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fat_chris · Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 3198 Location: Beijing

I am currently reading a riveting book about the yakuza, the sex trade, and the life of journalists in Japan:

"Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" (2009) by Jake Adelstein

It's an incredible read that I am tearing through.

Another one of my favorites is Karl Taro Greenfeld's "Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation" (1994), a collection of biographical sketches detailing random societal aspects of 1990s Japan.

So...what are your recommended and favorite reads pertaining to Japan?

Regards,
fat_chris

P.S. Does anyone else have trouble getting the search function to work?

stevenbhow · Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 58

Tokyo Underground is very good. There is a movie in the works supposedly.

Glenski · Joined: 15 Jan 2003 Posts: 12844 Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN

http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=43694&highlight=books+japan
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=49042&highlight=books+japan

steki47 · Joined: 20 Apr 2008 Posts: 1029 Location: BFE Inaka

I loved "Speed Tribes". Really great snippets of a Japan I would probably never get to see normally.
Just finished reading "Grotesque" by Natsuo Kirino. Quite intense crime thriller. The author is a bit of a feminist with an ax to grind and it comes through in this novel. Very dark, without hope. None of the characters are "good" in anyone's standards.

fat_chris · Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 3198 Location: Beijing

Thanks for those links Glenski. Much appreciated.

Regards,
fat_chris

Threnody · Joined: 13 Nov 2009 Posts: 26 Location: Pennsylvania

yakinsak · Joined: 30 Aug 2009 Posts: 3

Yeah, the search function doesn't work for me either. Hitting 'search' just takes me to a blank page with 'done' in the status bar. :/

cangel · Joined: 12 May 2003 Posts: 74 Location: Jeonju, South Korea

Nearly a decade ago, as I was preparing for my JET tenure, I read a book called, Beyond Sushi. This is a book put together using an ALTs letters home. It was a nice, light introduction to Japan. Pretty funny, at least at the time.

wintersweet · Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 7:29 pm Post subject:

Speed Tribes was very entertaining, but it struck me as essentially fiction written by someone with a terrible grasp of Japanese. I can't remember all of my criticisms of it--I reviewed it for a course on modern Japan in college a couple years after it came out, more than 10 years ago--but I do remember that there were a lot of Japanese errors in it. And my Japanese was even more minimal then.

The quote on the back from William Gibson makes me crack up because it's exactly the sort of thing he'd crib from. (He's a good writer but an awful researcher.) Very Happy

iverin · Joined: 26 Jun 2008 Posts: 111 Location: Ontario

I've read both Kirino's Out and The Real World but have been unable to find Grotesque but I'm very interested in reading it. My local library, which is where I got the other two books, only stocks those two and it doesn't look like they'll be getting any other of Kirino's books any time soon.