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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
THE LIFE OF SEINOSUKE: Dr. Oishi and the High Treason Incident, by Joseph Cronin. Kyoto: White Tiger Press, 2007, 128 pp., with photographs and drawings, 1,800 yen (paper) The High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) was an anarchist plot to assassinate the Meiji emperor, one ...
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF YUKICHI FUKUZAWA, revised translation by Eiichi Kiyooka, preface by Kammei Ishikawa, with a foreword and afterword by Albert M. Craig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, (1966), 480 pp., with frontispiece photo, $30 (paper) The political scientist Masao Maruyama wrote in ...
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart. New York: Harcourt Books. 300 pp., with 26 photos and numerous drawings, 2006, $14.00 (paper) In 2002 Rory Stewart, author and former British diplomat, walked across Afghanistan. The country had been at war for 25 years, its ...
AN ACTOR’S TRICKS by Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, foreword by Peter Brook. London: Methuen Drama, A&A Black Ltd., 2007, 102 pp., £10.99 (paper) Yoshi Oida, born in 1933, is one of Japan’s most interesting actor-directors. Trained in the classical stage disciplines, particularly that ...
THE CURIOUS CASEBOOK OF INSPECTOR HANSHICHI: Detective Stories of Old Edo, by Kido Okamoto, translated by Ian MacDonald. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007, 335 pp., $24 (paper) Between 1916 and 1937 the critic and playwright Kido Okamoto (1872-1939) published the “Hanshichi Torimonocho”; stories, ...
TABLOID TOKYO 2, by Geoff Botting, Ryann Connell, Michael Hoffman, Masuo Kamiyama, Mark Schreiber; Illustrations by Hirosuke Ueno; foreword by Mark Schreiber. Toyko: Kodansha International, 2007, 288 pp., profusely illustrated, 1,400 yen (paper) The success of the first volume of “Tabloid Tokyo” has encouraged ...
AN AMERICAN DIARY OF A JAPANESE GIRL, by Yone Noguchi, with an introduction by Laura E. Franey, an afterword by Edward Marx and illustrations by Genjiro Yeto. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007, 202 pp., $23.95 (paper) Yonejiro Noguchi (1875-1947) adopted the pen name of ...
BORNEO, CELEBES, ARU, by Alfred Russel Wallace. London: Penguin Books, 2007, 112 pp., with maps, £4.99 (paper) The great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) traveled widely in what was then called the East Indies and which we now know as Malaysia and Indonesia. Between ...
THE KOJIKI, edited by Yoshinobu Hirata, illustrated by Yuko Mori. Tokyo: Kumon Shuppan (5-bancho, Chiyoda-ku), 2004, 160 pp., 951 yen (cloth) “The birth of Japan. The gods give us a story of love and violence.” Thus is introduced this Japanese-language manga-illustrated edition of the ...
THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF BUDDHISM: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History, by Mikael S. Adolphson. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, 214 pp., with 32 illustrations and maps, $36 (cloth) Buddha with fangs and claws is an unexpected image, if only because ...
Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook, by Patrick Macias and Izumi Evers, illustrations by Kazumi Nonaka. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007, 148 pp., profusely illustrated, $16.95 (paper) Fashionable clothing on young women is often seen as an indication of the state of ...
Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan, by Janet R. Goodwin. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, 208 pp. with maps, $48 (cloth) Prince Genji was apparently among the few to resist the charms of those bands of young ...