Can you be a stranger in your own country?
A Japanese-American raised in California, 24-year-old Katie Kitamura returns to Japan to discover the country she left behind.
Travelling across this foreign landscape, she visits middle-class gambling halls, fight stadiums and giant shopping meccas, luxury care homes and cramped apartments housing four generations under a single roof. And she wonders in which version of modern Japan she might have belonged.
Defined by its adventurous youth culture, but with the fastest-ageing population in the world, renowned for its strict social code, but producing the black-comedy violence of the Battle Royale films, the Japan she discovers is an often contradictory land of Godzilla toys and war memorials, of futuristic manga characters and brightly coloured vending machines.
Katie Kitamura, author of Japanese for Travellers answers our questions...
Will the printed word endure?
Yes. Or at least, I hope so.
Which newspaper do you read?
The New York Times.
Who/What is your biggest influence?
It depends. At the moment, I've become addicted to watching old Hitchcock movies from the Thirties - things like Sabotage, The Secret Agent, Blackmail, The Lodger. I'm also a great fan of anything to do with cookery: telegenic celebrity chefs, weekly food columns and restaurant reviews, glossy hardbound cookbooks, Le Creuset kitchenware.
What books are you reading at the moment?
Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook.
What books did you read as a child?
I had a set of collected fairy tale volumes - they were called, individually, something like The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, and so on. Towards the end they seemed to be reaching somewhat for their titles, judging by the unlikely sounding The Olive Fairy Book, and the even more unlikely The Brown Fairy Book.
Which literary character would you most like to meet?
I'd like for Uncle Toby to show me his kitchen garden. I'd also like to meet Gwendolyn Harleth, in the period before her marriage to Grandcourt. And maybe also Pnin, who I like to consider, despite knowing better, a kind of stand-in for Nabokov.
Which authors do you most admire?
Granted there's a lot to admire in a lot of different writers - but if I had to draw a list at random, it would include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Alan Hollinghurst, W.G. Sebald, Kenzaburo Oe, Norman Mailer, Vikram Seth, Bret Easton Ellis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Ford.
Where/When do you do most of your writing?
In the early morning, with a cup of tea.
For further information please contact Anna Ridley on 020 7010 3251 / anna.ridley@uk.penguingroup.com
