The Cook's Encyclopedia of Japanese Cooking by Emi Kazuko

The Cook's Encyclopedia of Japanese Cooking
Emi Kazuko
(Barnes & Noble Books: 2003)

READ: April-July 2006 (ongoing)

A book I sorely wanted to bring with me to Japan, but couldn't spare the space for. But I look oh-so-forward to using it when I return home to Canada - it will help me recreate some of the Japanese meals I have eaten here and loved! It's a really nice cookbook. There is a whole first section explaining various Japanese meats, vegetables, noodles, and cooking utensils. Then many, many recipes organized by type. Some of these seem somewhat complicated, but others quite simple. Plus, if you've ever wanted to find out the difference between all those kinds of tofu sitting on the shelf at the grocery store, this book will surely be able to tell you.

The Art of Japanese Prints by Nigel Cawthorne

The Art of Japanese Prints
Nigel Cawthorne
(Advantage Publishers Group: 2000)

READ: May-June 2006

Another Chapters bargain-book find, I kept seeing it and refusing to buy it on the premise that I was moving to Japan soon and the last thing I needed to acquire was another book. Then I convinced myself that since I was moving to Japan soon, I needed to acquire this particular book, that I owed it to myself as a soon-to-be-Japanite and a lover of ukiyo-e, the specific focus of this book. So I bought it.

It was a great purchase and one I will not regret anytime soon. Though a slim volume, it provides an excellent overview of the development of ukiyo-e and a look at some of the masters of ukiyo-e. There are nice illustrations, interesting details, and well-written explanations. A lovely book.

The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod

The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
Alistair MacLeod
(McClelland & Stewart, Toronto: 1992, c1976)

With an afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.

READ: May-June 2006

This is a book I had long wanted to read, supposed admirer of Canadian literature that I am. I have read one or two short stories of Alistair MacLeod's before. This is a collection of seven stories, all focused around family love and family relationships. They are all based in or focused on Cape Breton, but have meaning and value beyond those borders. There's a reason why Alistair MacLeod is commonly included in the canon of Can-Lit, and I am looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.

The Mad Trapper of Rat River by Dick North

The Mad Trapper of Rat River: A True Story of Canada's Biggest Manhunt
Dick North
with photographs and illustrations
(Lyons Press, Guilford (CT): 2003)

Sections of Parts One and Two originally published in 1972 under the title The Mad Trapper of Rat River. Sections of Parts Three and Four originally published in 1989 under the title Trackdown.

READ: May 2006

I was sent this as a Christmas/birthday present from my brother and sister-in-law in Vancouver. They'd picked it up (assumedly) on their northern travels to Yukon that they'd done earlier in 2005. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical at first, but after the first few pages, I was hooked.

No one was sure where the mad trapper came from. He'd shown up in a town in the Northwest Territories in 1931 or so, and most knew him as one Albert Johnson. But they didn't know where he came from, and he wasn't fond of making friends. After a run-in with the RCMP which left one member dead, Johnson led the police on a 5-week chase through the backwoods and snow of the NWT and the Yukon.

The author, Dick North, is a northern journalist who has had a lifelong interest in the mystery of Albert Johnson. He details the manhunt as if he were there, and then he proceeds on a long exploration of who Johnson was. He goes through many possible suspects, and details why each one does or does not match up with what was known about Johnson. It ought to be boring, it ought to be tedious, but it is not. It is quite a remarkable story, and I recommend it to all you Canadiana junkies out there.

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan by Alan Booth

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan
Alan Booth
(Viking; Penguin, Toronto: 1986)

READ: March-May 2006

Alan Booth's two books (the other is Looking for the Lost, which I have not read yet but is on my shelf awaiting) are largely heralded as the two best travel books about Japan. I had heard this a few times, and then after Will Ferguson went on and on about him, I figured I had to find his books. One Chapters order later, they arrived.

