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Review
"[Booth] achieved an extraordinary understanding of life as it is lived by ordinary Japanese....Frequently brilliant in his insights."-F.G. Notehelfer, The New York Times Book Review
"Alan Booth was not only the best travel writer on Japan, but one of the best travel writers in the English language. Looking for the Lost is a superb exercise in describing Japan from the point of view of an outsider with the knowledge of an insider."-Ian Buruma, author of The Wages of Guilt
"Booth had a horror of pretension....[He] never fails to produce the whimsical anecdotes that keep the whole account down-to-earth."-Elizabeth ward, Washington Post Book World
Product Description
A VIBRANT, MEDITATIVE MALK IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL OF JAPAN
Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation, the everyday drama that brings this remote world to life on the page. Looking for the Lost is full of personalities, from friendly gangsters to mischievous children to the author himself, an expatriate who found in Japan both his true home and dogged exile. Wry, witty, sometimes angry, always eloquent, Booth is a uniquely perceptive guide.
Looking for the Lost is a technicolor journey into the heart of a nation. Perhaps even more significant, it is the self-portrait of one man, Alan Booth, exquisitely painted in the twilight of his own life.
Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation, the everyday drama that brings this remote world to life on the page. Looking for the Lost is full of personalities, from friendly gangsters to mischievous children to the author himself, an expatriate who found in Japan both his true home and dogged exile. Wry, witty, sometimes angry, always eloquent, Booth is a uniquely perceptive guide.
Looking for the Lost is a technicolor journey into the heart of a nation. Perhaps even more significant, it is the self-portrait of one man, Alan Booth, exquisitely painted in the twilight of his own life.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
52 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tramping past yet more concrete polyhedrons on Honshu's bleak northern coast as the mist drips from his frozen nose, or slithering down a muddy mountain in sweat-sodden socks in Kyushu's steambath summer, this master of irony shares with us each blister as we accompany him on his eccentric - and essentially pointless - quest to walk in the footsteps of two longgone minor heroes of Japan. His deadpan retelling of encounters on the way, the irony of the abyss between the romanticised past and the awful contemporary urbanised present, caused this reader to laugh indecently loudly on a Tokyo train. This is a brilliant and exquisitely personal travelogue in which Booth, periodically restored by beer and hot baths, opens up for us a Japan that few outsiders experience. With lugubrious fatalism, he details his dogged but doomed search for the romantic past behind the concrete present of Japan in the 1990s. A very funny read from a man who knew his territory and was - despite all the odds - deeply attached to it. Wallow in it - loudly - wherever you are.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
The Sadness of Things
31 May 2000
Format:Paperback
I received this book from a friend shortly before returning to Japan to begin my life there again. Having read it in various stages of travel and arrival (I happened to be reading his funny, spot-on description of modern Nagoya when my plane touched down there) I was struck with how Booth can hollow out an empathetic place in the reader's soul for Japan and then fill it with keen, often wistful observations that invariably bypass the throwaway, surface image and instead imbue everything with 'mono no oware', or "the sadness of things." In a literary as well as literal sense, this author always takes the unexpected path, and the result is a deeply felt chronicle of wonder and longing.
I would especially recommend this book to those who have lived in Japan, as many of the observations and descriptions Booth records will most likely complete a half-formed thought or two that has been eluding your ability to state it precisely.
In short, this is a marvelous book, made all the more poignant by the idea that the wistful voices of the past and the echoing footfalls of the various journeys he recalls here are now all that remains of the author.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Not just for folks who have lived there
24 Aug 2000
Format:Paperback
I have never lived in Japan, but have visited, and found a certain "something" wonderful about that country and its people that I could never find adequate words to describe. Alan Booth communicates both the mystique and the down-to-earth attitude Westerner finds in Japan--I think it's that "something" that I've searched my own intellect, but failed, to describe. Reading Alan Booth's "Looking for the Lost" has helped me to connect with those subtle attractions that I found in Japan, and that kept me returning.
Since most reader-reviewers recommend this book to those who have lived in Japan, I'll add my voice and recommend it to those who have spent limited time there, or who are planning to travel in the outer-reaches of this gorgeous country.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
If you've lived in Japan, you'll love these travelogues
19 Jun 1998
Format:Hardcover
I recently picked up "Looking for the Lost" in a Kyoto bookshop at the beginning of a short journey of my own through central Japan - I was hooked within the first five pages by the powerful combination of Booth's smooth prose style - so smooth you can almost imagine the writer reading his work to you - and his refreshingly sharp insight into so many of the quirks of Japanese culture that leave most westerners bemused/confused, even those of us who have been here a while. Booth has a great way of telling you about some aspect of Japanese culture without making you feel like a complete beginner. Again, you can almost imagine being there with the author, sharing a joke about some of those country grannies or the women at public events dressed almost entirely in latex who somehow seem so polite and squeaky that you can't believe they're real! Add to this Booth's sense of the history of all the places he trudges through, and you really come to appreciate just how vivid he manages to make these narrative journeys.
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