GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | NONFICTION

ravel writer Alan Booth presents a warm, intimate and humorous account of a 128-day, 2000-mile walking journey he made down the length of Japan in 1985. The book is a lovingly-rendered tapestry of the hundred villages and thousand Japanese he met along the way. Neither a crooked innkeeper nor a small-village mayor with a global perspective escapes Booth's convivial but wickedly observant eye. Every page of this highly companionable book keeps you smiling or laughing.

EXCERPT

t was late in June so most of Japan was dripping and gray--the rainy season was at its height. But Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands, was cracking under a heat wave. The sea did not roar or even mutter; it was intense and blinding, like in advertisements for citrus fruit. Only with great reluctance did the people of Cape Soya venture out into the scorching sunshine. Most of them slouched in the shade of their doorways watching the trickle of honeymoon couples vainly trying with the aid of the coin telescopes to pierce the forty-three kilometers of heat-haze that separated their noodle shopsfrom the societ union. Four young motorcyclists in gleaming black leather sat sweating and drumming on a table outside one of the restaurants, picking flies off the rims of their soda bottles, listening to the taped voice shriek about shellfish, and gazing across at the four brand new Hondas they had parked within a yard of the end of Japan--latitude 45° 30' N, the latitude of Milan, the Crimea, and Portland, Oregon--the furthest north you can get in Japanese eyes and still count yourself civilized.

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