Author(s): Alan Booth

Travel | Read our reviews! | Japan | History

One sunny spring morning in the seventies, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across Japan's entire length. Traveling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission- 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo. The Roads to Sata is a wry, witty, inimitable account of that prodigious trek, vividly revealing the reality of life off-the-tourist-track in Japan. Journeying alongside Booth, we encounter the wide variety of people who inhabit the Japanese countryside - from fishermen and soldiers, to bar hostesses and school teachers, to hermits, drunks and the homeless. We glimpse vast stretches of coastline and rambling townscapes, mountains and motorways; watch baseball games and sunrises; sample trout and Kilamanjaro beer, hear folklore, poems, and smutty jokes. Throughout, we enjoy the wit and insight of a uniquely perceptive guide, and more importantly, discover a new face of an often-misunderstood nation.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
 Booth walked the length of mainland Japan from its most northern tip Cape Soya to the southern Cape Sata in 1977. After living in Japan for seven years, in Tokyo, initially, to study theatre, and then writing for various newspapers and magazines, he felt he wanted to better understand the country he lived in, and had married into. First published in 1985, recently reissued, The Roads to Sata is a wonderful account of the ordinary and surprising. Eloquent and witty, Booth is keenly observant of the landscape, the culture and the people. His descriptions are vivid and honest, revealing the best, worst and curious of this time. 1970s Japan is moving fast—new highways, big industry, expanding cities—but retains a slower pace in the byways, on the old tracks, and in the villages that Booth passes through. Within a few pages, you will be hooked. By the landscape descriptions: “The mist lay so thick on the hills that it hid them, and the rain continued to flatten the sea.” “In the silent gardens of the old houses in Kakunodate the tops of the stone lanterns are lumpy and green, the stone wells drip with dark water that congeal in the summer heat. The moss is black-green and thick as a poultice.” By his hilarious and at times frustrating encounters: So many offers of a ride to the gaijin who wants to walk! “On the road into the city I was twice greeted in English. At a drive-in a young truck driver jumped out of his cab and said, ‘You, foot, yes, and good for walk, but sun day—rain day, oh, Jesus Christ!’ Further on, a businessman stopped his car to offer me a lift and, clearly, puzzled by my refusal, said, ‘Then what mode of transportation are you embarking?’ Japanese slipped out: ’Aruki desu.’ ‘Aruki?’ 'Aruki’. A digestive pause. ‘Do you mean to intend that you have pedestrianised?’ I nodded. He drove away, shaking his head.” By Booth’s observations of culture, both ancient and modern, of history and folklore: “But at the village of Kanagawa that night they were dancing. Four red demons with clubs made of baseball bats, a snow queen covered in silver cooking foil, a black nylon crow, three coal miners with lamps, a robot with a body of cardboard boxes—all danced in the small school playground, round the car whose battery powered the microphone into which a bent old woman was singing. Her only accompaniment was one taiko drum and the scattered clapping of the dancers.” With laugh out loud passages, his encounters with oddities on the road and in the ryokans (tradition inns) he stays in, as well as haunting and searingly honest moments as he meets ordinary people who reveal their personal histories, Booth relates his conversations with humility and insight. All this taken together with both the grind and beauty of walking for 128 days over 3300 km, makes The Roads to Sata an illuminating travelogue, vivid and rich—and all the more so for Alan Booth’s turns of phrase, superb language and witty style.

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Review: 'Illuminating' * Economist *
'A memorable, oddly beautiful book' * Wall Street Journal *
'A marvellous glimpse of the Japan that rarely peeks through the country's public image' * Washington Post *
Fluent in the language, well-informed and disabused, [Booth] is in the fine tradition of hard-to-please travellers like Norman Douglas, Evelyn Waugh, and V.S. Naipaul. A sharp eye and a good memory for detail...give an astonishing immediacy to his account. * The Times Literary Supplement *
[Booth] achieved an extraordinary understanding of life as it is lived by ordinary Japanese....Frequently brilliant in his insights * The New York Times *
'One of the classic Japan travel books of the modern age ... a vivid but witty portrayal of rural Japan in the seventies, and the quirky characters who populated it' * Japan Times *
Booth vividly evokes his 2,000-mile, 128-day journey on foot from Japan's northernmost point, Cape Soya in Hokkaido, to Cape Sata in the south. As he recounts his misadventures on this epic trek, he engagingly reveals the realities of off-the-tourist-track Japan. * National Geographic *

Author Biography: ALAN BOOTH was born in London in 1946 and travelled to Japan in 1970 to study Noh theatre. He stayed, working as a writer and film critic, until his untimely death in 1993.