Books
A Walk in Japan: The 1910 Travelogue
of Bernhard Kellermann (Translation Robert Blasiak)
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 Book InformationA Walk in Japan: The 1910 Travelogue of Bernhard Kellermann, Translated by Robert BlasiakOnline: $25.00 NZ Mailing: NZ $4; Australia $8;
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A Walk in Japan is the first English translation of Bernhard Kellermann’s 1910 account of his travels in the cities and countryside of Meiji Era Japan. A successful author and poet in Germany, Kellermann was also an avid traveller. Just five years after the Russo-Japanese War ended, he boarded the Trans-Siberian Express across Asia before taking a steamship from Russia across to Japan’s Western shores, where his account begins. The pages brim with the enthusiasm and excitement of a young man in foreign lands. Indeed, Kellermann was only 30 when this trip began, and his commercial success (and the subsequent banning and burning of his books during the 1930s and 1940s) still lay before him. In Japan, he spends his days in theatres marvelling at the costumes and dances, rapidly falling in love with the women he meets, and wandering the coastlines and forests of Japan. Tokyo-based artist Stuart Ayre has beautifully illustrated the book by drawing on period photos and postcards as well as Japanese art. These illustrations and Kellermann’s enthusiastic and humorous words (rendered for the first time in English) allow readers to walk through the Japan of yesteryear and meet its people – a land populated with local theatre troupes, teahouses, rickshaws, and bare-breasted ama divers. Buy Online LINKSRobert did a winning presentation on the book here: www.pechakucha.org/users/robert-blasiak More about Robert: www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/whyutokyo/people005.html |
Selected Illustrations by Stuart Ayre