I took my time reading this book, mainly because it was so delicious. Booth moved to Japan in 1970, and in 1977, he set out from the northern tip of Hokkaido and walked all the way across Japan, all the way south to the southernmost tip of "mainland" Japan, Cape Sata on the south shore of Kyushu Island. It was over 2,000 miles (as the title suggests). He tells poignant and often funny stories of the people he meets, of people who follow him slowly in their cars in the rain because they can't understand why he refused their offer of a lift, of people he chats with about life, death, and WWII in little pubs in small towns. It is a touching portrait of Japan.

It was also interesting to compare Booth's Japan to Ferguson's, since Booth took his cross-Japan trek in the late 1970s while Ferguson was there, post-crash, in the mid-90s.

A wonderful, well-written book that I'd recommend to anyone with an interest either in Japan itself, or just in armchair travel in general.

Art History by Marilyn Stokstad

Art History
Marilyn Stokstad
(Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J.; Harry N. Abrams, New York: 2002)

Volumes 1 and 2 combined, with ArtNotes companion workbooks. In collaboration with David Cateforis, and chapters by Stephen Addiss, et al.

READ: September 2005 - April 2006

This was my textbook for the first-year Art History course that I was taking at the university this year. It's a textbook, so I won't go on and on about it. But as far as textbooks go, it was quite good. Other than being way too heavy to carry anywhere (I never brought it to class), it is fairly comprehensive as far as European art is concerned. There were two tiny chapters on the entirety of Japanese art totalling about twenty pages in all (as I discovered when I went to write a paper on Japanese temple architecture). But I guess it's only fair that most art history classes, at least in this part of the world, will focus mostly on the European tradition in art and architecture. There was a decent amount on American art, though again, not much if you are interested in aboriginal art. Ditto for other Asian art, like China and Southeast Asia, plus a small bit of information on Islamic and African arts. Still, this book is widely recognized as being the best textbook there is for a general introduction to art history. If you have an interest in art and art history and don't know where to start reading, this is a good place. I tend to not keep most of my textbooks - they get outdated or are not compelling enough on their own, but I'm keeping this one for sure.

Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey

Wrong About Japan
Peter Carey
(Vintage International, New York: 2006)

First published by Knopf in 2005.

READ: March 2006

I picked this up one day from a secondhand book shop because it had an intriguing premise: Peter Carey, famous Australian author (among other things, he is the author of the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, which I really want to read someday) who is based in New York City, takes his 12-year-old son to Tokyo for a week after his son declares that he is going to live in Japan someday. Charlie is interested in Japanese manga and anime, not kabuki theatre and temple architecture. So he gets his dad to promise that they will visit the Real Japan, which they do. They meet a young Japanese boy who speaks English (I guess in Tokyo, anything is possible) who shows them some way-off-the-beaten-track aspects of Japanese life. There is a bit of Japanese theatre, despite Charlie's loud protests, and if I recall correctly, Carey gets away at one point by himself to visit one temple or something like that. But mostly there is anime and yakuza and comics and Mr. Donut. It's a short book, and you don't have to be a Japanophile to appreciate it. It's a fun read with a number of laugh-out-loud moments.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Lynne Truss
(Gotham Books, New York: 2004)

First published in U.K. in 2003 by Profile Books.

READ: March 2006

Hee. Another funny book. I was given it as a present back in 2004 immediately before I left for Southeast Asia, but hadn't gotten around to reading it. By March of this year, plans were firmly underway to head to Japan for a year (or some) to teach English, so I figured it was time to figure out punctuation.

I've always been a bit of a punctuation stickler. Not always in my own writing (I do tend to drag things on and on), but when editing others' work. Plus in grade 8, my English teacher, Mr. Waddington (who, strangely, had been my French teacher the year before, but that's another story entirely), told me I overused commas. I'm not sure you can actually overuse commas - usually the problem is underuse, no? - but there you have it.

Anyway, this book hasn't helped really in terms of making me a better English teacher, but it was an excellent book nonetheless. It is quite funny. It's certainly not a how-to book. Truss doesn't really tell you when a comma is appropriate, but she can sure show many examples of inappropriateness. And the poor apostrophe! That's the one that drives me batty. It's so simple to use, yet so rarely used right. I can forgive things like "1970's" (shouldn't be an apostrophe), but "Orange's for sale" is only right if there is one thing for sale and it happens to be called Orange. And "it's" versus "its" - the easiest rule in the entire grammar book - let's just not go there.

