"Eastwards" is a collection of essays each of whom focuses on a special aspect or on an episode within the cross-cultural narrative that imposes on our minds the terms -West- and -East-. The volume assembles seventeen essays by eighteen authors divided into three chapters. Being the outcome of the first international conference for East Asian studies that was held in the Baltic states in 2008 at the University of Latvia in Riga, the volume contains not only contributions by scholars from Vilnius, Tallinn and Riga but also rather rare topics like critiques of translation from Japanese and Classical Chinese into Latvian. The book contains also an essay on the life and personality of an almost neglected Baltic -pioneer- in Manchuria."