LOST JAPAN by Alex Kerr, translated...

LOST JAPAN by Alex Kerr, translated from the Japanese by Bodhi Fishman & Alex Kerr (Lonely Planet: $10.95, 269 pp., paperback original). In 1994, Kerr became the first non-Japanese to win the prestigious Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize, awarded to an outstanding work of nonfiction, for this study of the traditional arts in Japan.

In a series of personal essays, he argues that the current popularity of flower arranging, Kabuki, etc. represents the final efflorescence of a moribund culture: “The drastic decline in the quality of the environment--the mountains and rivers covered with wires and concrete, the old wooden houses replaced with aluminum and plastic--is having an effect: The fossilized forms remain, but people are forgetting the purpose behind them.”