From Marco Polo and Other Essays

What can Marco Polo tell us about the present? Why does the daily newspaper leave its readers restless? What happens to a person’s thoughts during a Sunday visit to a bookshop and a department store?

From Marco Polo and Other Essays brings together six complete works by Terada Torahiko. Tales of distant customs become sharp comparisons with modern institutions. Electric lamps reveal the ingenuity and practical compromises of technological change. A proposed world without daily newspapers opens into a vision of more thoughtful public knowledge.

A recollection of the painter Nakamura Tsune preserves the intensity of artistic labor and the uncertainty of memory. The long final essay follows Terada through Maruzen and Mitsukoshi, where bookcases, gift certificates, an escalator, toys, flowers, and a riverside view prompt reflections on education, vanity, pleasure, and responsibility.