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36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan | 
 enlarge | Author: Cathy N. Davidson
Publisher: Plume
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 436281
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0452272408
Dewey Decimal Number: 915
EAN: 9780452272408
ASIN: 0452272408
Publication Date: October 1, 1994
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Product Description
Davidson moved to Japan in 1980 to teach English at the nation's leading all-women's university, and began a deep and abiding fascination with the country and its people. This spirited and evocative work is at once a highly original travel memoir and the compelling account of a deeply personal interior journey. Reading tour.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 A lovely trip through Japan with a friend November 15, 2008
What a nice book about Japan! I've read a lot of books on Japanese culture, mostly written by experts, but this author is totally green and speaks no Japanese. It feels like an intimate conversation with a dear friend. Loved it, especially her time at the sea.
 One of the Better Expatriate Japanese Travelogues June 12, 2008
I liked this book. I've been reading a lot of expatriate Japanese travelogues lately and I admire the author for leaving ego and self-indulgence out of the narrative (not accomplished by Katie Kitamura, Laura Friska, Richard Kramer, or Bruce Feiler). I've only visited Japan for a month so I don't know if her observations and interpretation of Japanese society and culture are accurate, but I thought the writing was gracious and thoughtful and her expat experiences in other countries rang true for me. I've lived and traveled in several countries and had many of the same feelings about identity and belonging. I really enjoyed the item about speaking Japanese in Paris because that happened to me when I was in Japan--I would automatically revert to my limited knowledge of French when trying to converse in simple Japanese. It was such a strange thing and now I know that this happens to other people too.
I only gave this book four stars though because I didn't enjoy the latter part of the book as much as the first. There was an elitist tone regarding the building the Japanese house in North Carolina that didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book.
I still would recommend this book however; in my opinion, it's superior to most of this genre that are out there.
 If you're traveling to Japan . . . May 7, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you are planning to travel to Japan, particularly for the first time, this is a good book to read, as it is an excellent guide to the complicated cultural differences you are likely to encounter. There are some wonderful anecdotes, my favorite being the story of how Davidson and her husband attended a funeral in the home of people they knew quite well. Nevertheless, they ended up completely confused as to how to behave correctly and mortified by their errors in etiquette. The book is also a wise commentary on what happens when one is so smitten by another culture that (for a time) the possibility of moving and starting one's life over in a new place seems not only desirable but possible. There is a fine section in which Davidson, on a visit to Paris, observes the difficulties of the Japanese tourists who are also visiting the city. The experience provides her with a completely different perspective, tempering her rather idealized view of Japanese culture. That said, the book is too long, and as I read it for a second time, I found myself skimming and skipping through parts like the long elegy for Suzuki-san that appears and reappears like a kind of refrain in the second half of the book. As a memoir, 36 Views is a very serious, sometimes graceful, sometimes ponderous look at Japan, and I occasionally found myself longing for a dose of irreverence.
From Practice House (in Japan) to Practice House (in NC) November 18, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Davidson Sensei's book is worthwhile just for the vignettes and anecdotes about a gaijin living in Japan in the 1980's. The book is even better as a discourse and commentary on the relative merits of egalitarian and elitist cultures.
For many gaijin, Japan is a middleclass paradise... safe, clean, polite, orderly, full of giri (reciprocity); an egalitarian meritocracy. The ultimate middle class experience. At first, Davidson falls in love with Japan but by her fourth visit, she sees it as a sad, depressing place. Her discomfort reaches a peak during a stay at her former host University's Practice House, an ersatz model Western home designed to be a laboratory for teaching young Japanese women Western manners, practices and protocols.
The Western, and particularly the American elite's disdain, if not outright contempt for what's left of the middle class is well known. Academic elites, in particular, loath their middle class students (while craving the middle class tuition dollars that pay their salaries). Davidson tells us about her family's failed efforts to participate in the middle class Chicagoland suburbia of the 1950's. She hates all of the mid-20th century middle class symbolism in her Japanese host's Western Practice House.
Davidson moves on to a job at an elite East Coast University, builds a fabulous Japanese house on a beautiful lakeside setting in the country, and leads a live that most Americans can only imagine. Ultimately, the author chooses to participate in the upmarket options that are only available to her in Elitist America instead of the living in middle class Japan. She makes the decision after a blinding flash of insight gained while vacationing in Paris. The point of the book, the moral of the story, fits our times perfectly: Elitism is better than Egalitarianism, (if you are a member of the Elite). What is funny and charming about all this is that Davidson really doesn't seem to understand the implications of her decision until a houseguest from Japan spells it out for her. And in the final chapter the irony that a second Japanese houseguest also has to spell out for her. After her lengthy journey and a long story well told, it turns out that Davidson's fabulous Japanese house is an ersatz Practice House.
No giri.
No Mount Fuji.
Intriguing And Graceful September 16, 2006
Cathy Davidson's 36 VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI has become, after a few reads, a personal favorite. At first it would seem to be something of a first-person travelogue, but - like ceratin other classics (Peter Matthiessen's SNOW LEOPARD and Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK both spring to mind) - it quickly evolves into something more.
Davidson's impressions of Japan - and of foreigners in Japan (these are particularly revealing) - are stated with great eloquence and economy, and the book steadily shifts towards something more philosophical - how identity can be found or commented upon by unlikely places and experiences. Davidson finds this a fascinating yet disorienting process, and details both quite well.
Davidson works through her illusions about Japan, which are replaced by less romantic realities, and inevitably confornts the same ironies in America, which are viewed in a new light upon arriving home. This takes us to what - to me - was the real heart of the book - a Japanese friend's visit to Davidson's new home in North Carolina, and an illusion-shattering conversation which occurs during that visit. Illusions or stereotypes persist due to (among other reasons) their romance or mythic symbolism, and the projection of those fantasies onto a different culture do give voice to ones' dissatisfactions with ones' own culture, and seeing that examined, recognized, and partially obliterated is in some ways a bit sad and anti-romantic. Her friend (who in some ways sees the exoticism of America as any of us might be wowed by Japan, but also is completely unafraid to point out the b.s. built into both societies) - among other super-sharp observations - does point out that one can also choose to hang on to a few of those illusions - in a highly selective and informed way, and perhaps gain some unique personal insights.
An intriguing and graceful book; I recommend it.
-David Alston
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