Christoph Peters
Tage in Tokio
(Days in Tokyo)

Illustrations by Matthias Beckmann
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2021
256 pages
30 b/w illustrations


Christoph Peters has been studying Japan for 35 years. He has written novels about Japan, trained in the traditional tea ceremony, collects Japanese ceramics. But he has never been to Japan. So the first trip to Tokyo has to become a comparison between fantasy and reality. Christoph Peters roams the subway and side streets, sushi bars and museums, visits temples and a boxing match. And he is an eminently precise observer: from the looks of people in the subway, from the rules of conversation, from the wealth of nuances in the glaze of a tea bowl, the panorama of an entire culture emerges. "Days in Tokyo" is a declaration of love for a fascinating and contradictory country that also tells us something about ourselves with every attempt to understand it.

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