Travelers who’ve used Lonely Planet guides to navigate Laos by bicycle or trek through mountain passes in New Zealand may be surprised by Lost Japan, one of four titles published to launch the company’s new series of travel narratives. Devotees will expect something written in the company’s de facto house style – a travelogue that’s loose, chatty, and meant to be tucked into a backpack (never a suitcase).

Alex Kerr, however, writes as if he travels with a Samsonite, or perhaps even a Gucci. An erudite U.S. ex-pat who has lived in Japan since 1977, Kerr holds degrees in Japanese and Chinese studies and approaches his subject – for the most part, the state of the traditional arts in contemporary Japan – with the profound respect and earnest zeal of a lifelong scholar. This collection of carefully structured essays about culture and the arts, originally written and published in Japanese, charts the author’s “artistic apprenticeship” under the mentorship of some of Japan’s most notable kabuki theatre performers, calligraphers, art collectors, and flower arrangers. Along his journey toward esthetic enlightenment, Kerr comes to the conclusion that the Japanese have willfully destroyed their traditional ways of life, abandoning their thatched houses and calligraphy brushes for neon-lit love hotels and pachinko parlours.

Lonely Planet deserves credit for seeking out authors with impressive pedigrees, but Kerr may be too familiar with his subject for some readers. He and his editors assume a high degree of previous knowledge (is it widely known that “Diet” refers to the Japanese legislature, and will many readers understand his allusion to a Tibetan mountain as “the great Shiva lingam of the universe”?) and his tendency to trumpet his own artistic authority can be grating. Ikebana, the traditional art of flower arrangement, is dismissed as “grotesque” and “painful to behold” without elaboration – readers deserve more than this from such a well-schooled author.

That said, this lovingly wrought elegy to the traditional arts deserves an audience – and some thoughtful discussion.