A Far Valley: Four Years in Japanese Village [Paperback]

Brian Moeran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

Charts the course of four years that anthropologist Brian Moeran and his family spent in a remote valley in southern Japan. Part private journal, part social and moral commentary, his account portrays everyday life in the Oni Valley, together with the complicated sets of relationships that emerged. Personal tragedy intrudes when Moeran's eldest son breaks his neck in a diving accident at the local primary school. Who is to blame? In trying to deal with this situation, he becomes entangled in a series of half-truths and deceits as those involved try to avoid responsibility. Gradually, he comes to realize that he will forever remain an outsider in this valley, and with real regret is forced to leave.

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha International (JPN) (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 4770023014
• ISBN-13: 978-4770023018
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,115,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Four years of close contact with Japanese neighbors, January 3, 2000

By 

David Mankins (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Far Valley: Four Years in Japanese Village (Paperback)

Brian Moeran and his family spent four years in a rural Japanese community, watching as pots are made, attending school award ceremonies, community festivals and funerals, but mostly listening (and drinking, a great deal of drinking) as their neighbors talked about their lives, their families and their communities.

Moeran is an anthropologist, and was doing his field work in a neighboring community at the time, and he brings an anthropologist's observant eye to his diary of daily life in rural Japan.

This book compares quite favorably to Alan Booth's classic _The roads to Sata_, and John Morley's _Pictures from the water trade_ in the ``a gaijin looks at Japan'' genre. If anything, it improves on those works by telling the tale of one community through sixteen seasons, and being peopled by individuals with whom the author formed lasting relationships. Further, Moeran's Japanese wife provides us with an occasional peek into the Japanese woman's world that is missing from most other books of this type.

The community Moeran describes is small and isolated. It is not representative of Japan as a whole (Moeran, in his introduction, tells how urban Japanese friends found his tales of rural Japan almost as exotic as a westerner does). Some may consider this to be a drawback, but I did not. The book still introduces us to some of the aspects of ``Japanese-ness''.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life in a Japanese valley., October 30, 2003

By 

Michael Valdivielso (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Far Valley: Four Years in Japanese Village (Paperback)

First off, let me say that the author gives a very honest and emotional picture of ONE Japanese valley. The fact is that Japan's ideals and norms can't be judged by the study of one village OR two villages OR three villages. Also, the characters are, in some cases, composites of more than one person, names have been changed and so on, but the events DID happen.
After saying all that I have to state that this is a great book. It is full of humor, passion, happy interaction and tragic events. And, yes, lots of drinking. Smoking too.
The book is based on three diaries that Brian Moeran kept during his four years living in Japan. The book is broken down into three parts, each made up of chapters which are either one sentence long to many pages long and this gives the story an interesting and timeless flow. In fact, the book is only 254 pages yet seems much longer.