More than 3,000 women and 900 men — that’s the number of lovers the main protagonist in Ihara Saikaku’s 1682 novel “Koshoku Ichidai Otoko” (“The Life of an Amorous Man”) tallies up as he reminisces. Saikaku, born in Osaka in 1642, became a renowned poet who wrote about the fluid, ...
Invited for a two-year stint at the University of Tokyo, professor Robin Gerster set about “orientating” himself in Japan by ...
Julie Shigekuni’s ambitious new novel, “In Plain View,” is a family drama of infertility, adultery and murder set between the ...
Chika Sagawa is an anomaly in the history of Japanese poetry. Born in Hokkaido as Aiko Kawasaki in 1911, she became one of Japan’s first modernist poets, refusing to use the traditional poetic forms of tanka and haiku. The nation was changing in the ...
There are only a handful of foreign writers on the Japanese garden that can really be taken seriously. Among those who have applied their erudition and insight to the subject are Loraine E. Kuck, Gunter Nitschke, Marc P. Keane and David A. Slawson. Leonard ...
Those who were in Japan in the winter of 1973-74 will recall the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War: many public baths conserved oil by operating every other day; the neon lights of Ginza were blacked out; and commodity shortages spurred panic buying of laundry ...
The scene: It’s night; someone is alone in a dimly lit room. There’s an eerie stillness, a creeping anxiety. Then, behind them, you notice a strange shape: a hunched-over figure, lurking in a corner. It is standing deathly still. The head is obscured by ...
Shunryu Suzuki, author of the influential “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” is credited with introducing Zen to the West and founding California’s first Zen Buddhist monastery. Crooked Cucumber, by David Chadwick.468 pagesHarmony, Nonfiction. In David Chadwick’s biography of Suzuki, “Crooked Cucumber,” he mentions an incident ...
Mr. Turtle wants to borrow a Philip K. Dick novel from a local Japanese library. But “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is on loan, so he borrows a book on “The Making of Blade Runner.” This scene from Yusuke Kitano’s award-winning sci-fi novel ...
A common perception abroad is that Japanese society is docile. This is partly thanks to Western writers who tried to create a single profile of the Japanese in the early to mid-20th century, such as Ruth Benedict in her 1946 book “The Chrysanthemum and ...
In 1901, poet Akiko Yosano’s “Midaregami” (“Tangled Hair”) was published. This collection of 399 sensual, explicit tanka and haiku poems broke with the formal traditions set down centuries before. Her book allowed Japanese verse to transition from feminine to feminist. A Long Rainy Season: ...
In “Countdown to Pearl Harbor,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Twomey vividly retells and reappraises the events leading to the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack, by Steve Twomey416 pagesSimon & Schuster, Nonfiction. The ...
Hokkaido photographer Taka Maesawa plans to publish a sequel to her photo book documenting the life of the Ainu indigenous people in the country’s northernmost prefecture to help efforts to hand down their culture to future generations. The 69-year-old hopes to achieve her goal ...
In 1945, year zero for “Nationalism in Asia”, most of the region it describes was impoverished, backward and exhausted. After the calamitous Pacific War, China, India and Indonesia were in a final showdown with the great European colonial powers that had exploited them for ...
In “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” famed Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki depicts a world overrun by giant insects and a poisonous fungal forest, the fallout of an environmental cataclysm in the distant past. Humans live on in fractured kingdoms, using what ...
