Circle Around the Sun — Peregrine Hodson

Describes the life of an Englishman in Japan, a banker by day and a writer by night, and what it feels like to be a chameleon in a pin-stripe suit: the strange sensation of returning to Japan, as another persona comes back to life, part Japanese, part gaijin; the gradual internalization of an alien culture; and the bittersweet adventure of becoming someone other. The book records the experience of an outsider in a country where the group is all-powerful, and of an individual in a society where conformity is an almost religious duty. It describes a journey through the looking glass land of a foreigner in Tokyo and the invisible country which exists in the mind of the Japanese, into the interior - in search of the heart of Japan.