During the 1990s, journalist Caroline Bergman and her diplomat husband spent five years living in Japan. She wandered widely through what she terms “the Empire of the resigned,” and her first book, From the Japanese, is a lively, insightful, and often surprising distillation of her many official and spontaneous encounters with the Japanese.

Among the highlights: a candid conversation with a young Western-educated woman who sought out a traditional arranged marriage (and makes an excellent case for it!); an interview with an elderly historian who has been embroiled in lawsuits for three decades over the right to tell the truth about Japan’s war crimes during the Second World War; and a professional woman who became an instant sensation after suing her boss for sexual harassment, then a “foreign” concept that had no existence in polite parlance or in law. Also figuring in Bergman’s cast of characters are transvestites, geishas, politicians, rebels, and even the Emperor himself.

Bergman’s writing is perfunctory, but her intelligence, diligent research, and curiousity make each of her encounters, all captured in precisely rendered conversations and informative asides, absorbing and illuminating. But it is Bergman’s non-judgmental authorial stance that distinguishes From the Japanese. Having wrestled with her Western assumptions and won, Bergman is able to penetrate the unique nature of Japanese culture, where things are not what they seem. Stillness and silence represent a deep distrust of verbal communication. The reluctance to make commitments or express opinions, far from being a sign of weak will, reveals an ability to tolerate the kind of ambiguity Westerners abhor.

The Japanese do not strive to be clear or concise – it is futile in a world that they believe is “all blur and uncertain hues.” While Bergman admires this perspective, she remains aware of its downside. It may, she posits, explain the country’s difficulties in “dealing with their past, their present, and even their future.”