Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
BIG IN JAPAN: A Ghost Story, by M. Thomas Gammarino. Chin Music Press, 240 pp., $15.00 (paper) With “Big in Japan,” an erotic coming-of-age novel set in Japan, M. Thomas Gammarino has joined the likes of Jay McInerny (“Ransom”), Brad Leithauser (“Equal Distance”), and ...
PATRIOTS AND TRAITORS, SORGE AND OZAKI: A Japanese Cultural Casebook. Edited by J. Thomas Rimer. Saint Johann Press, 2009, 208 pp., $35 (paper) The subtitle informs us that this is a “casebook” — that is, not a monograph on the Sorge spy ring, but ...
KILLING KANOKO, by Hiromi Ito. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. Action Books, 129 pp., $16 (paperback) Hiromi Ito’s poetry is often described as “shamanistic,” and indeed, according to translator Jeffrey Angles, when she performs her poems she sometimes “sits on the floor like a shamaness ...
CHRONICLES OF MY LIFE: An American in the Heart of Japan, by Donald Keene. Columbia University Press, 2009, 196 pp., $19.95 (paper) Those who have read Donald Keene’s 1996 memoir “On Familiar Terms” may wonder whether it was necessary for him to bring out ...
THE BEIJING OF POSSIBILITIES, by Jonathan Tel. Other Press, 2009, 186 pp., $14.95 (paper) Jonathan Tel, in “The Beijing of Possibilities,” reminds us that megalopolises such as Beijing are inexhaustible, and therefore offer endless possibilities. In good ways and bad, they never cease to ...
RED SNOW, by Susumu Katsumata. Drawn & Quarterly, 2009, 248 pp., $24.95 (hardcover) Comic books and graphic novels are treated, nowadays, with a level of respect that would have been unthinkable when they were purchased more often in drugstores than in bookstores. Indeed, it ...
EXILEE AND TEMPS MORTS: Selected Works, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Edited by Constance M. Lewallen. University of California Press, 2009, 277 pp., $24.95 (paperback) Pablo Picasso was a poet and a good one, but it would be a tragedy if his literary work ...
A DRIFTING LIFE by Yoshihiro Tatsumi; edited, designed, and lettered by Adrian Tomine; translated by Taro Nettleton. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2009, 855 pp., $29.95 (paper) When an American journalist, remarking on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s growing popularity in the United States, suggested that the manga ...
LOVE HOTEL CITY, edited by Andrew Stevens. London: Future Fiction, 2008, 127 pp., $14.95 (paper) Of the 12 “visions of Japan” gathered in Future Fiction’s “Love Hotel City,” Steve Finbow’s “Shadowings” is among the most interesting. In it he explores the relationship between a ...
THE EDOGAWA RAMPO READER by Edogawa Rampo, edited and translated by Seth Jacobowitz, preface by Tatsumi Takayuki. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press, 2008, 241 pp., $16 (paper) As a boy, Edogawa Rampo was, as he relates in one of the essays included in this collection, a ...
