This is Joseph Campbell's account of a journey that led him to be an icon in the field of comparitive mythology and religion. Sake and Satori covers his travels through through the second half of his year-long journey through Asia. Written from the unjaded perspective of a remarkably erudite teacher on his first trip to the Asia he had studied for most of his life, this book is a unique snapshot of 1950s Asia and its rapidly changing post-colonial and Cold War tensions. In 1954 and 1955, the famed mythologist traveled to Asia for the first time, at age fifty.

In this second volume of his Asian journals, he continues east after nearly seven months in India, moving through Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally coming to rest, for a full five months, in Japan. The narrative is fueled by Campbell's knack for cultural and mythological comparison. With characteristic wit and compassion, Campbell relates his experiences with a culturally intact Japan, where Noh drama, Kabuki theater, and Geisha houses are still common.

He grapples with his self-discovered prejudices and opinions about how Asia is absorbing and resisting Western notions of gender, pluralism, and wealth. He relates revealing conversations with other travelers, as well as with Japanese from all walks of life, from geishas to scholars. Along the way, he allows passing asides to develop into wide-ranging philosophical explorations, augmented with his photos and specially commissioned drawings. Campbell's life was at a turning point during his travels and many of the seeds of his transition from professor to cultural icon were planted during this Asian journey.

These journals of Japan, along with its companion volume of Indian journals, Baksheesh and Brahman, impart unique and entertaining insights into both the man who wrote them and the cultures he described. It also reveals Campbell's mind, just as he was about to embark on the career of public education and popular writing that was to bring him to the notice of a broader audience. This title is now available, along with its companion volume, Baksheesh & Brahman: Asian Journals India.

Reviews:

For Campbell, religion was a subset of mythology, and the exposure to Japanese Buddhism was important to the next leg of his journey as a scholar. Sake and Satori is a glimpse of a supple mind, mid-career. -- Shambala Sun

Through such embryonic theories, as well as observations of hostesses, yamabushi priests and other colorful characters, Sake and Satori provides a window into both a young postwar Japan and the mind of a "young" Campbell, both of which were to leave their marks on the world in the years to come. -- Yomiuri Shimbun

Journaling is a different kind of writing because it skips consciously between the who of the writer and the what of the subject matter. Having read some seven hundred and fifty pages of Joseph Campbell's reflections on a myriad of Asian countries through which he traveled for one year, beginning in September 1954, I have a much deeper appreciation for the man and the impulses that guided him to become a comparative mythologist.... Always observant, Campbell reveals through his journals the complex interior terrain of a soul who helped put the study of comparative mythology back on the world map." -- Dennis Patrick Slattery, Parabola Magazine