About the book: 2019 / Few would deny that Japan, four relatively large and 6848 tiny islands, after it was forced to open its sea ​​gate to Commodore Matthew Perry, seriously influenced the European world and even in some sense turned it upside down. And it continues - to influence, change, turn over. It began with art, more precisely with painting. Well, just remember offhand, how many European artists do you know in whose work Korean, Chinese or Vietnamese origins can be easily read? But Hiroshige, Utamaro, Motonobu are constantly heard. Then he became acquainted with literature, and since then tanka and haiku have been composed in different European languages, whose incompleteness of tercets merges with painting into a single inseparable form. Tea ceremonies, discreet exquisite ceramics, ikebana... And architecture. And gastronomic delights...A book about all this is written by journalist Irina Tosunyan, who worked for Literary Gazeta in Moscow for many years, lived in Japan for three years, and in China for several months. Like an ordinary Japanese or Chinese man in the street. Some of the proposed stories were published in Russian and Japanese newspapers and magazines, others are published for the first time. Currently, Irina is LG’s own correspondent in the USA..