Yes, the hype that surrounded its publication was worth it. It's a good book and quite enjoyable.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond
(Viking, New York: 2005)

READ: February-March 2006

I read Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel almost exactly one year ago and really enjoyed it. Collapse was one I'd been seeing around a lot, so it was time to tackle it. And it did not disappoint. Guns, Germs, and Steel is the better of the two, but Collapse is also worth a read.

The book is a series of case studies of environmental degradation, and the ways in which the societies affected did or did not overcome these collapses. Guns, Germs, and Steel looked at the winners in civilization; Collapse looks largely at the losers: the Vikings, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, modern-day Rwandans, and so on. But he also looks at societies that managed to overcome their environmental difficulties; for example, the Icelanders. Iceland is an environment that should not work, yet it is one of the most prosperous nations in the world. Why?

Diamond's basic argument, to really dumb it down, is that not all failures of societies can be blamed on a cataclysmic event, on an act of God (or whoever), but that many times, a society fails because it does not respond appropriately to the environment around it. So the Vikings, for example, tried to live in Greenland in exactly the same fashion they had in Norway. Greenland's fragile ecosystem could not handle this, and so it eventually collapsed. Greenland itself, however, did not become inhabitable; the Inuit lived there for many centuries after the Vikings were forced to leave. But the Vikings were unable to adapt to a lifestyle that was more sustainable on Greenland's shores. Likewise, Easter Island, once a lush, thriving ecosystem, was continuously exploited by the Islanders until it, too, became what we now know it as: a barren, windswept rock of an island. There was no great event that destroyed Easter Island. People kept living there, farming the land and cutting the trees, until there were no trees left, and consequently erosion sped up.

Diamond also looks at a few modern-day societies who are facing potential environmental crises. Japan, with its post-WWII rapid deforestation, is one of these. So is the state of Montana, with the damage mining has wrought on its natural environment.

The pace gets sluggish at times, but overall the book is well-written and thought-provoking. I like the way Diamond approaches this subject - not too preachy, not too technical. He mixes just enough science with real-life meaning to make it interesting. Start with Guns, Germs, and Steel and move on to this one if you want to know more.

Hitching Rides With Buddha: Travels In Search Of Japan by Will Ferguson

Hitching Rides With Buddha: Travels In Search Of Japan
Will Ferguson
(Knopf Canada, Toronto: 2005)

Originally published in abridged form in the U.K. as Hokkaido Highway Blues by Soho Press in 2001.

READ: February 2006

Will Ferguson is one of my new favourite authors, and he's Canadian to boot! I actually haven't read much by him, but what I have read, I have enjoyed immensely. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable few days on Bali and Lombok in Indonesia two years ago, reading his book Happiness (TM). I really need to re-read it solely so that I may have the pleasure of reviewing it on this site.

Anyway, I digress. I'd been waiting for Hitching Rides With Buddha to come out in paperback, when I received it as a Christmas present from my parents who knew I was thinking of coming out to Japan later this year. And man oh man, is it ever funny. If you know anything at all about Japan, or don't know much at all but are interested in learning a bit, this book is for you. Taking Alan Booth's 2000-mile walk across Japan as inspiration, Ferguson, who taught English on Kyushu in the south end of Japan for about 5 years in the early to mid-1990s, set out to hitchhike clear across Japan. He is witty, he is insightful, and I promise he will make you laugh and laugh and laugh. I drove Randal crazy while I was reading this book as I kept laughing out loud every page or two. He couldn't understand it...until he went to read it himself a few months later. Then it was his turn.

And it's not just a book for Japanophiles. While the action is obviously set in Japan and most of Ferguson's comments are targeted toward Japanese and foreigners in Japan, many of these comments also translate to a larger picture of human nature generally. I'm sure I often say on this blog that "this book is an entertaining read", but this time I really, really mean it. I can't recommend this book enough.