Those of us interested in coffee, life and Japan will open Merry White's "Coffee Life in Japan" with high expectations. For most readers, alas, these expectations will be only partially fulfilled.
White is an anthropologist, but one would be hard-pressed to guess her profession from this text. There's a barely perceptible nod to the methodology of Ian Condry in his "Hip-Hop Japan," and some throat-clearing justification of her approach — one that yields, she admits, "a questionable set of data for the more scientific anthropologist" — but that's about the extent of it.
"Coffee Life in Japan" has more in common with that spate of books popular a few years ago where an author picked a popular foodstuff — cod, salt, spam, whatever — and then produced a book in which every fact he or she could dig up about that foodstuff was, in more or less entertaining fashion, and with some firsthand reportage thrown in — a behind-the-scenes look at a spam farm in Slovenia! — retailed.