Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020 How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem? Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon? Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect? After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan , he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before. 'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed'Financial Times