You need to know the telephone number of the Nigerian Embassy in Tokyo? You curious about Japanese coinage? You need to know how much it will cost to send a 500-gram package by sea to Buenos Aires? You need a quick course on how to use chopsticks? Then this is your book. It reads like a particularly dogged geography textbook, or one of those old German guidebooks that were always telling you, "Then looking to your left, you will see..."

McQueen spent years touring Japan on his motorcycle and appears to have taken notes on every town he passed through, resulting in entries like: "The main street of the tiny and very rural hamlet of Sugiyama, about nine km north of Kitakata, is made up almost entirely of kura." A kura is a warehouse.

The first 208 two-column, fine-print pages give the nuts and bolts of living in Japan and are ultimately the most useful for a visitor who doesn't plan to take half a year off to tour the country. This first quarter of the book will give you the rundown on the various ways to buy sex, will tell you what to expect when you "date" a Japanese member of the opposite sex, and will give you ideas on how to get a job and on the cost of living once you get one (well yes, it is possible to rent a three-mat room for 20,000 yen a month, but there are not many of them left). You are given a list of ryokan in Tokyo, which is valuable as most people don't know there are any ryokan left in Tokyo at all. You are filled in on cheap places to eat like the chain restaurants and the noodle emporia, but McQueen is no food buff. McQueen says French food is too expensive in Japan, which he probably wouldn't say if he knew that La Dinette in Takadanobaba charges 2,000 yen for three courses that satisfy hungry undergraduates. McQueen gives us a gloomy description of foreigners' state of mind as they come to know Japan - the initial rhapsodic elation, then the despair, then the coming to terms with reality.

Altogether, McQueen is an extraordinarily thorough guide for someone intent on traveling the country from north to south, planning his itinerary as he goes. But because it covers so much ground, there is not much loving detail. His coverage of the sweet little town of Tsuwano and of Hagi, the pottery center, for instance, is so perfunctory the reason to go to these places is not at all apparent.

Kinoshita and Palevsky's Gateway to Japan, which recently went into a second edition and is more selective of destinations but more detailed about those locations, must remain the Japan guide to buy if you're buying only one.

Reviewed by Sandor Belfry

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