Family photographs are essentially a collection of memories, snapshots of happiness frozen in time. As treasured as these printed images may be to the individuals captured in them, they are no match for the destructive power of the tsunami that swept away town after town along the Tohoku coast on ...
Kafu Nagai was an unapologetic sentimentalist, always an era out of step with the times. Born in the Meiji Era ...
The premise behind Rumiko Takahashi’s massively popular manga “Ranma ½” is delightfully bizarre: A father and son martial arts duo ...
Angela Carter wrote that Tokyo possessed the “indecipherable clarity of a dream,” one in which you might think you are in control, but have, in fact, been “precipitated into somebody else’s dream.” A similar sensation occurs when reading Kobo Abe’s novel, “The Ruined Map,” ...
“Mechademia” is an annual journal that gathers academic writing on manga, anime and games as well as on a broad range of activities related to popular culture in Japan, such as cosplay. In the eighth and most recent volume, however, the essays zero in ...
Japan is on the way up. That much is obvious from improved business confidence, its successful bid for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the early economic successes of “Abenomics,” with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proclaiming to the world the arrival of “a new dawn.” ...
Written by Japan’s original blogger, a mistress of wry observation and scalding wit, Sei Shonagon’s “The Pillow Book” retains its fresh, authentic appeal more than 1,000 years after its inception. Shonagon was a contemporary and presumed rival of Lady Murasaki, author of the “The ...
Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan, by Ikuho Amano.Palgrave Macmillan, Academic. Japan is not generally believed to be a decadent society, and yet there are certain periods in its history when phases of moral decay were accompanied by a surge in “aesthetic indulgence.” The bubble ...
Flux, the new collection of poems by Japan-based poet Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, reveals a myriad of fluctuations and transitions in style and theme. From the poet’s diverse choice of form to her penetrating eye on the collection’s wide range of subject matter, the poems here ...
Better known for her crime and fantasy writing abroad, precious few of the prolific Miyuki Miyabe’s tales of terror have actually made it into the English language. Haikasoru’s publication of “Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo” addresses this oversight. Capably translated by Daniel Huddleston, this ...
Akiyuki Nosaka’s “Grave of the Fireflies,” a harrowing, semi-autobiographical tale of two young siblings fending for survival in the aftermath of World War II, helped him win the prestigious Naoki Prize for literature in 1967. The Pornographers, by Akiyuki Nozaka. ALFRED A. KNOPF, Fiction. ...
In her debut novel, “I Hear Them Cry,” award-winning author Shiho Kishimoto explores how the pattern of violent behavior can be inherited from parent to child and how love and violence are often connected. I Hear Them Cry, by Shiho Kishimoto Translated by Raj ...
Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction, by Motoko Tanaka.Palgrave Macmillan, Academic. Japan is no stranger to apocalyptic events, a fact drilled home with the catastrophes of March 11, 2011. The country has suffered all number of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear bomb attacks, ...
The rest of the world knew him as Hirohito, but to his subjects he was always just “the Emperor.” Known posthumously as Showa, Japan’s 124th monarch reigned for over 60 years, during which he would be witness to both the best and worst of ...
Winter, when mornings are crisp, puddles frozen and the promise of snow floats in the air; it’s the perfect season to crack open “Snow Country” and let its well-known opening line — “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country” ...
