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Peter Conrad
For Peter Conrad's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 21, 2013
Six great thinkers' 'lessons'
Life is a career that none of us chose. The rich and credulous hire life coaches to flatter them. Others who crave enlightenment can sign on to the School of Life set up by entrepreneurial egghead Alain de Botton.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 17, 2013
American fiction's drunken masters
Rivers run through Olivia Laing's writing — sometimes the real thing, either narrow and innocuous like a backwoods creek or mile-wide like the Mississippi; occasionally streams of memory that flow backwards, and sometimes gushers of tears; always a steady current of liquidly eloquent words.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
May 26, 2013
Infernal prose flows again from Dan Brown's brain
I used to think that Dan Brown was merely bad. Now, after reading the latest version of the apocalyptic thriller he rewrites every few years, I suspect he might be mad as well.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
May 12, 2013
Allowing Nijinsky's ballet to tell his life
How can we separate the dancer from the dance? Vaslav Nijinsky's art was a vanishing act, and his mystique depended on gestures that lasted only a second, like his leap through a window in "The Spectre of a Rose," or the slight but scandalous quivering of his thighs that mimed ejaculation when, performing Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun," he rubbed himself against the captured drapery of a fleeing nymph. Offstage he was stolid — as blockish as Stravinsky's wooden Petrushka or, according to the sniffy socialites who patronized the Ballets Russes, as unimpressive as a shop assistant, a plumber's apprentice or a stable lad. After his mental breakdown, he spent decades in a state of blank-eyed mutism, interrupted only by inappropriate giggling fits.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 21, 2013
Painfully honest, artful homage to wife's death
This little book has a purpose that is weightily monumental: It's a Taj Mahal made of paper, not white marble.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 7, 2013
The myth of human progress
'The more I see of men,' said Madame de Stael, 'the more I like dogs.' Always excepting the pit bulls and Rottweilers that slather and snap at the heels of yobs, I agree with her.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 24, 2013
Painting a vivid picture of Jane Austen's life through the details of humdrum household objects
THE REAL JANE AUSTEN: A Life in Small Things, by Paula Byrne. Harper, 2013, 400 pp., $29.99 (hardcover)

Longform

High-end tourism is becoming more about the kinds of experiences that Japan's lesser-known places can provide.
Can Japan lure the jet-set class off the beaten path?