown
Audrey Hepburn's Neck
. Beneath this rib-
tickling, acutely observed tale of a young guy from the
sticks adrift in big-city Tokyo are several important themes,
including the continuing impact of World War II and the
confused relationships between the Japanese and
gaijin
.
William Gibson
Idoru
. Love in the age of the computer
chip. Cyberpunk novelist Gibson's sci-fi vision of Tokyo's
hi-tech future - a world of non-intrusive DNA checks
at airports and computerized pop icons (the
idoru
of
the title) - rings disturbingly true. The hip thriller
Pattern
Recognition
is also partly set in Tokyo.
Johnathan Lee
Who is Mister Satoshi?
By turns intriguing,
funny and moving, if occasionally a little clichéd, this novel
follows a middle-aged man on a quest to find the addressee
on an unexplained package that belonged to his dead mother.
Ì
David Mitchell
Ghostwritten
and
number9dream
.
Mitchell made a splash with his debut
Ghostwritten
, a
dazzling collection of interlocked short stories, a couple
of which were set in Japan.
number9dream
, shortlisted for
the Booker prize in 2001, conjures up a postmodern Japan
of computer hackers, video games, gangsters and violence.
David Peace
Tokyo Year Zero
and
Occupied City
. The first
two instalments in Peace's crime trilogy set in Tokyo imme-
diately after the end of World War II. Never an easy read,
Peace's novels nonetheless impress with their attention to
detail, complex plots and compelling characters.
