Get Your Free Audiobook
-
Japan Story
- In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present
- Narrated by: Christopher Harding
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
Failed to add items
Add to cart failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
New to Audible Prime Member exclusive: 2 credits with free trial
Japan Story
Buy Now for ₹820.00
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Japan Story, written and read by Christopher Harding.
This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-19th century to the present.
It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernisers and nationalists but with resistance, conflict, distress.
We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernisation.
These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and homegrown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.
Critic Reviews
"How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it...Masterly." (Neil MacGregor)