Josie Dew went to Japan on a whim - and cycled round it on a bike. Once there, she found what we cosmopolitans fear to discover: that foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) are different, laugh at things we don't think are funny, eat food you wouldn't be seen dead tucking into at home, have inexplicable lavatorial habits, are just cute when they try to speak English, and seem quite at home in their (to us) exotic surroundings. Which was more than Josie was. The mosquitoes grazed on her regularly, food was mainly slippery threads of something or other and she was always being mistaken for American.
In fact, though Josie Dew is English, she doesn't fall into that category of stalwart Englishwoman who trudges through the rain forests in search of butterflies or spends a lifetime paddling the Amazon studying its river communities. Dew is more the urban adventurer, off on a bit of lark; a jolly, girl-next-door type ("gosh!" and "phew!" come easily to her lips) who is happy to pedal from town to city to village, knocking on people's doors to inquire about where she might pitch her tent and usually, as a result, being invited to stay the night.
Not that she's not intrepid. Her solo bike ride - started in June and lasting four months - meant she constantly had to fight off the worries the Japanese had about a strange-looking gaijin pitching her tent in public parks, beside shrines, down alleyways and on roadside verges. And then, worse, pedalling off to yet another unknown destination. Especially as she was - she discovered - what is known in Japan as a stale Christmas cake - a woman of marriageable age who is not yet married. When asked her age, she said whatever she thought would be acceptable to the questioner: 22 if she wanted to portray herself as young and insouciant and 45 if she wanted to shock. In fact, she's in her early 30s, is an accomplished chef (single-handedly, she runs a bicycle meals-on-wheels service in London called Posh-Nosh) but with rainbow-striped shorts, sticky-out hair and a bubbly, eager manner, could easily pass for 22.
Everyone is cycling these days, coming back loaded with diaries and photos and hopes of a book contract, and though she had already published two cycling books Dew was not certain she would have a book at the end of her Japanese adventure. However, so detailed were her notes (she is an industrious writer, leaving nothing unsaid, nothing unremarked, nothing unexplained) that the publishers finally decided she had more than enough material. Which is why the sequel to this book will appear next year.
Writers, of course, have a positive duty to investigate (OK, pry) and if there's one pleasure greater than having an illicit dekko at someone's diary, it's getting to see someone else's bathroom: the reading matter available; the flossing and depilatory implements; the aftershave; and the thickness of loo rolls and towels - the details can tell you a lot. (In a collection of travel writing I contributed to recently, the editors had one cliche rule: no sunsets and no lavatory stories.) In A Ride in the Neon Sun, however, Josie Dew gets into lots of lavatories. The most startling loo was the one that burst into song not only when the occupant entered but also when the loo seat was sat on. No privacy there, so. Which may be why some Japanese women, apparently blushing at the thought that anyone might know what they are up to, flush the cistern many times in order that no one should know which is the real flush. This habit has proved to be so wasteful of water that someone came up with a brilliant idea: lavatories fitted with regular recordings of a flush. Four fakes to one real.
And then there are those sparsely-furnished, windowless rooms which, by dint of sliding to and fro a series of screens and the putting down of a futon or two, can be transformed into sleep-inducing bedrooms overlooking a bamboo garden. And finally, there are the Japanese themselves - a munificent, droll lot who can't wait to provide the cycling foreigner with a bed, a meal, maps, fruit and, on one occasion, money. The extent and variety of hospitality Dew received from the people she met will take readers by surprise - as it did her. Because she had originally intended flying to New Zealand and changed her mind at the last minute after meeting some Japanese people in England, she washed up there without having done much preparatory work. On a previous journey, she'd tried to learn Chinese.
"Japanese was actually a lot easier than Chinese," she told me, "especially when written in Roman letters. I got by by learning to make the right sounds." (Her book contains 23 pages of useful Japanese phrases as well as the usual bike-talk about cranks and chainrings.) There was also the question of history. "I'd never been interested much in the history of places I cycled through before. Maybe because I suffered from the negativity of school history." Japan, of course, was full of it so that, as soon as she got home again, she read everything she could lay her hands on and is happy to share it all with her readers.
She also tells us about the dangers of an everyday faux pas: when bowing, don't bob up again while the other person is still bowing to you. If you come up too soon, go down again. Don't wrap your kimono right over left - that denotes death and mourning. Do go into banks: they give you a little gift each time, which might be soap, tinfoil, pens or - yes, a roll of company-motif lavatory paper.
After being questioned about her American origins, the next question was: was she not afraid of being attacked? So I asked her too.
"Japan was so safe," she told me, "I could camp anywhere." And she did.
Now, she trusts her instincts. If it doesn't feel right, she doesn't do it. Some years ago, after accepting an offer of a lift for herself and her bike from an importunate Bulgar who then imprisoned her in his flat - she escaped by leaping from his balcony to the one next door, much to the surprise of the occupants who were dining alfresco at the time - she's learned never to take lifts from strangers.
Dervla Murphy reviews A Ride in the Neon Sun, a Gaijin in Japan, by Josie Dew, published by Little, Brown, price £18.99 in UK, in next Saturday's Weekend.
