This was an excellent book to read towards the end of a trip to Japan. Simon May spent a year teaching Philosophy at the elite Tokyo University, and the book, whose imprint page insists is fiction, implicitly claims on every other page to be a truthful account of his experience as a gaijin. There are echoes of other sex-preoccupied Japan-visitor book, most strikingly in the description of a vaginal gymnastics display, a form of entertainment that has apparently persisted to the present day, for those who know the right people. His observations about Japanese society mercifully lack essentialising chat about 'the Japanese', and he creates (presumably) composite characters to embody them. He has a bit of fun with unintentional double entendre, as in a fax from a restaurant where he has booked a table, 'We look forward to seeing you come,' a level of humour to which man wouldn't stoop. Of course, his experience of Japan was very different from my three and a half weeks there as a tourist, back in my hotel room by 8.30 most nights. But I saw enough spectacular feats of sleeping, both sitting and standing, on the subway, to recognise the truth in May's surreal anecdotes on the subject; and spent enough time in Hiroshima to disagree with his dismissal of it as ugly and uninteresting, and to know that he is wrong when he says there is no mention of the Rape of Nanking in the Peace Museum there -- though it is fleeting indeed, and I saw nothing to make me quarrel with his sense that the Japanese generally have not done any of the public soul-searching about their Fascist war crimes that the Germans have done about the same period. ( )