One Japanese individual commits suicide every fifteen minutes. More than a million Japanese people are hikikomori, meaning that they almost never leave the house. Even as the country is suffering through one recession after another—shuttered stores seem to be as common as departing prime ministers—the social fabric of my adopted home, sustained and refined over […]
A powerful, unexpected scene glances through the beginning of Colin Thubron’s characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted, new book of travel. As he walks through the mountains of Nepal, towards Mount Kailas in Tibet, suddenly he realizes that he’s only 140 miles from Naini Tal, the Indian hill-station whose name rang across his home as a […]
“What am I afraid of ?” I asked myself not long ago. Not many things. A traveller can’t afford to carry fears with him, leaping into the unknown on every trip. The only things I could think of were snakes, which sometimes fill my dreams–and heights, which induce in me a mad impulse to take […]
The last major story that D.H. Lawrence published, six months before his death, was set in the ancient world and, characteristically, preoccupied with resurrection. “The Man Who Died” is a typically wild and visionary piece, sensual and impenitent, about the risen Jesus meeting a priestess of Isis and, true to his Chatterley origins, feeling that […]
On sofas overlooking the lights of the city, salon-tanned kids stretched out before a blue-lit cocktail bar—not to be confused with the espresso bar (offering tiramisu) in another corner or the regular popcorn counter serving up Pepperidge Farm cookies and tubs of Häagen-Dazs. It took me a while to realize that these glamorous teenagers weren’t […]
To get to the Desert Rain coffee-house in central Leh, you have to walk off the crowded main street that leads to the mosque and slither through a passageway to a parallel back lane, barely paved, too narrow for more than three people to pass at a time, in the process forever of being completed, […]
“When I was your age,” the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is telling a group of six hundred or so young female students at Chikushi Jagakoen school in Fukuoka, Japan, “I was a quite lazy student. I didn’t have much enthusiasm for studying.” Though sitting politely, their hands in their laps, the girls almost visibly come to […]
The traveler, I decided one day, is part photographer and part philosopher: His aim, as he sets out, is to catch some aspect of his subject—a tilt of head, a glint of eye—that exists out of time, and so to show us, as a portrait-painter might once have done, that aspect of a place that […]
“You’ve got to remember we’re on an island here,” my old friend Nicolas was saying, as unseasonal rains crashed down on Alice Springs, the worst downpour in nine years, and great chocolate-brown currents clogged the usually dry river-bed of the Todd, blocking our way back to our hotel and washing away roads for the moment. […]
It was already clear, in December of 1999, that books were a dying species. Already more people seemed interested in producing novels than consuming them, and when it came to serious works there seemed more fascination with the writer than the writing. Books, I heard from two serious, bewildered editors in New York on the […]
