Clara’s Verdict
There is a particular kind of travel writing that reads as though the author is recounting their adventures to someone they have just met at a party — warm, slightly breathless, endlessly digressive in the best possible way — and Chris Broad has made a whole career out of it. Abroad in Japan, his debut book, is the literary extension of the YouTube channel that has given him 2.5 million subscribers and something approaching cultural ambassador status for a country he stumbled into entirely by accident. It runs to just over eight hours in audio form, and I confess I listened to a substantial portion of it in one sitting on a train journey that felt considerably shorter than it was.
The audiobook is narrated by Broad himself, which is the only sane choice.
About the audiobook
When a young Englishman with no Japanese and no teaching experience landed in a rural village in northern Japan, he had every reason to believe he was about to make a catastrophic professional error. What followed instead was a decade of accumulating mishaps, unexpected friendships, bureaucratic bewilderment, and gradually deepening love for one of the most rigorously particular cultures on the planet.
Abroad in Japan spans ten years and all forty-seven of Japan’s prefectures, moving from the summit of Mount Fuji — climbed in circumstances that are predictably chaotic — to the neon-lit cacophony of Tokyo, from provincial schools where Broad’s foreignness made him simultaneously fascinating and mildly terrifying to his students, to the extraordinary proximity that came from spending a week with Ken Watanabe, Japan’s biggest film star. Broad is an honest narrator: he does not paper over his failures, his cultural missteps, or the anxiety that has shadowed his adult life. He is equally honest about the moments of genuine terror, including a North Korean missile incident that puts the more quotidian embarrassments firmly in context.
What distinguishes this book from standard expat memoir is that Broad has genuinely tried to understand Japan rather than simply reacting to it as a source of entertaining strangeness. The country’s culture of hospitality, its relationship with perfectionism, its capacity for both breathtaking beauty and grinding conformity — he writes about all of it with earned affection.
The narration
Chris Broad narrating his own book is an unqualified pleasure. His delivery is exactly what fans of the YouTube channel will recognise: self-deprecating, quick, with a timing for comic beats that suggests he has been telling these stories aloud for years. He knows which sentences need space around them and which should tumble forward. There is no performance anxiety here, no sense of someone in an unfamiliar medium. He sounds, as one listener put it, like a mate talking to you about his life — and that is precisely the register the material demands.
What readers say
The response to this audiobook has been warm and consistent. Listeners who already knew Broad from his YouTube work found the book a natural extension of everything they valued about the channel — the humour, the genuine curiosity, the refusal to present Japan as mere spectacle. One reviewer called it the best book they had ever read, citing Broad’s storytelling as captivating and heart-warming in equal measure. Another offered the measured four-star assessment that the first half — covering the early teaching years and culture-shock period — is the stronger section, while a third compared him favourably to Jeremy Clarkson in terms of his ability to make a place come alive through personality rather than description. The audiobook holds a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from Audible UK listeners.
Who should listen?
This book is for anyone who has ever been curious about Japan without knowing quite where to start, for travellers who want something more than guidebook coverage, and for admirers of honest, funny memoir in the tradition of Bill Bryson. It is also, frankly, for the 2.5 million people already watching the channel who have been meaning to read the book and have not yet got round to it. The audio format, with Broad narrating, is arguably the optimal way to experience it. Listen to Abroad in Japan on Audible UK and let Broad convince you that getting on the wrong train in rural Tohoku is the making of a life.
