Sake and Satori: Asian Journals, Japan (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

In 1954, famed mythologist Joseph Campbell traveled, at age 50, to Asia for the first time. In this second volume of his Asian journals, he continues East after nearly seven months in India, moving through Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally coming to rest, for a full five months, in Japan. Fueled by his remarkable eye for cultural differences and similarities, yet written through the unjaded perspective of a remarkably erudite teacher on his first trip to the Asia he has studied for most of his life, Sake and Satori is a unique snapshot of 1950s Asia and its rapidly changing post-colonial and Cold War tensions.