Reviewed by MARIKO KATO "In many ways I was like Alice, that very assured and middle-class English girl, when she walked through the looking glass."
So humbly admits Alan Macfarlane, professor of anthropology at Cambridge University with a 32-year career and 20 published books. He delightfully reassures us that his initial impressions of Japanese people were only that they "were reserved and many of them wore glasses." His anthropological interpretations were as naive as the famous Lewis Carroll heroine. And like Alice, Macfarlane discovers a world that challenges virtually every model that he had hitherto used to understand a civilization.
This is not your usual impressionistic, anecdotal book on Japan. A work by an elite intellectual visiting Japan for the first time at age 48 is a passport into worlds unseen by the average young backpacker. The opening chapter is a hybrid of glimpses into court cases and schools, quotes from intellectual travelers past, and Macfarlane's own eloquent diary entries. With poise he relates a dual narrative of his own thoughts and experiences of Japanese people, and the historical and cultural background of their elusive country.