Good timing to ask about this, since I've been sizing up the Japan booklist and thinking about additions and descriptions. Clarifying the level/type of book for some of the entries would definitely be an improvement.

• Japan Emerging is a good book, which may or may not be what you want. It's not a narrative history of Japan, but a collection of essays on various eras and topics, covering Japanese history from its origins to the end of the Edo Period. These essays cover a whole lot of ground, are written by top scholars for a undergraduate-level readership, and you mentioned you do have an idea of the outline of Japanese history, so perhaps that might interest you. But if you want a narrative history of Japan first, it's not the book for you.

• Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey (2nd edition 2014) by Mikiso Hane and Louis G. Perez is a narrative Japanese history from its origins to the Meiji Restoration. It's followed by Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (5th edition 2018) by the same authors. It's important to get the latest editions of both since Hane died some years ago and Perez has updated the texts substantially. Both Hane and Perez are really good at writing that reads simply but still conveys their ideas. This is probably my strongest recommendation for a beginner's full narrative history of Japan.

There are other histories by era. The era I can give you most advice about reading is the Edo Period, but I'll mention a few other books as well.

Edo Period

• The Making of Modern Japan by Marius Jansen is on the booklist, and still one of the best and most readable narrative works. It takes about 759 pages to cover 1600 to the late 20th century, the first 330 pages are 1600 till the end of the shogunate in 1867/68. One really strong advantage of Jansen's book is how it handles the transition of Edo Period history into the modern era.

• Now, if you're more interested in a narrative history of the Edo Period itself, I'm very partial to Conrad Totman's Early Modern Japan, which is about 550 pages and focuses on Totman's strongest points: the political, economic, and environmental history of the Edo Period,though it does cover cultural history as well. Some of Totman's more specialist writing is dry as dust, but I find Early Modern Japan is pretty readable. However, any huge survey book isn't likely to be a page-turner.

I'm also going to suggest another possible route to learning more Japanese history, one that might be a bit more enjoyable than reading through a survey. Find a book on a person, topic etc. and just dig in. The following books are all compelling, easy-entry reads on aspects of the Edo Period.

• Ordinary samurai and their lives under the Alternate Attendance policy are the subject of Constantine Vaporis's wonderful Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern ... a top notch academic work but flows like a novel. Vaporis very entertainingly reconstructs the entire process of going to and from Edo, serving your domain there, and what samurai brougt back to their hometowns. There isn't a dull moment in this book, full of stories about samurai, commoners and lords. I laughed so many times reading this book. There are memorable moments like an account of Kurume domain samurai trashing their quarters when they're told they can't go home for another two years, a dispute between two domains over a makeshift plank bridge some enterprising samurai have installed to sneak out on the town, and a Tosa domain exercize program to get samurai in shape to walk the route to Edo. This is actually my #1 recommendation for just getting into the Edo Period.

• Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life during the Age of the Shoguns also by Constantine Vaporis is a sourcebook of translations of a wide variety of documents, tending towards the more personal or culturally interesting, with accompanying commentary. It's designed to be useful for a high school or undergraduate course, as well as the casual reader. There's a short history of the era in the introduction, a guide to reading primary sources, and lots of nice illustrations. The documents are arranged by topic, so it's a fine book for browsing and picking out stuff that interests you first.

• The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori by Mark Ravina is a page-turning biography of a Meiji Restoration hero who ended up leading a rebellion against the Meiji government. It's is a really good entry point to reading about the late Edo Period/Meiji Restoration because it tells one story: the rise and fall of Saigo Takamori, beginning to end, without assuming the reader already knows a whole lot of other stuff. That tends to be a problem with many qualitybooks, they're not ideal places to begin learning about the era. In narrating Saigo's story, Ravina writes a lot about the history of his domain, Satsuma, its place within Japan, and the politics of the era.

• Daily Life in Early Modern Japan by Louis Perez (an author of one of the narrative histories above) is specifically written for a lay audience. It explores "normal lives in 18th century Japan": how people ate, worked, dressed, played etc.

I could recommend more books, particularly if there's a particular era or aspect of the Edo Period that interests you, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Pre-Edo Period History

This is not my stomping grounds, but I can give a few recommendations.

• A new interesting book, published 2017, is Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History edited by Karl F. Friday, which is a historiographical review of Japanese history up to 1500. It's a series of essays by period and topic but I bring it up as n option for you because you have read an old-school history of Japan, Stephen Turnbull's popular repackaging of history, and various wikipedia articles which also often reflect older scholarship. So, depending on your interest, it might actually be really illuminating to read a book about how the "history" of these eras has changed.

• Of Karl Friday's own books, I can vouch for Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan from the booklist being a really great read that I came into without knowing much about the topic. It explores the evolution of samuri warfare from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. Friday divides his broad survey of samurai warfare into five themes: The meaning of war, the organization of war, the tools of war, the science of war, and the culture of war. He re-examines old assumptions, debunks myths, and has a lot of interesting insights.

• And my more random this-is-really-interesting reccomendation: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500-1300 by Bruce Batten is another easy-entry text written for the lay reader who's interested in archaeology and Japan's ancient to medieval interactions with Korea and China. It's also about the modern city of Fukuoka rediscovering the ancient sites under their feet. After reading the book, I got a chance to visit Fukuoka and see some of the sites, so it's a really special book to me.

Happy reading and I'd be glad to give more recs, elaborate on these if you want to ask.