Sorry for posting this as a special notice, but I need to find out
who's still out there and interested. If this provokes a wave of
unsubscribes, I'm not concerned about that.

I just finished reading "The Strangeness of Beauty" by Lydia Minatoya.
I'm usually wary of fiction set in Japan written by Americans, even
Japanese Americans, but this book is a beautiful meditation on what it
meant to be Japanese in the first third of the 20th century, from the
point of view of an issei who returns to Japan after a dozen years in
Seattle.

Minatoya works every angle and makes this a study in history as it
affected everyday people, comparative ethnography, and comparative
literature without once losing the reader in academia. It's all in the
details, such as revelations about little-known social taboos; and in
the larger themes, such as domestic resistance to Showa Japan's
growing militarism.

If you've ever been baffled by Japanese customs and weren't even sure
of what you were seeing, much less what to ask, this book will give
you a lot of insights.