Japanese for Travellers: A Journey

Katie Kitamura is speeding across Japan on a train to Osaka to visit her parents. The landscape and the journey evoke everything from her 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 how she belongs in a country where, as a Japanese-American, she is at once an insider and an outsider. Spanning three generations of life in post-war Japan, and questioning collective memory and personal and national identity, Japanese for Travellers is a brave, thoughtful, and often very funny exploration of aspiration, belonging, decay and change.