An Affair with a Village – Joy Hendry

Abstract

Joy Hendry is today a leading Japanese studies scholar and anthropologist, recompensed with the Order of the Rising Sun, who founded and presided over several major research associations over the past decades. However, at the time this story starts (as it is a story Hendry is writing in this book), she is a young woman starting her fieldwork for a doctorate. She had mastered the Japanese language already, but many aspects of Japanese daily life, especially in a retired rural area such as the small village of Kurotsuchi (Kyushu), elude her – as it did for most foreign academics in the 1970s.

Written during lockdown due to the pandemic, Hendry narrates [...]