"[This book is] a classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's"--Amazon.com.

In 1988, at the age of 26, Pieter Waterdrinker was at home in the Netherlands one day when a man knocked on his door and asked him to smuggle a shipment of bibles into the USSR. The resulting adventure would lead to a lifelong journey into Russia and its history. Waterdrinker would eventually find himself living in Saint Petersburg, with his Russian wife and three cats, on a street which a hundred years earlier had been the epicentre of the 1917 Russian...