Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess
10 best books like Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess (Lea Jacobson): Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa, Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan, Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, A Geisha's Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice, Japan Took the J.A.P. Out of Me, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike
Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa
During a year spent in Japan on a personal quest to deepen her appreciation for such Eastern ideals as commitment and devotion, documentary filmmaker Karin Muller discovered just how maddeningly complicated it is being Japanese. In this book Muller invites the reader along for a uniquely American...
| Author | Bruce Feiler |
| ISBN | 0060577207 |
Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and...
Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan
| Author | Alex Kerr |
| ISBN | 0809039435 |
A surprising assessment of the failures and successes of modern Japan.
In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr chronicles the many facets of Japan's recent, and chronic, crises -- from the failure of its banks and pension funds to the decline of its once magnificent modern cinema. He is the first to give...
Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan
| Author | Alan Booth |
| ISBN | 1568361483 |
Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation,...
Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld
| Author | David E. Kaplan |
| ISBN | 0520215621 |
Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong—more than four times the size of the American Mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock...
Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan
| Author | Robert Whiting |
| ISBN | 0375724893 |
"A fascinating look at some fascinating people who show how democracy advances hand in hand with crime in Japan."--Mario Puzo
In this unorthodox chronicle of the rise of Japan, Inc., Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa, gives us a fresh perspective on the economic miracle and near disaster...
Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation
| Author | Veronica Chambers |
| ISBN | 0743271564 |
Forget the stereotypes. Today's Japanese women are shattering them -- breaking the bonds of tradition and dramatically transforming their culture. Shopping-crazed schoolgirls in Hello Kitty costumes and the Harajuku girls Gwen Stefani helped make so popular have grabbed the media's attention....
A Geisha's Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice
| Author | Komomo |
| ISBN | 4770030673 |
This is the story of a contemporary Japanese teenager who, in a search for an identity, became fascinated with the world of geisha, and discovered in herself the will and the commitment to embark on the many years of apprenticeship necessary to become one.
It is also the story of a young Japanese...
| Author | Lisa Fineberg Cook |
| ISBN | 1439110034 |
Six days after an InStyle-worthy wedding in Los Angeles, Lisa Fineberg Cook left behind her little red Jetta, her manicurist of ten years, and her very best friend for the land of the rising sun. When her husband accepted a job teaching English in Nagoya, Japan, she imagined exotic weekend getaways,...
Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike
| Author | Tom Mes |
| ISBN | 1903254418 |
Takashi Miike is known for mostly his more bizarre, violent, controversial output in the film world. Though interestingly, I don't think there exists a genre he's not attempted. At all. His film oeuvre literally spans the entire rainbow from extreme psychological bloodbaths to historical dramas...
Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs
| Author | Joan Sinclair |
| ISBN | 0810992590 |
In Pink Box, photographer Joan Sinclair takes us on a journey inside the secret world of fuzoku (commercial sex) in Japan, a world where kawaii (cute) collides with consumerism and sex.
Unrivaled in their creativity and the sheer number of choices, the clubs featured in this book offer their...
| Author | Shoichi Aoki |
| ISBN | 0714845108 |
Presented in an identical format to Phaidon's previous Fruits, published in 2001, Fruits Too is a collection of Tokyo teenage street fashion portraits selected from Japan's premier street fanzine of the same title. Published every month by Shoichi Aoki, who is also the sole photographer for the magazine,...
Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.
| Author | Roland Kelts |
| ISBN | 1403974756 |
As a Brit in Japan, I was intrigued by the parallels Kelts sees between the British invasion of the States in the 1960s and the Japanese invasion that has been ongoing since the late '70s or so. Just as the Brits learnt from US (black) culture and re-exported it back to white Americans, the Japanese manga...
Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain
| Author | Lori L. Tharps |
| ISBN | 0743296478 |
Magazine writer and editor Lori Tharps was born and raised in the comfortable but mostly White suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she was often the only person of color in her school and neighborhood. At an early age, Lori decided that her destiny would be discovered in Spain. She didn't know anyone...
Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana
| Author | Stephanie Elizondo Griest |
| ISBN | 0812967607 |
Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.”...
Blue Eyed Salaryman: From world traveller to lifer at Mitsubishi
| Author | Niall Murtagh |
| ISBN | 1861977891 |
Why on earth would anyone give up a life on the open road for the regimen of a vast Japanese conglomerate? And is it really so different in Japan from everywhere else? Niall Murtagh spent years as a world traveller - hitchhiking to Istanbul, bussing to Kathmandu and crossing the Atlantic in a home-built...
Thank You and Ok!: An American Zen Failure in Japan
| Author | David Chadwick |
| ISBN | 1590304705 |
David Chadwick, a Texas-raised wanderer, college dropout, bumbling social activist, and hobbyhorse musician, began his study under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1966. In 1988 Chadwick flew to Japan to begin a four-year period of voluntary exile and remedial Zen education. In Thank You and OK! he recounts...
Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures
| Author | Kyoko Mori |
| ISBN | 0449004287 |
In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak...
Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West
| Author | T.R. Reid |
| ISBN | 0679777601 |
"Fascinating...clearly stated, interesting and provoking.... A plainspoken account of living in Asia." --San Francisco Chronicle
Anyone who has heard his weekly commentary on NPR knows that T. R. Reid is trenchant, funny, and deeply knowledgeable reporter and now he brings this...
Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne
| Author | Ben Hills |
| ISBN | 1585425680 |
It's the fantasy of many young women: marry a handsome prince, move into a luxurious palace, and live happily ever after. But that's not how it turned out for Masako Owada. Ben Hills's fascinating portrait of Princess Masako and the Chrysanthemum Throne draws on research in Tokyo and rural Japan, at...
Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons from the Tokyo Riot Police
| Author | Robert Twigger |
| ISBN | 0688175376 |
Adrift in Tokyo, translating obscene rap lyrics for giggling Japanese high school girls, "thirtynothing" Robert Twigger comes to a revelation about himself: He has never been fit nor brave. Guided by his roommates, Fat Frank and Chris, he sets out to cleanse his body and mind. Not knowing his fist from...
Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage & Sex in Contemporary Japan
| Author | Nicholas Bornoff |
| ISBN | 0671742655 |
To the Western mind, the Japanese attitude toward sex is at once bizarrely structured yet refreshingly frank. In a land where marriages can still be arranged and a woman1s place is most definitely in the home, love hotels dot the landscape and late-night television is brazenly risqué by Western standards....
Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation
| Author | Karl Taro Greenfeld |
| ISBN | 0060926651 |
suggestively-linked vignettes that confront the question, is it innocent Anglo-Saxon Westerners being seduced by the corrupt Japan or innocent sober Japanese being seduced by the drug-addled foreigner? meditation on appearances vs. reality, living in the moment vs. planning for the future,...
Split: A Memoir of Divorce
Bestselling and award-winning author Suzanne Finnamore writes a story of divorce that is �brilliant� (Augusten Burroughs) and sure to become a classic.
There are certain books that come to epitomize their painful subject matter, offering solace to those who share the same fate and...
Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex
| Author | David Henry Sterry |
| ISBN | 1593762410 |
The only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously...
