Harriet Sergeant is a journalist and the author of Among the Hoods: My Years With a Teenage Gang.
Ian Buruma’s latest book, The China Lover, is a fictionalised take on themes previously examined in his impressive body of non-fictional work. His views on Japan, its history, films and underworld as well as the role of the outsider, the relationship between East and West and much more are all unpacked here as we follow
Rows of black suits filled the China Airlines flight from Beijing to Paris in September 1984. The People’s Liberation Army had ordered its entire delegation of dancers and musicians to wear the same ill-fitting outfit. Only one 17-year-old dancer had disobeyed the order. For this, his first visit to Europe, Jin Xing had bought a
On the 25 November, 1970 after a failed coup d’état, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima stuck a knife into his belly, then had his head cut off with his own sword. Twenty years later I enjoyed a brief flirtation with a member of Mishima’s private militia, the Tate no Kai or Shield Society. Matsumura, like
Shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, I found myself in a girls’ dormitory of Beijing university. It was a small drab room of eight wooden bunks. The students wore shapeless Mao jackets over hand-knitted jerseys and their hair in plaits. It was very cold. I had asked about their love life. The girls