ResumeJapan.com - Travel, Japan, Memoirs and more.

The Sadness of Things   May 31, 2000

In short, this is a marvelous book, made all the more poignant by the idea that the wistful voices of the past and the echoing footfalls of the various journeys he recalls here are now all that remains of the author.


a great traveling book   January 23, 1999
  4 out of 5 found this review helpful

Through gangsters, school children, scholars and maids Booth let us taste, smell and feel a country so sure of itself and yet struggling to define the changes that have been shaking it for the last century. Allmost as a poet boot write about the everyday people and among them the ones still belong to a world soon to be gone. This is the swan song of a man who let us,through his words, to see the beauty of a culture, feel the pain of its departure and taste the bitter cold beer. May he rest in peace.


If you've lived in Japan, you'll love these travelogues   June 19, 1998
  5 out of 5 found this review helpful

I recently picked up "Looking for the Lost" in a Kyoto bookshop at the beginning of a short journey of my own through central Japan - I was hooked within the first five pages by the powerful combination of Booth's smooth prose style - so smooth you can almost imagine the writer reading his work to you - and his refreshingly sharp insight into so many of the quirks of Japanese culture that leave most westerners bemused/confused, even those of us who have been here a while. Booth has a great way of telling you about some aspect of Japanese culture without making you feel like a complete beginner. Again, you can almost imagine being there with the author, sharing a joke about some of those country grannies or the women at public events dressed almost entirely in latex who somehow seem so polite and squeaky that you can't believe they're real! Add to this Booth's sense of the history of all the places he trudges through, and you really come to appreciate just how vivid he manages to make these narrative journeys.