The Sunday Haul- A Book on Japan

The only name that comes to mind whenever I think of Japan is ‘Aki Morita.’ It wasn’t until recently that I came to know Morita is one remarkable person who was behind another remarkable company- Sony Corporation that itself brings out some pretty remarkable products. Come to think of it, the Japanese are one set of remarkable people. Who else could think of inventing products like the Walkman, the electric rice cooker and everything else that is highly functional yet fits in one’s palm- like my Sony camera, which unfortunately, has stopped working. Anyway, what I wanted to convey was that any country where such imaginative and inventive people live is bound to be one remarkable country. And if one cannot visit such a remarkable country the least one can do is read more about it and weep that one cannot visit it in one’s life time.

Of course I do also know about Honda, Nissan, Nikon, sake, Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands, manga, Tokyo, the bullet train and several names that bring Japan to mind. It may give one the impression that either Japan is going to figure a lot in this post or that I may be going to Japan shortly. I wish the latter could be true but it is highly unlikely, as long as I am working for the government, that I will be in a plane bound for Tokyo. Anyway, the thing is that though I have read a lot about Japanese people and the products they make, I haven’t come across any book in which Japan features prominently. I have read one piece in a collection of essays in which Pico Iyer writes about living somewhere in rural Japan. Apart from that I haven’t read much about Japan. Even the Conde Nast Traveler magazines I have with me do not carry any exhaustive write ups about Japan.

Quite interestingly, my first Dave Barry book was ‘Dave Barry Does Japan’ which I found at a sale in ‘Gangarams’ when they had a branch in Hyderabad. DBDJ is incredibly funny and I fell in love with his style of writing. This was the first book I found after reading several of his articles which appeared in the Sunday issue of The Asian Age. It was a paper back and years later I found a hardcover which I cherish like anything. Last Sunday I picked up a book that I thought was another travel book on Japan but turned out to be something else. The book was ‘Pictures from the Water Trade’ by John David Morley. I picked it up for twenty rupees from a heap of books. It isn’t exactly an account of the writer’s life in Japan narrated in the first person but the book is written from the view point of another character which we have to assume as the author’s alter ego. Anyway, I bought this book after reading the back page on which Colin Thubron writes that the book ‘joins the tiny handful of books on Japan which display both deep acquaintance and imaginative insight.’ I hope the book turns out to be what Colin Thubron says it is or else I'll never visit Japan even if I get free air tickets.