Ian Buruma Books in Order

Donald Richie's text and Ian Buruma's photographs explore the history, symbolism, craft, and social meaning of tattooing in Japan. The book looks at traditional designs and the people who carried a once-stigmatized art on their skin.

Buruma looks beneath familiar images of Japan through its popular culture, sexual myths, gangsters, performers, sacred figures, and social roles. It is an observant tour of the fantasies and contradictions shaping modern Japanese life.

Based on travels across Asia, these essays examine countries balancing modernization with older ideas of culture and national identity. Buruma visits Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

A Dutch journalist in India becomes absorbed by the life of K. S. Ranjitsinhji, the princely cricketer who played for England. The novel uses cricket to probe class, race, empire, and the fragile business of belonging.

Buruma compares Germany and Japan's efforts to remember, deny, and reckon with their wartime crimes. Through encounters with veterans, survivors, artists, politicians, and activists, he shows how unresolved history shapes national identity.

In essays on Asia and the West, Buruma takes apart the fantasies each side projects onto the other. He ranges through politics, film, sexuality, nationalism, and public life, arguing that cultural differences are often exaggerated.

This concise history follows Japan from Commodore Perry's arrival in 1853 to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Buruma charts the country's rushed modernization, imperial expansion, wartime collapse, and difficult emergence as a postwar democracy.

Buruma explores Europe's long fascination with England through writers, exiles, reformers, and admirers from Voltaire onward. The result is a lively cultural history of British liberty, eccentricity, class, and the gap between England's image and reality.

Buruma follows Chinese dissidents, exiles, activists, and would-be democrats from Beijing to Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. Their lives challenge easy assumptions about Chinese unity, political obedience, and the prospects for individual freedom.

Buruma recounts the making of modern Japan, from forced opening to the West in 1853 through empire, defeat, occupation, and the 1964 Olympics. He focuses on the political choices and myths behind a rapid national transformation.

Written with Avishai Margalit, this study examines hostile fantasies about the West, from anti-modern nationalism to religious extremism. It traces how images of a soulless, decadent West have fueled political resentment and violence.

Buruma interviews his uncle, director John Schlesinger, about family, sexuality, film, and a career that ranged from British cinema to Hollywood. Schlesinger recalls making *Midnight Cowboy*, working with major stars, and navigating fame.

After filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam in 2004, Buruma returned to investigate the crime and its aftermath. The book explores radicalization, immigration, political Islam, free speech, and the limits of Dutch tolerance.

This historical novel reimagines the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese star known by different names in China, Japan, and America. Her shifting identity mirrors the wars, occupations, ambitions, and divided loyalties of modern East Asia.

Buruma explores the uneasy relationship between religion and liberal democracy in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. He argues that faith can have a public role, but political and religious authority must remain separate.

Buruma examines 1945 as a global turning point, when liberation, starvation, revenge, and political rebuilding followed World War II. Moving between Europe and Asia, he shows how the uncertain postwar order began amid immense human upheaval.

This essay collection considers war, violence, art, film, and public memory, from occupied Paris and Anne Frank to Japanese militarism and popular culture. Buruma asks how artists and societies confront cruelty without looking away.

Drawing on his grandparents' letters, Buruma tells the story of Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger's marriage across two world wars. Their family history becomes a moving exploration of Englishness, Jewish identity, assimilation, and loyalty.

In this memoir, Buruma recalls arriving in Tokyo in 1975 and plunging into its underground theater, film, nightlife, and art scenes. It is a candid story of an outsider finding freedom while remaining visibly foreign.

Buruma traces the Anglo-American special relationship from Roosevelt and Churchill through Brexit and Donald Trump. Looking at prime ministers and presidents in pairs, he asks how nostalgia, power, and national myth changed an unequal alliance.

Buruma investigates three elusive figures linked to wartime collaboration: Felix Kersten, Kawashima Yoshiko, and Friedrich Weinreb. Their conflicting stories reveal how survival, self-invention, and political myth can blur the line between villainy and heroism.

Buruma examines Baruch Spinoza's life in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the ideas that made him a radical outsider. The biography considers exile, Jewish identity, religious conflict, and Spinoza's lasting defense of freedom of thought.

Buruma reconstructs everyday life in wartime Berlin through letters, diaries, archives, and eyewitness accounts. Against a backdrop of bombing, hunger, fear, and repression, he follows the compromises and acts of courage that survival demanded.