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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
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, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
PAPRIKA, by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Alma Books, 2009, 350pp., £9.99 (paperback) Comparisons to Haruki Murakami and J.G. Ballard on the cover of this book do Tsutsui little service. His novels do not have the steely gaze and cool prose of Ballard’s “Crash,” nor the magical-realist ...
OCCUPIED CITY by David Peace. London: Faber and Faber, 2009, 288 pp., £20 (cloth) To say the second book in David Peace’s “Tokyo trilogy” is haunting would be to start this review with a cliche of which “Occupied City” is devoid. Yet the book ...
TOKYO FIANCEE by Amelie Nothomb, translated by Alison Anderson. Europa Editions, 2009, 160 pp., £10.99 (paper) A prequel to her autobiographical best-selling novel “Fear and Trembling,” Amelie Nothomb’s “Tokyo Fiancee” is a slight tale of love and doubting in Japan. The narrative overlaps the ...
AUDITION by Ryu Murakami, Bloomsbury, 2009, 200 pp., £10 (cloth) Ten years after the release of Takashi Miike’s film of the novel, Ryu Murakami’s “Audition (Odishon)” has finally been translated into English. Aoyama, a fortysomething documentary maker, decides it is about time he remarried. ...
HELL by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Alma Books, 2008, 199 pp., £7.99 (paper) Characters who re-live their mistakes, their cruelties, and their sexual indiscretions populate Yasutaka Tsutsui’s hell, a netherworld built in ever-decreasing circles of guilt, memory, and desire. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre claims, “Hell is ...
THE BLADE OF THE COURTESANS by Keiichiro Ryu. Vertical, 2008, 304 pp., $21.95 (cloth) On the opening day of Shin-Yoshiwara — Edo’s new pleasure quarters — Matsunaga Seiichiro, a 26-year-old swordsman stands on the Asakusa Nihon Embankment and looks across at the city. He ...
A SLOW DEATH: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness, by the NHK-TV “Tokaimura Criticality Accident” Crew. Vertical, 2008, 141 pp., $19.95 (cloth) Reviewed by Steve Finbow A 35-year-old-man lies unconscious in a University of Tokyo Hospital intensive-care unit. He has been irradiated. Losing up to ...
BAT-MANGA!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, by Chip Kidd (Pantheon Books) The story of how the 1960s television show “Batman,” starring Adam West as the (very camp) caped crusader, influenced manga art and Japanese culture in general. It’s a gorgeous book for ...
REAL WORLD by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Philip Gabriel. Vintage, 2008, 224 pp., £7.99 (paper) A high school student, unhappy with life, bludgeons his mother to death with a baseball bat. He is calm and appears removed, almost abstracted from the events. He leaves ...
LALA PIPO by Hideo Okuda, translated by Marc Adler, New York: Vertical, Inc., 2008, 288 pp., $14.95 (paper) Their recent list of contemporary Japanese fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels is making those Japanophiles at the New York publishing house Vertical Inc. Nihon otaku among ...
WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, London: Harvill Secker, 2008, 192 pp., £9.99 (cloth) MURAKAMI DIARY by Haruki Murakami, London: Vintage, 2008, 176 pp., £9.99 (paper) Toward the end of this memoir on writing ...
BURN YOUR BELONGINGS by David F. Hoenigman. SIX GALLERY PRESS, 2008, 201 pp., $24.99 (paper) In a letter to Charles Olson on June 5, 1950, the late Robert Creeley wrote that “form is never more than an extension of content.” In her “How To ...