Tokyo

My parents have been in Tokyo for the last three years, and I've visited them for some rather longish stretches - though my reading has usually been a continuation of whatever I'm interested at the time.

That said, The Wise Bamboo is a memoir by Malcolm Morris of his years at the close of World War II as the head of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where much of the occupation forces were billeted. It shows its age in sections - his views on the Japanese are not exactly conciliatory - but it is quite a readable book nevertheless. Tokyo itself is a city which has changed immensely through the years, and it was nice to have a look at what it was.

Having never visited it, my image of Tokyo is mostly created by movies, like Lost in Translation (and some manga, such as Sanctuary).

I am sure there are other books set there as well. I have not yet read any Murakami, although I have a couple of his books on my shelf. Does he make use of the city of Tokyo in any of his work?

One book I remember as being fun to read was Inspector Imanishi investigates by Seicho Matsumoto. Imanishi is a Tokyo detective. The book came out in 1989?, so I'm not sure of its availability -- and I read a library copy, but the author's last name has really stuck with me.

I did a tagmash on Tokyo, fiction -- and three of the five top that came up were by Murakami:

The wind-up bird chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world : a novel by Haruki Murakami
Number9dream : a novel by David Mitchell

I remember one of Murakami's novels being fairly descriptive of Tokyo, but I'm don't remember which one. The wind-up bird chronicle is fairly so.

Looking at the reviews of Kitchen, this book is mostly deals with Tokyo from the view of a food critic, so is probably not really descriptive.

Number9dream is about post-modern Tokyo, so it might be a good choice. But I haven't read any of Yoshimoto or Mitchell. (I didn't know anything about them until I did the tagmash).

Out by Natsuo Kirino is a gritty novel about four women who work in a factory and how the pressures under which they live lead to murder. It was not what I pictured Tokyo to be. I liked how you got to go behind closed doors and look at daily lives of working women. It's a pretty good page-turner because you don't know if they're going to get out of the mess and, if so, how.

For an expat's view and just a fun read, try Moon Over Tokyo by Siri Mitchell.

There is a great book by a Canadian journalist Catherine Bergman called From the Japanese: A Journalist in the Empire of the Resigned in which she interviews a few of Tokyo's more controversial characters. Very interesting!