Sex is not sinful in Japanese culture, Buruma writes, but female desire is perceived as a destructive force. Japan's relentlessly sexist culture is epitomised by the artificial beauty of the doll-woman, the geisha. However, Buruma also discovers an intense mother love among Japanese men, who visit rukojos in red-light districts to be babied. And oddly for such a patriarchal society, the father is popularly mocked as dame oyaji (stupid dad)  the ideal father, it seems, is dead. First published in the early 1980s, this excellent cultural study resembles Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler, using cinema to probe a nation's psyche; but Buruma also has TV series, manga comics and grainy porn films to help him with his diagnosis. Porn has since migrated to the internet (as Buruma wistfully observes in a new preface), but that doesn't diminish his attempt to understand why the meek Japanese salaryman has such violent sexual fantasies. The result is not a definitive portrait of a people, but a fascinating snapshot.