Japanese Inn is a book my father gave me when I was in middle school—perhaps because he loved it, perhaps because I am half-Japanese, and good parents, in their quiet way, try to plant roots in the places they hope their children will grow.
It is not a book I would recommend widely. I suspect many would find it slow, even dull. I myself am not drawn to historical fiction. But there are exceptions we carry like small heirlooms, and this one has always felt like that. For readers who don’t keep history tucked in their pockets like lint—especially not Japanese history—the novel may feel dense with unfamiliar names, weighed down by detail. And yet, to me, it felt light. Charming. Almost enchanted.
Not because it traffics in the supernatural, but because it brushes so gently against the magic of the everyday. In that way, it reminded me of magic realism—not in content, but in spirit. There is something quietly luminous about how it lingers on the mundane: the rhythm of a broom across tatami, the steam rising from a bath, the way travelers come and go, carrying the history of the world in their footsteps.
I’ve always been drawn to stories of place—not quest novels where characters move across maps, but the inverse: stories where the place endures, and people pass through it like weather. This book is just that. A fictional chronicle of an inn, and all the lives that briefly intersect within its walls. It made me think of my own childhood: of walking Roman roads or Kyoto alleyways and wondering who had come before me. What arguments, romances, betrayals, or silences had unfolded in these spaces? Could I feel, faintly, the echo of their steps in mine?
We tend to imagine awe as a modern affliction, but surely someone in ancient Egypt rounded the bend, saw the pyramids for the first time, and—whether aloud or in their own ancient idiom—shouted, What the hell is that? Maybe they even clapped a friend on the shoulder, wide-eyed, overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of it all.
This is the tone of Japanese Inn—a book of small, unnoticed awe. It devotes whole pages to simple, uneventful days, and then, with no fanfare, mentions the presence of some of the most storied names in Japanese history. This is a novel that revels in the in-between moments: the chores, the meals, the waiting. It’s the kind of stillness we admire in a Miyazaki film, but struggle to tolerate on the page. Very few authors can make a child’s ordinary task feel as thematically weighty as an emperor’s decision. But this book tries. Sometimes it succeeds.
Reading it again now, it is not just a story I remember—it is a memory itself. A memory of my father, young then, giving me something he loved. Maybe hoping it would be a bridge. Maybe trying to pass along a piece of himself.
Maybe just trying to shut me up for a few hours.
Either way, it worked.
If you want to read about another book my father gave me, I wrote brifely about James Clavell’s Shogun recently as well.