A grand panoramic tour of Japan's history

For the rest of the world, Japan conjures up a vision of unique sensual images and experiences: exquisite cherry blossoms, the ever-so delicately flavored sushi, the highly stylized Noh and kabuki performances, the elaborately coiffed geisha dressed in an ornate kimono, the ethereal 17-syllable haiku, the ritualistic tea ceremony, aesthetic bamboo pavilions with tatami-covered floors, extremely courteous, disciplined and equally industrious people worshipping their emperor (though no longer divine)—the list is endless.

- SHREEKANT SAMBRANI

Even a veteran traveler is mostly unable to decode this enigma of exotica, leave alone explain how they have come to signify the Land of the Rising Sun for so long.

That link is what the journalist-historian Lesley Downer's magnificent little book so authentically and refreshingly provides. She has spent decades in Japan, which she so obviously adores, and written extensively on the country including a Shogun quartet of novels. She gained recognition when she published her account of the journey on foot, retracing the path of the great haiku master Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) from Edo (now Tokyo) to the northeast, when he wrote some of the most celebrated haikus of all times. In a 1989 review of her book, On the Narrow Road, Journey into a Lost Japan, the renowned scholar John David Morley wrote: "The literal translations that Ms. Downer herself sometimes offers seem to me to come closer to its spirit than the lapidary approximations" (sample: Old pond—/Frog jumps in/Sound of water, from the book under review).

Downer paints her vast canvas of the archipelago from prehistoric times to current headlines with deft, broad yet delicate, brush strokes. Her writing has all the allure of a roman à clef, which is what it really is in more ways than one. She begins with the charming myth of gods dancing to draw out Amaterasu, the sun goddess, hiding in a cave (the Japanese is one of a handful of cultures that has this divinity as female; she is the mother divine of all the Japanese, including, especially, the emperor). She beamed and the world began. Big Bang, anyone?