Tokyo: Books: Tokyo Recommended Reading

Tokyo Recommended Reading

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami - Pick up any book by Murakami and you enter the surreal world of his fertile imagination. This one has a runaway-schoolboy hero, a baseball-obsessed trucker and talking cats. Though odd, Murakami’s books are totally beguiling. The author used to run a Tokyo jazz bar in Kokubunji before decamping to live and work in the United States, so his fictional oddballs may well be based on real-life urban encounters.

Samurai William, Giles Milton - The amazing true story of an English sailor in Elizabethan times who was shipwrecked in Japan and went on to become a local hero. William Adams was astounded to find a world where people bathed regularly (not common among Londoners at the time), ate raw fish and lived a life of elaborate daily rituals. Funny and heartwarming.

Shogun, James Clavell - It is fashionable to sneer at Clavell, but his rip-roaring action thrillers are historically accurate. A primer in how things were done in more bloodthirsty days, when the samurai code of honor was everything.