Dr Christopher Harding

From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards, the West’s relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back.

The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards, Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men.

Christopher Harding’s captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia’s impact on the West in all its variety.

The Japanese introduces readers to more than a millennium of Japanese history through vivid, interconnected pen portraits of 20 of Japan’s most fascinating and influential lives.

Who are the Japanese? This is a question that not just outsiders but the Japanese people themselves have struggled with. It is the challenge and the conundrum that lies at the heart of more than a millennium of recorded history in Japan. It is the question at the heart of this book.

As Japan enters a new phase of its long existence, with the dawning of the age of a new emperor, The Japanese sets out to tell the story so far. It does so not by way of a traditional blow-by-blow narrative, with battle after battle and leaders coming and going. Instead, it homes in on 20 powerfully influential figures who have since become woven into Japan’s national fabric. The result is a complete, accessible and clearly themed overview of Japanese history.

Japan Story is an extraordinarily rich cultural history of Japan from 1850 to the present. The book offers a brand new telling of modern Japanese history, exploring the ways the ways in which the nation has grappled with modernity, internationalism and its own cultural anxieties, and revising the traditional narratives of contemporary Japan as both a morality tale and an economic miracle.

In Chris’s absorbing account, 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 modernization. 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 home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

All eyes will be on Japan in the coming years with the abdication of Emperor Akihito in 2019 and the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. This dazzling and original book digs beneath the surface of a highly complex society, and confounds the particular image of Japan that its government likes to portray.