"To not have written a book on Japan is fast becoming a title of distinction," wrote Basil Hall Chamberlain more or less 100 years ago. "Kuhaku & Other Accounts From Japan" is prefaced by Mark Twain in a similar mood: "When I think how I have been swindled by books of oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast."
"Kuhaku," then, is an attempt to gather a group of artists, diarists, essayists and fiction writers to, in the editor's words, focus "on how things are, not as yet another Westerner thinks they should be." This "imperfect, democratic book" arrives impressively packaged: clothbound, foil-stamped, ink-screened and printed, obscurely, in Iceland. Beautifully designed by Craig Mod, it looks and feels weighty, definitely serious, informed, literary, and, of course, concomitant with the last, old.
"Kuhaku" comprises essays, stories and "accounts." The last seems to be a catchall label, including an indignant piece on the difficulties of garbage collection that blindly contradicts the editor's rules when the author, "yet another Westerner," sulkily holds forth on the race in general. "If the Japanese really wanted to be environmentally responsible, they'd stop burning all their plastic garbage. They'd stop suffocating every purchase in countless layers of wrapping." Heard it all before? A few lines down the author confides she's got an entire room filled with garbage she doesn't know what to do with.