Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

Richard Lloyd Parry.

Here's some nice plagiarism of this by Marrouchi:

Western writers have been visiting Japan since the 1860s, but for such a vast thrilling and important country it has proven barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only few such as the Greek Irish Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of Japan native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without acquiring intimacy with the culture of Japan: Angela Carter's Nothing Sacred, an individual inspection, Anthony Thwaite's Letter from Tokyo, a collection of poetry, John Hersey's Hiroshima, a work of reportage, or Roland Barthes's L'Empire des signes (Empire of Signs), a meditative essay are good examples. Other — in my opinion less sophisticated — texts include Jay McInerney's Ransom full of machismo and japonaiserie (Vincent Van Gogh's nineteenth-century notion about the influence of Japanese art and culture), Clive James's comedy Brrm Brrm, or Alan Booth's and Richard Gordon Smith's travel writings (on travel and Japan, see, e.g., Goebel; Kawakami; Suvin; on the problematics between the literatures of the East and the West, see, e.g., Aldridge; Moore and Moody). But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling in spite of a short visit there in 1889, a Maugham, a Conrad, or a Bowles. I posit that exceptions to the rule are David Mitchell's number9dream and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World.

I just googled a few phrases and came up with the source quite easily. I could do it for the entire essay, I'm sure, and find other uncited sources.