SOURCE: Seidensticker, Edward. “Japan Kink.” New Republic 191, nos. 7-8 (13-20 August 1984): 40-2.

In the following review, Seidensticker compliments Buruma's commentary on Japanese culture in Behind the Mask.

Ian Buruma has written a lively book [Behind the Mask] about what we may call the dirty side of Japan, more interesting to some of us than the pretty side that has been so much more widely publicized by the Japanese information services and by those of us who write about Japan. In his preface Buruma says that his book

is an attempt to draw a picture of the Japanese as they imagine themselves to be, and as they would like themselves to be. … I shall try to show the products of a more popular, more collective imagination: films, comics, plays, and books catering to the taste of the maximum amount of people, and thus often the lowest common denominator. This...