Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan

Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Booth, Alan. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781568360652.

In his final work Alan Booth takes us on a fascinating journey by foot through three remote regions of Japan to search for the countrys geographic and spiritual heart - and for the elusive connections between present and past, self and society. Looking for the Lost is a beautifully written, opinionated, and entertaining look at the life and slow death of a culture, and a poignant self-portrait of a writer also nearing death. Booths journeys begin in the far north, in the homeland of modern Japans most famous outcast, the decadent novelist Osamu Dazai. His often hilarious encounters in the towns along the lonely, underdeveloped coast where Dazai grew up reveal a region caught between change and tradition, where the effects of Japans economic miracle are only now being felt. Booth then explores the tangled wilds of southern Kyushu - the battlegrounds where Saigo Takamori, one of Japans most-loved tragic heroes, led his small rebel army in a futile last stand against overwhelming government forces in 1877. Finally he turns to the mountains and rivers in central Japan where the Heike clan, defeated by the Genji in the epochal twelfth-century civil war, were said to have dispersed. The bloody fall of the Heike marked the decline of refined court culture, an aristocratic golden age that Japan still clings to, however tenuously, in a time of love hotels, tourist traps, and industrial sprawl.