A Walk in Japan: The 1910 Travelogue of Bernhard Kellermann
Translation by Robert Blasiak
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.
BOOK INFORMATION
A Walk in Japan: The 1910 Travelogue of Bernhard Kellermann, Translated by Robert Blasiak
ISBN: 978-0-473-32026-3
Japan; Travel; Theater
An enthusiastic first-hand account of Meiji Era Japan through the eyes of German author and poet Bernhard Kellermann.
Published April 2015
Paperback, perfect binding.
Black/white illustrations (36); Prefaces by Translator and Illustrator
Size: 21 cms by 15 cms
Weight: 360 gms
LINKS
Robert 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
