Tafuri was twenty-nine years old and had not visited Japan. His slim volume on the country's postwar architecture was the first in a series of guidebooks on contemporary architecture under the direction of Leonardo Benevolo. Translated into English for the first time, the book represents a rare outsider's view of the metabolist movement and figures such as Kenzo Tange by one of the world's most astute critics of the second part of the twentieth century.