Murray Sayle, 76, likes to tell how he was delivered by the same doctor as Australian Prime Minister John Howard; how he lived a few streets away from him and went to the same high school, and then the same university.

However, for Sayle, the small mountain village of Aikawa, 100 km from Tokyo in Kanagawa Prefecture, isn't a long way from home. It is home. He's spent close to 30 years in "real Japan," close to "real Japanese," trying to work out its puzzles.

He's no newcomer to the world of "intellectual journalism." He has edited Newsweek Asia, published 67 cover stories for the Spectator, written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and more -- in short, "all the publications in the English language that would publish a 10,000-word article."