The 'Ghost Roads' of Alan Booth: Walking into the Unknown in Looking for the Lost

Alan Booth's travel writing on Japan has perhaps, in the words of Richard Lloyd Parry (2006), been 'unjustly neglected'. In his final major work, Looking for the Lost, which was first published posthumously in 1995, Booth's choices related to subject matter and structure suggest a highly personal subtext. Presented out of chronological order, the three narratives that comprise the work seem to have been carefully shaped in response to the circumstances of his impending death. In the first narrative, Tsugaru, Booth confronts himself in the form of Dazai Osamu. In the second narrative, Saigo's Last March, Booth follows Saigo Takamori's fleeting escape from impossible odds at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion, mirroring his own doomed battle with cancer. In the final narrative, Looking for the Lost, Booth pursues one possible route of the Heike (Taira) clan before they faded into history, just as he was soon to do as well.