The Conqueror Comes to Tea

The story of Japan is no longer—if it was ever—the delicate words and prints of the travel literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A scheme for ruling the world has been followed by a costly war; the war by unconditional surrender; the surrender by occupation. From these tumbling events is emerging the new story, with characters and plots aplenty in the stark, sometimes terrifying and always swiftly moving drama of Japan today. It has all the makings of a novel…