What Japan Does to People

Getting stopped on a Tokyo street by a photographer sounds like the opening of a story that only happens to other people. David Schumann—tattooed German punk rocker, student abroad, probably not expecting any of this—flies to Japan and finds himself being pulled into the local modeling industry, the parties, the women, the particular strangeness of daily life in a city that makes you feel intensely visible and completely alien at the same time.

His book The Tokyo Diaries covers all of it autobiographically: the moment he gets spotted, the slow ascent into something like success in a country operating by rules he’s only half-deciphering, and everything that comes with it on the way up and on the way down. This is the kind of writing I’m drawn to—where the fish-out-of-water setup isn’t played for comedy but for what the experience actually does to a person. Japan has a talent for marking people. You go there and come back different, and if you can articulate how, that’s worth reading.