☰Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake

The essential history of Tokyo, tracing the city from its origins as the Edo shogunate capital through the 1923 earthquake that destroyed most of it. Seidensticker was a great translator of Japanese literature and brought the same precision and affection to this history. If you want to understand what the old neighborhoods — Asakusa, Yanaka, Shitamachi — once were, and why their survivors feel different from the rest of the city, this is the book.