Synopses & Reviews
For centuries Westerners have projected fan-tasies of a decadent, voluptuous East in contrast to the puritanism of their own cultures. A Japanese theatrical troupe performing in his native Holland in 1971 exposed the young Ian Buruma to these temptations, and soon he was off to Tokyo, a would-be libertine. The essays collected in The Missionary and the Libertine chronicle Buruma's sobering discovery that Asians often have equally distorted visions of the West.
In these humorous and enlightening essays, Buruma describes the last days of Hong Kong, the showbiz politics of the Philippines, the chauvinism of the Seoul Olympics, the sinister genius of Lee Kuan Yew, the intricacies of Japanese sexuality, and much more. His portraits of Benazir Bhutto, Imelda Marcos, Satyajit Ray, and Corazón Aquino are classics of the journalist's art.
Buruma shows that the cultural gap between East and West is not as wide as either missionaries or libertines, in East or West, might think. At home in both worlds, he has provided a splendid counterblast to fashionable theories of clashing civilizations and uniquely Asian values. By stripping away our fantasies, Buruma reveals a world that is all too recognizably human.
Synopsis
The author of "Anglomania" brilliantly examines the meeting of love and war in East and West in this selection of 25 essays, many previously published in "The New York Review of Books" and collected here for the first time.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-319).
About the Author
Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in God's Dust, A Japanese Mirror, and Behind the Mask. He has also written Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, and Anglomania. Buruma is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities in Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
Mishima Yukio: the suicidal dandy -- Oshima Nagisa: Japanese sex -- Tanizaki Junichiro: the art of cruelty -- Yoshimoto Banana: pink dreams -- Edward Seidensticker: an American in Tokyo -- Wilfred Thesiger: Wilfred of Arabia -- Baden-Powell: boys will be boys -- Louis Couperus: the Eurasians of the Dutch East Indies -- Satyajit Ray: the last Bengali renaissance man -- Nirad C. Chaudhuri: citizen of the British Empire -- Mircea Eliade: Bengal nights -- V.S. Naipaul's India -- Bhutto's Pakistan -- St. Cory and the evil rose -- The bartered bride -- The Seoul olympics -- The last days of Hong Kong -- Ghosts of Pearl Harbor -- The war over the bomb -- We Japanese -- Samurai of swat -- Amâericainerie -- Wake up, America -- Looking East -- The nanny state of Asia.