Japanese For Travellers

Katie Kitamura is on a train to Osaka to visit her parents. Speeding across the Japanese landscape, the journey evokes everything from distant childhood memories to the tumultuous years in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. As she tries to reconcile the vibrancy of Japan's contemporary pop culture with the unrecounted trauma of its past, she also struggles to determine where she belongs in a country of which, as a Japanese-American, she is at once a part and an outsider.

Spanning three generations of life in post-war Japan, exploring questions of collective memory, and personal and national identity, the result is a brave, thoughtful and often very funny exploration of aspiration, belonging, decay and change.