Book description
Can you be a stranger in your own country?
A Japanese-American raised in California, 24-year-old Katie Kitamura
returns to Japan to discover the country she left behind.
Travelling across this foreign landscape, she visits middle-class
gambling halls, fight stadiums and giant shopping meccas, luxury care
homes and cramped apartments housing four generations under a single
roof. And she wonders in which version of modern Japan she might have
belonged.
Defined by its adventurous youth culture, but with the
fastest-ageing population in the world, renowned for its strict social
code, but producing the black-comedy violence of the Battle Royale
films, the Japan she discovers is an often contradictory land of
Godzilla toys and war memorials, of futuristic manga characters and
brightly coloured vending machines.
Katie Kitamura was born in 1979 and currently lives in California.
Japanese for Travellers
is her first book.
