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    "nstc": null,
    "title": "A Beginners Guide to Japan",
    "subtitle": "observations and provocations",
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    "description": "Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020<br/><br/>How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem?<br/><br/>Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon?<br/><br/>Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect?<br/><br/>After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before.<br/><br/><br/>'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times",
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    "language_code": "eng",
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    "page_count": 200,
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    "publication_date_first": "2019-09-03",
    "publication_date_latest": "2020-04-30",
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    "editions": [
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            "isbn": "9781101973479",
            "product_form": "BC"
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    "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:30:47+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-11-07T00:30:03+00:00",
    "publisher": {
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        "slug": "bloomsbury",
        "name": "Bloomsbury",
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    "contributors": [
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