Memories of Wind and Waves: A Self-Portrait of Lakeside Japan

Memories of Wind and Waves gathers the richly detailed stories of thirty-three elderly men and women who spent their lives working on or around Japan's second-largest lake, Kasumigaura. Though just forty miles from Tokyo, the area was throughout much of the twentieth century very rural and poor - a world away from the capital that we know today. Many people tell of working late into each night in a struggle to survive, supplementing their main livelihood from fishing with a bit of farming or other work. Yet these are people who lived so close to nature - in some cases literally on the lake - that a great many of their reminiscences are not about hardship but about just how beautiful the place was.