Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Japan Story cover art

Japan Story

By: Christopher Harding
Narrated by: Christopher Harding
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Too Big to Jail cover art
The Japanese cover art
Darwin's Dangerous Idea cover art
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue cover art
The Phoenix Years cover art
Words on the Move cover art
Being the Other cover art
Quarterly Essay 1: In Denial cover art
The Eighties cover art
India Rising cover art
India cover art
State of Emergency cover art
The Making of Modern Britain cover art
The Italians cover art
Israel cover art
The Third Reich in Power cover art

Summary

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Japan Story, written and read by Christopher Harding.  

This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-19th century to the present.  

It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernisers and nationalists but with resistance, conflict, distress.   

We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernisation. 

These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and homegrown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan. 

©2018 Christopher Harding (P)2018 Penguin Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

"How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it...Masterly." (Neil MacGregor)

More from the same

What listeners say about Japan Story

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    40
  • 4 Stars
    15
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    38
  • 4 Stars
    12
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    35
  • 4 Stars
    14
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

A well researched plod fest

Firstly I need to say that I would like to write a book but I haven't got round to it yet. Chris Harding has done and so I give him endless praise and respect for doing so.

The book is split into chapters e.g. "Such and such era 1800 - 1850" but the book wanders all round the time periods. You can be in the 1980 era when an interesting anecdote is dropped only for the author to say that happened 50 years before the chapter you are in. This happens continually through the book to the extent that the chapters are almost irrelevant.

My end feeling was that the book is basically a discussion or talk about everything the author knows about Japan. A lot of that was of interest to be otherwise I wouldn't have bought the book. 16 hours in I didn't feel any more immersed than I was in the first minute. The highlight for me came early on it was the American's first encounter with Japan. An unbelievable story and hard to believe that it really happened. The author has a nice voice and sounds like a great guy, his Japanese sounds amazing and I praise him endlessly for sounding so fluent.

If you have any interest in Japan either present day or historically you will get something from this book. But it isn't as truly incredible as some other non fiction books which I didn't want to end.

e.g. Absolute Pandemonium by Brian Blessed
Canoeing the Congo
The Cyclist who Went Out into the Cold
No Shortcuts To The Top by Ed Viesturs

all of those books are gripping and thrilling and at times hilarious.

Congratulations again to Chris Harding and all the best to him in the future. I hope people buy his book and make him lots of Yen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Enjoyable and informing friendly history

I lived in Japan for a year, and found his boundless enthusiasm familiar and entertaining.
Historical situations were explained through characters and people's experiences, which suited me, and jumped forward and back in time, which I also thought was fine, though it annoyed other reviewers who presumably preferred a more ordered textbook.
I can't say how balanced a 'historical document' it was, but I was comfortable with it and enjoyed it very much.
Will listen again.
Hope he gets to play in the garden now.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Superb!

Well written modern history of Japan, with emphasis on the pop culture. Brought alive by the many relevant side stories.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Unlikely premise, but very well executed

When I chose this book, I was surprised to find it a story of Japan, largely through the lens of psychoanalysis, but actually it works very well. It was an extremely effective device to getting you inside the heads of a distant people that many of us know little about. Read by the author, very clearly and easy to listen to. Well worth the time.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Informative and refreshing

This is a highly enjoyable survey of post-Meiji Japan, which deftly combines political, cultural and social threads. There may be too much emphasis on "pop" issues for some, yet the result is far from glib and I learned a great deal of useful background.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Thankfully more engaging than most books on Japan in this period

I've read a few books on Japanese history, and have tended to find those focused on modern Japan among the least interesting. Yes, the rapid national realignments of the Meiji Restoration and following WWII were impressive, but TBH I've never found the books I've encountered about these periods that engaging - whether nonfiction or fiction. They tend towards rather obvious clashes between tradition and modernity that I've always found predictable and dull.

This being more of a psycho-cultural history than a pure history, I was expecting more of the same. Broken into a chronological yet primarily thematic series of chapters, usually brought to life through the experiences of a number of individuals - both famous and obscure - it won't give you much of a sense of what happened when, but it's very good on the *impact* of what happened on the Japanese mindset, and is all told very well.

The conclusions are familiar, but this is nonetheless excellent on the nuances, contradictions and complexities of different perspectives, something that can often be lost in the high level samurai to salaryman clichés that have become all too familiar from other books on this period.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good read

A good listen but author doesn't convey the full horror of what the Japanese imperial Army inflicted on the nation's it conquered, that's my only critisism of the book, although this in itself is very Japanese. That aside I enjoyed this audiobook.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Fornation of modern Japan

fascinating insight into the formation of modern Japan. interesting how pressure form America and China formulated the problems.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!