Travels in the East by Donald Richie (Stone Bridge Press)

If you are an independent traveler who relishes solitude yet occasionally wishes for another person's voice and vision, you need to pop this tiny volume into your luggage. Donald Richie's newest book is the perfect accompaniment to any journey, whether it's still in the planning stages, is already on the open road, or will never go beyond the expanses of a cozy armchair.

A man who left the United States to live most of his life in Japan, Richie is well aware of the privileges and limitations that come with spending short periods of time in other countries. Travel, he points out, "is freedom from captivity." Yet when travelers are in places where they cannot speak the language, it also can turn them into "no one at all."

This liability of being no one brings its own form of liberation. Without the demands of customary human interaction, travelers can become cameras, having no responsibilities except to absorb, consider, and record everything they have come to see. And that is where the challenge lies--suddenly the world is transformed into a blur of beauty and amazement. Describing it turns into a vocabulary test. Travel journals, despite the best of intentions, run the risk of becoming repositories for those desperate sentences that are usually found on the backs of postcards--unless the writer is Donald Richie.

This man doesn't leave his knowledge and experience at home when he goes exploring, and he never fails to bring originality of perspective and of language to the places that he visits. Pointing out that there is a vast difference between visiting a destination that's so far along the road less traveled that it is rarely ever heard of, and going somewhere so famous that a visitor has a connection with it long before actually being there, Richie revels in experiencing the places he goes to, and then recreating that experience for his readers. For him, viewing the Great Pyramids or the splendors of Cambodia's temples is an adventure as fresh and untarnished as going to Bhutan or Mongolia.

In Egypt, "in the cold shadow of Cheops" on the Geza plateau, he finds a profile from an ancient bas-relief on the face of the camel driver who is his guide, and a direct line is drawn from the present to the past and its men who built pyramids from stones "as big as a Toyota." At Angkor, while trying to understand the extent of the entire area, he realizes it is roughly the same size as inner Washington D.C. Suddenly he imagines the ruins of that modern capital being toured in the same way that Angkor is now, by tourists wandering through it in a daze of awe and ignorance. In India he sees the future of the world, "when further billions are born and have nowhere to go," and then recognizes in the erotic temple carvings of Khajuraho that sheer joy of "this beautiful, irresistible urge" that will soon overcrowd the planet.

As well as examining destinations, Richie takes a close look at the act of travel, and at those who pursue it. "Why," he asks himself while lying on an idyllic Krabi beach, "are tourists so horny?" He decides that for people who are in "a new environment, cut from the past and plunked into an alien present," often without language and the power that it confers, sex helps to reestablish a "sense of self." While his readers may or may not agree with him, he certainly does give everyone something to ponder.

As he does when recounting a conversation in Japan about the art of using lacquer, where he is told by "a portly gentleman" that there is no more lacquer because it can't be made by robots. "They're all around--young robots. They can't read anything but comic books and they perm their hair and they can't think. Robots already--that's what they are." And then, Richie says, "we drink our tea in that agreeable silence left when undoubted truths have been voiced."

May we all have the pleasure of drinking our own tea, or beer, or Scotch in that agreeable silence that comes when traveling with Donald Richie.~Janet Brown

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (Knopf)

It is the world after the Apocalypse, bombed, burned-out and ravenous. People starve while lice feast on their skin and in their hair. Lured by the promise of food, young women follow men they have never seen before, and little boys play at being soldiers, joined by little girls who play at being streetwalkers. The smell of death is well known; it's the stench of rotten apricots. Nothing makes sense and no one is who they appear to be. The Victors are the only people who are not locked in a nightmare, and criminals are the rulers of the marketplace. The war is over and this is Tokyo in 1946.

In this broken city, corpses are not unusual and people are haunted by death. Black scorched concrete and the charred remnants of houses stand as memorials to the thousands of people who died in barrages of firebombs, while the noise of jackhammers working to rebuild what was destroyed punctuates every other activity. For Detective Minami, a Tokyo policeman, the dead from the past are so real to him that only sedatives will allow him to sleep. He’s a man whose life is almost robotic. He works, he brings food to his family, he makes quick visits to a woman who, he says "haunts me."

"I am one of the survivors," he tells himself bitterly and repeatedly, "one of the lucky ones."

The bodies of young women who were raped and strangled are found in a city park, and the police begin the task of discovering their identities and finding their killer. Minami becomes immersed in a hell that is composed of his war memories and of the terrible truths that he is forced to learn by doing his job—finding a murderer whose past he shares.

And we join him there. This is not a novel that leaves the reader unmoved and unscathed. Through Minami, we become inhabited by the world that he roams through. His repeated phrases begin to drive us as crazy as his body lice drive him. His hunger becomes ours and we feel the bile that he persistently vomits rising in our own throats.

David Peace uses the cadence of rock and roll and the onomatopoeic language usually associated with comic strips to carry us deeply into this book, along with words that are so piercing that it often feels as though he is writing in a whole new language. His artistry and his storytelling hold us captive in a landscape that we would prefer not to see, and yet his skill makes it impossible for us to turn away.

Once in every couple of decades, just when fiction seems as though it is really and truly dead, along comes a book that turns upside down and inside out everything that we think we know about storytelling. Like On the Road, Catch 22, or All the Pretty Horses, Tokyo Year Zero redefines what a novel can be, and what a novel can do. Read it.~Janet Brown