Japanese for Travellers

Review by Philip Blazdell

I was very excited to receive this slim, yet elegant volume in the post. The premise was beguiling: 'Katie Kitamura is speeding across Japan on a train to Osaka to visit her parents. The landscape and the journey evoke everything from her distant childhood memories to the tumultuous years in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. As she tries to reconcile the vibrancy of Japan's contemporary pop culture with the unrecounted trauma of its past, she also struggles to determine how she belongs in a country where, as a Japanese-American, she is at once an insider and an outsider,' and yet the author has produced a book that is a barely readable collection of fragmented images, part-baked ideas and stolid prose. In fact, this book is so poor, that half way through I lost the will to live and had to go and clean my house less I slipped into a coma.

The author, who would have greatly benefited from hefty use of the red pen, seems to think that using one hundred words when two or three could do is the way to pad out what could have actually been a half decent book. I actually had to wonder if the author had just padded out a short magazine article into an excruciatingly long read or really wanted to show off the benefits of her multiple academic degrees by pummelling the reader into submission with her vocabulary.

However, there is no insight here, no great breakthrough of understanding and no great understanding of Japan is shown (for example the author refers to Bullet Trains when no one in Japan or of Japanese experience would refer to them as anything else but shinkansen.) The author's reading and understanding of Japan is so limited that she is forced to spend pages regurgitating the numerous clichés of Japan.

Kitamura might be a brilliant writer and this work clearly shows some ambition but she still has a long way to go and needs to learn that less is often more. There are many better books on Japan and this tome should be of only limited interest to travellers in the region.

• Japanese for Travellers by Katie Kitamura