Tokyo

Stephen Mansfield is an author and photojournalist who has been living on the edges of Tokyo since the late 1980s.

• * City of Literature, Theatre and Art: The print masters Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro; the Kabuki theatre; authors Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, Mishima Yukio, Murukami Haruki; foreign writers Angela Carter, William Gibson and Donald Richie. * City of Architecture: From the fortifications of Edo Castle, great temples and shrines, via the western hybrids of the Meiji era to the post-modernist skyscrapers, giant neon screens and digitalized surfaces of today's city. * City of Calamities: The great fires of the Edo period; floods, famines and typhoons; the 1923 Earthquake, coups and rising militarism in the 1930s; the fire bombings of the Second World War; the 1995 subway gas attack by members of a death cult and the fatalism of residents living on one of the earth's largest fault lines.

'Tokyo's cultural history, which is what Mansfield so splendidly serves us, is a template of its times, and in offering it, this book joins the best. Scholarly but packed, pungent and personal, it gives us the new key to the city.' --Japan Times