WRITTEN ON THE SKY: Poems From the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth. New York: New Directions, 2009, 90 pp., $12.95 (paper) SONGS OF LOVE, MOON AND WIND: Poems From the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, selected by Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 2009, ...

THE ALIEN WITHIN: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature, by Leith Morton. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009, 260 pp., $56 (cloth) The subject of the exotic and alien other is a perennial. In Japanese literature the foreign influence is usually traced ...

A PAGE OF MADNESS: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, by Aaron Gerow. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies/University of Michigan, 2008, 224 pp., 22 illustrations, $50 (cloth), $22 (paper) Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “A Page of Madness” (“Kurutta Ichipeiji,” 1926) was long thought lost. Only ...

WANDERINGS IN ARABIA: The Authorized Abridged Edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles Doughty, abridged by Edward Garnett, foreword by Barnaby Rogerson. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009, 608 pp., £12.99 (paper) In 1876 the young Charles Doughty set out to cross the interior of ...

TOKYO: A Cultural and Literary History, by Stephen Mansfield, foreword by Paul Waley. Oxford: Signal Books, 2009, 268 pp., with photographs, £12 (paper). John Milton was of the opinion that “towered cities please us then, and the busy hum of men.” Tokyo would have ...

MYSTERIES OF THE GOBI by John Hare, foreword by Matthew Parris. London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009, 238 pp., with photos and map, £17.99 (cloth) The Great Gobi Desert is one of the most inhospitable of all places. It covers 13 million square kilometers of ...

THE RECORD OF LINJI, translation and commentary by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, edited by Thomas Yuho Kirchner, with forewords by Mumon Yamada and Kazuhiro Furuta. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009, 488 pp., $53 (cloth) The Linji-lu is one of the most influential of all ...

DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE IN JAPANESE BUDDHISM, edited by Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2008, 382 pp., $52 (cloth) Japan is so successfully ecumenical, the various religions of Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam happily living side by side, ...

EAT SLEEP SIT: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple, by Kaoru Nonomura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Kodansha International, 2008, 324 pp., ¥2,600 (cloth) Here is an unusually fine translation of a most unusual best-seller: the 1996 “Ku Neru Suwaru: Eiheiji Shugyoki,” ...

EAT SLEEP SIT: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple, by Kaoru Nonomura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Kodansha International, 2008, 324 pp., ¥2,600 (cloth) Here is an unusually fine translation of a most unusual best-seller: the 1996 “Ku Neru Suwaru: Eiheiji Shugyoki,” ...

KEN-ZEN-SHO: Zen Calligraphy and Painting of Yamaoka Tesshu, with a foreword by Rupert Faulkner, introductions by Sarah Moate and Alex Bennett, an essay by Terayama Tanchu and an afterword by Takemura Eiji. Bunkashi International (Kendo World Publications), 2008, 200 pp., 33 color plates, 67 ...

SPARKLING RAIN and Other Fiction From Japan of Women Who Love Women, edited by Barbara Summerhawk and Kimberly Hughes, with introductions by Hitomi Sawabe and Mieko Watanabe. Chicago: New Victoria Publishers, Inc., 2008, 216 pp., $16.95 (paper) As editor Barbara Summerhawk writes in her ...