The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

William Gibson is one of favorites. Here’s an article on Japanese culture. He wrote it a couple years before Pattern Recognition came out. If you’ve read the book, you’ll spot the London-Tokyo connection developing here:

I’ve always felt that London is somehow the best place from which to observe Tokyo, perhaps because the British appreciation of things Japanese is the most entertaining. There is a certain tradition of ‘Orientalia’, of the faux-Oriental, that has been present here for a long time, and truly, there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original.