A Tokyo Romance

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo as a young film student in 1975, he found a feverish and surreal metropolis in the midst of an economic boom, where everything seemed new and history only remained in fragments. Through his adventures in the world of avant-garde theatre, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma came of age. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free. A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him, and a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic and sexual.

Ian Buruma is currently Luce Professor at Bard College, New York. His previous books include Voltaire's Coconuts, The Missionary and the Libertine,The Wages of Guilt, Inventing Japan, God's Dust and Bad Elements,Occidentalism (Atlantic 2004) and Murder in Amsterdam (Atlantic 2006).