Impishly provocative … Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed … Japan and the Japanese have long seemed to lend themselves addictively to interpretation by outsiders. By inviting all types of readers to see the flaws in that tendency from the outset, Iyer neatly sheds the burden of being right about everything while crafting a framework within which to enjoy the place

Leo Lewis, Financial Times

Insightful and profound … Iyer can nail Japan with lyrical eloquence

Japan Times

Candid and wholly absorbing, Iyer's inventive guidebook is more than a collection of cultural curiosities – it's a tribute to a nation that prizes social consciousness and sees life in temporality

Booklist

[A] lovely pocket compendium of oddities and insights of Japanese life ... Provocative and elegant, Iyer's guide succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to be authoritative

Publisher's Weekly

With an elegant, understated manner, Iyer offers poignant reflections on his adopted country and its maddening contradictions and shifting parts ... Iyer's subtle observations reveal a great deal about what is beyond the surface of how some Westerners view the Japanese

Kirkus

Pico Iyer is a writer like no other, sui generis

Jan Morris, praise for Pico Iyer