Memories of Silk and Straw: A Sel-Portrait of Small-Town Japan

First published in Japanese in 1981, then translated into English and released by Kodansha International in 1986. Rendered out of print when the publisher ceased to exist in 2011. Re-published as an e-book in 2015.

Voted Best Book of the Year by Japan's foreign press, a collective autobiography based on interviews taped by a provincial doctor.

"A fascinating group of people-geisha, gangster, shop-keeper, seamstress, farmer, fisherman, carter, midwife - all speaking candidly about their lives."
-San Francisco Examiner

"The finest book on the realities of Japanese traditional life to have been published in English for a very long time - if ever."
-Alan Booth, author of The Roads to Sata

"A sensitive portrait of a Japan known to too few in the Western world."
-Choice

"A book to savor, a book to learn from."
-Ronald Dore, Harvard University

"Fascinating, plainspoken, and uninhibited."
-The Magazine