Why a Booktrail?
A Literary tour around Tokyo
The Book of Tokyo
Why a Booktrail?
A Literary tour around Tokyo
What you need to know before your trail
‘The Book of Tokyo’ collects ten stories by some of Japan’s most exciting and revered contemporary short story writers. Together, the stories form a kind of literary map of this vast and ever-changing city’s districts – an imaginative tour of the city for short story fans and travellers alike.
Travel Guide
Tokyo
At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them.
But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time…
The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Book of Tokyo
Destination: Tokyo Author/Guide: Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks, Masashi Matsuie Departure Time: 2000s
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