Elizabeth Ward - The Japan Times

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Elizabeth Ward

For Elizabeth Ward's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 24, 2002

Moral absolutism on trial

ONE MAN'S JUSTICE, by Akira Yoshimura, translated by Mark Ealey. New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt, 2001, 276 pp., $23 (cloth) In every society, even the most apparently open-minded, there are times when some questions become taboo. In the United States right now, such questions include anything that hints at American culpability in its recent dealings with other countries.

CULTURE / Books

Sep 30, 2001

Postwar Japan finds a voice

SILENCE TO LIGHT: Japan and the Shadows of War, Manoa 13:1, edited by Frank Stewart and Leza Lowitz. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001, 217 pp. Manoa, published by the University of Hawai'i, is a twice-yearly journal of Pacific Rim writing and graphic art, with each issue devoted to a particular country or region. The latest, very impressive issue focuses on Japan -- not turn-of-the- millennium Japan, the stumbling economic megapower, but Japan as seen through the prism of the Pacific War. It is the appropriate perspective, given that this year marks the 60th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the 70th anniversary of its invasion of China, the real starting point of that war.

CULTURE / Books

Jul 22, 2001

Dead-end lives in the suburbs of Tokyo

LIFE IN THE CUL-DE-SAC, by Senji Kuroi. Translated by Philip Gabriel. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 231 pp., $12.95. To read this version of "Life in the Cul-de-Sac" is to experience two conflicting emotions. On the one hand, there is admiration for the storyteller, as the dozen linked vignettes that make up the book gradually coalesce into a bleak yet powerful portrait of life on a single dead-end street in the western suburbs of Tokyo 20 odd years ago. On the other hand, there is extreme irritation with the translator, whose tin ear and shaky grammar combine to make that portrait much more obscure than one feels it must be in the original Japanese. Senji Kuroi, an award-winning novelist and essayist, could not possibly write so badly.

CULTURE / Film

Apr 25, 2001

Some great books have made great movies. It's a safe bet that many people, asked to reel off their top five, would name one of the following: "The Godfather" (Mario Puzo); "A Clockwork Orange" (Anthony Burgess); "Blade Runner" (from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"); and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Arthur C. Clarke).

CULTURE / Books

Dec 13, 2000

SHONEN: Where It All Started, by Yuji Ando. Kabushiki gaisha 22, 6-6-16 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052. 80 pp., 3,000 yen (cloth). This beautiful bilingual book is basically an album of paintings by the well-known artist Yuji Ando, depicting his memories of a rural Japanese childhood in a setting that the photographer Johnny Hymas calls in his afterword "a child's natural playground."

CULTURE / Books

Aug 1, 2000

Sowing authentic 'seeds of peace'

HIROSHIMA WITNESS FOR PEACE: Testimony of A-Bomb Survivor Suzuko Numata, by Chikahiro Hiroiwa. Translated by Tadatoshi Saito. Tokyo: Soeisha Books/Sanseido, 1,000 yen. Thirty-six years ago, not two decades after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Kenzaburo Oe was already writing about the imperative to remember that appalling event. It sounds trite -- a hazard that attends memorials to all great tragedies, from Hiroshima to the Holocaust -- but Oe was getting at two important things: first, that people do tend to forget, or repress, traumas of this magnitude; and second, that the act of remembering doesn't occur in a void. It is shaped by context: who is doing the remembering and what they choose to remember.

CULTURE / Books

Jun 20, 2000

A holocaust foretold by the pattern in the rock garden

BEFORE HIROSHIMA: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and other stories, by Joshua Barkan. London: The Toby Press, 2000; 139 pp., $12.95 (paper). "Before Hiroshima" is 31-year-old American Joshua Barkan's first published collection of fiction, and the title story, which makes up almost half the book, is what makes you sit up and take notice.

CULTURE / Books

Apr 25, 2000

Return to Ishiguro's fog-bound world

WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, by Kazuo Ishiguro. London: Faber & Faber, 313 pp., 16.99 British pounds. Ever since "A Pale View of Hills" (1982), Kazuo Ishiguro has been playing games with his readers' minds. Some people find this infuriating, some fascinating, as the mixed reception accorded his novels -- even the Booker Prize-winning "The Remains of the Day" (1989) -- attests. But there is no doubting the skill with which he manipulates reality. Perhaps no writer in English has so completely mastered the art of the unreliable narrator since Vladimir Nabokov let Humbert Humbert loose in the pages of "Lolita."

CULTURE / Books

Feb 29, 2000

Staying on the beaten track in darkest Saitama

THE CITY OF YES, by Peter Oliva. Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1999; 336 pp., $21.99. Like many another young, sensitive, well-intentioned foreigner, Canadian-born Peter Oliva -- or his protagonist -- came to Japan for a year and was so bowled over by the place that he felt the world could hardly go on if it didn't hear what happened to him here and how he felt about it.

CULTURE / Books

May 13, 1999

Miyazawa comes to life for young English readers

GAUCHE THE CELLIST; SNOW CROSSING; THE STORY OF THE ZASHIKI BOKKO and Three Poems; THE RESTAURANT OF MANY ORDERS (4 vols. with four CDs and read-along booklet in English and Japanese), by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by Roger Pulvers, illustrated by Osamu Tsukasa. Tokyo: Labo Teaching Information Center, 1998; books 2,100 yen, 2,100 yen, 2,000 yen, 2,000 yen respectively, 4-CD set 8,600 yen. Kenji Miyazawa, the centenary of whose birth was celebrated just three years ago, needs no introducing to Japanese readers. Most Japanese could recite or at least recognize lines from his best-known poems, including the modern inspirational classic "Ame ni mo makezu," (here translated as "Strong in the Rain"), and many have been familiar with his fables, satires and fairy tales since childhood.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Historically, kabuki was considered the entertainment of the merchant and peasant classes, a far cry from how it is regarded today.

For Japan's oldest kabuki theater, the show must go on

By Lance Henderstein

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

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