Tokyo

Emily Itami’s Costa-shortlisted Fault Lines transported readers to Tokyo. Now join her there. Tokyo: quaint and vast, majestic and baffling. Unspoiled parks and roiling tourist traps, artisanal delicacies and millions of vending machines, highly efficient commuter trains packed with snoozing salarymen. Can an outsider—or even a native who left—ever hope to keep up? When Anna reconnects with her childhood friend Tsubasa after years apart, they strike up a wide-ranging correspondence. They have much to tell about their lives and memories and dreams, but also about the city they once shared. As their connection deepens, Tokyo’s codes and customs and unspoken rules unfold in revealing lessons: how politeness conceals a world of meaning; how falling asleep during a business meeting can signal exemplary commitment; how alienating vastness can give way, without warning, to intimacy. Brought to charismatic life by novelist Emily Itami, Tokyo is funny, tender, and gently disorienting: an epistolary love story and a brisk primer in the complex etiquette of a city that reveals and withholds in equal measure. About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well. The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English. At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life.