For a blow-by-blow historical narrative of the evolution of Japanese monetary and fiscal policy from the Plaza agreement to the point at which the American recession was beginning to nip Japanese recovery in the bud, this book would be hard to beat. It is a lucid, cogent account, based on a wealth of documentary and interview sources—albeit sometimes with a bit too much reliance on hindsight-rich analysis and self-justifying memoirs, rather than press reports of the policy arguments as they were presented at the time.