AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
LONG ROAD HOME: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor, by Kim Yong (with Kim Suk Young). Columbia University Press, 2009, 168 pp., $24.50 (hardcover) The author of this excruciating memoir led an unquestioning life in North Korea until one of the routine checks ...
REFLECTIONS IN A GLASS DOOR: Memory and Melancholy in the Personal Writings of Natsume Soseki, by Marvin Marcus. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2009, 268 pp., $49 (hardcover) Author of a well-received study of the biographical writings of Mori Ogai (“Paragons of the Ordinary,” 1993), ...
JAPANESE CINEMA, by Stuart Galbraith IV. Taschen, 2009, 192 pp., 354 photographs, $29.99 (hardcover) This is a large (23.1 cm by 28.9 cm), fully illustrated account of Japanese film from its beginnings. There have now been a number of such histories, each perforce written ...
THE THIRD MIND: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, by Alexandra Munroe with appendices by Ikuyo Nakagawa and essays by Richard King, Harry Harootunian, Vivien Greene, Kathleen Pyne, D. Scott Atkins, J. Thomas Rimer, Burt Winther-Tamaki, David Patterson and Munroe. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009, ...
HIROSHIMA by John Hersey. London: Penguin Books, reissued 2009, 244. pp., £9.99 (paper) In 1946, just after the first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, “The New Yorker” magazine’s Aug. 31 issue published the complete text of John Hersey’s portrait of the atom bomb ...
NEW HORIZONS IN JAPANESE LITERARY STUDIES: Canon Formation, Gender and Media (in Japanese and English); edited, with an introduction by Haruo Shirane. Bensey Publishing Inc., 2009, 266 pp., ¥2,800 (paper) Some scholars would seem to think that methodologies (systems of methods used to focus ...
A BILINGUAL GUIDE TO THE TRADITIONAL PERFORMING ARTS by Masayuki Nakamura, translated by Jeffrey Hunter. Tankosha, 2009, bilingual (Japanese/English), 192 pp., with color plates and b/w photographs, ¥1,900 (paper) Books on the specifics of Japanese culture (as compared to those on cultural generalities) were ...
JIA ZHANGKE’S “HOMETOWN TRILOGY”: Pickpocket, Platform, Unknown Pleasures. Text by Michael Berry. London: British Film Institute, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 152 pp. £9.99 (paper) Sometimes called the most significant of the current generation of Chinese film directors, Jia Zhangke (b. 1970) enjoys the ...
RESEARCH GUIDE TO JAPANESE FILM STUDIES by Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009, 197 pp.+ VIII, $60 (cloth); $25.00 (paper) In its field I cannot imagine a research guide more needed. For whole decades scholars ...
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL, edited by James Quandt, with essays by Tony Rayns, Karen Newman, Benedict Anderson, Kong Rithdee, James Quandt and Apichatpong. Letters from Mark Cousins, Tilda Swinton: annotated filmography; selected bibliography, biography. Preface by Alexander Horwath (text entirely in English). Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, ...
A JAPANESE ROBINSON CRUSOE by Jenichiro Oyabe, edited by Greg Robinson and Yujin Yaguchi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009, 185 pp., $28 (paper) This curiosity (a first-person account of the writer’s gradual transformation from Meiji gentleman to self-proclaimed “Japanese Yankee”) was first published ...
WRITTEN ON THE SKY: Poems From the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth. New York: New Directions, 2009, 90 pp., $12.95 (paper) SONGS OF LOVE, MOON AND WIND: Poems From the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, selected by Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 2009, ...
