Stephen Mansfield, an author and freelance photojournalist based in Japan, has contributed to over 60 magazines, newspapers and journals worldwide. His books include Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History, Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Form and Japan's Master Gardens.
Tokyo's history could easily fill a volume twice this size, but Mansfield makes it feel complete, exploring not only how the city changed and grew, but why, and how it responded to various crises and obstacles. Tokyo: A Biography brings the city to life. --San Francisco Book Review Tokyo: A Biography is a curious way to look at a city, traveling from its shogunate infancy through the growing pains of a fiery adolescence and onto its later years as it strives to find itself and build an identity... --Seattle Book Review One of the pleasures of the book is Mansfield's prose, which draws on his considerable poetic skill to deliver memorable formulations...The range of approaches to writing the city is as varied as the city itself, including social history, natural and human geography, social ethnography, and studies in visual and material culture. --The Japan Times