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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
“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, ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
Mohsin Hamid’s new novel comes with a ringing endorsement on its back cover from Jay McInerney, a writer one doesn’t readily associate with subcontinental fictions about escaping poverty. But McInerney can speak with authority on second-person narration, having written “Bright Lights, Big City,” one ...
HOME FIRES, by Elizabeth Day. Bloomsbury, 2013, 256 pp., ￡11.99 (paperback) Elizabeth Day’s first novel, “Scissors, Paper, Stone,” a taut, beautifully written drama, won a Betty Trask award. It was about a mother and a daughter who were holding things together by keeping a ...
WE, THE CHILDREN OF CATS, by Tomoyuki Hoshino, edited and translated by Brian Bergstrom with an additional translation by Lucy Fraser. PM Press, 2012, 266 pages, $20 (paperback) In a moving preface to the English translation, author Tomoyuki Hoshino speaks of his love for ...