Tokyo must have more foreign-language books devoted to it than any other major city -- not only the guides, which endlessly proliferate, but also serious books about the history of the place, its disposition and its nature. There are Edward Seidensticker's seminal two volumes, Paul Waley's necessary two single volumes, and many more, including one of mine (which I could modestly mention but won't).
Now we have Angela Jeffs' take on the nature of the place. Her Tokyo is an enormous urban area (home to 12 million, workplace to many millions more) that, despite the high population density (second only to Seoul), still has "more green spaces than any other city in the world." It is a place of "unbelievable ugliness and surprising beauty . . . gentle innocence and garish vulgarity."
Jeffs subscribes to the popular land-of-contrasts theory because it best serves the agenda of her publisher and her own commission, which was to provide more than a casual guide and less than a scholarly history. She was to delve beneath the city and to emerge with evidence that she (and hence her reader) had been truly "inside." Tokyo is revealed as perhaps one thing on the surface but, as the privileged insider discovers, underneath another altogether.