He calls a spade a spade when necessary but invariably with great wit and insight.
Ferguson is aware of the Japan cliches and stereotypes but does not ignore them.
Ferguson can paint words with the tender strokes of an impressionist only to be followed by Dave Barry-like ironies and double entendres. This is also a book that shows Ferguson to be an articulate, perceptive and very witty writer. Along the way Ferguson converses and interacts with drunken truck drivers, high-school aged fisherman, sporty hedonistic new people, possible gangsters, overbearing intellectuals- a piece of Japanese society at large. Ferguson spends much time in such locales nominally following the cherry blossom front from the southernmost point of Kyushu, up the lesser known Japan Sea side of Japan to the northern tip of Hokkaido. In 1996, Ferguson hitchiked the length of Japan, hardly a feat worthy of the 'extreme' category of travel writing currently in vogue, but certainly of interest to those of us who have spent time in foreign locales of no particular touristicattractions and have admired them precisely because of their normalcy- as a microcosm of the country at large. However, the best travel book I have ever read on Japan has just been published: 'Hokkaido Highway Blues' by Will Ferguson. Many of these works amount to little more than the product of a writer's conceit in having been published. This lead to a lot of dull, pithy, pedestrian writing in which the same standard Japan cliches and themes were raised again and again to the point where self-parody became a real danger. ( More customer reviews)In the 80's it seemed that almost any foreigner who spent much time in Japan felt obliged to write a book about their experiences.
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