A Japanese Mirror

In this scintillating book, Ian Buruma peels away the myths that surround Japanese culture. With piercing analysis of cinema, theatre, television, art and legend, he shows the Japanese both 'as they imagine themselves to be, and as they would like themselves to be.'



A Japanese Mirror examines samurai and gangsters, transvestites and goddesses to paint an eloquent picture of life in Japan. This is a country long shrouded in enigma and in his compelling book, Buruma reveals a culture rich in with poetry, beauty and wonder.



Ian Buruma is the Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, New York. His books include Year Zero: A History of 1945, The China Lover: A Novel, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism, God's Dust, Behind the Mask, The Wages of Guilt,Bad Elements,and Taming the Gods. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times.



Buruma's informed and perceptive study not only tells us a good deal about the matriarchs, warriors and geishas, whores and hoodlums of Japanese fact and fiction, but also identifies the deeply rooted erotic, violent and sadomasochistic fantasies which lie just beneath the surface of an exceptionally ordered society.



A brilliantly funny book about the bizarre pop-culture phenomena of modern Japan, from its absurdly violent mass-circulation porno-comics to its sentimental movies about gangsters and vagabonds.



Audacious, compelling and entirely readable... A Japanese Mirror, with its rich and sexy anecdotage, is an engaging, at times disturbing read, not least because its author, having derived his framework from the gods, knows when to pull the screen.



A Japanese Mirror is what the tourist who wants to see the real Japan - "through the looking glass" - should pack in his flight-bag.