Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
Review Sep 28, 2013
Biography of Masaoka Shiki excels in the expanded details
by David Burleigh
Haiku, the short Japanese poem now proliferating overseas, scarcely needs an introduction anymore. Its three great pillars, widely read even in translation, are the poets Matsuo Basho (1641-1694), its first creator, then Yosa Buson (1716-1784) and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), who renewed it. THE WINTER ...
Offbeat Sep 27, 2013
The violent, thuggish world of the young Bach
by Dalya Alberge
Johann Sebastian Bach is arguably the greatest of all composers, with the “St. Matthew Passion” and the “Mass in B Minor” among the most sublime masterpieces in classical music. But biographers over the past half century have “sanitised” his life, in the belief that ...
Review Sep 7, 2013
The murky past of Pope Francis: Is he really so humble?
by Hugh O'shaughnessy
I don’t remember hearing the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in March, or any of his fellow Argentinian Jesuits when I was in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They seemed strangely silent in such harrowing times when ...
Review Aug 31, 2013
Masterful ode to Liverpool's Shankly
by Frank Cottrell Boyce
‘Red Or Dead” is a masterpiece. David Peace already has a considerable reputation but this massive, painstaking account of the career of Bill Shankly towers above his previous work. It’s usual when praising a sports novel for critics to claim that “it’s not really ...
Review Aug 31, 2013
Remarkable story of the independence, dedication of Isamu Noguchi's mother
by David Burleigh
Like many people, I like soft light and use lampshades of Japanese paper from the successful Akari series designed by the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), certainly the artist’s greatest influence on individual lives, especially at home. Some of his own upbringing is described ...
National Jun 20, 2013
Woman finds calling in aging district
by Takuya Okamoto
Operating a restaurant is just one of the jobs Nabi Togo assumes in her quest to help revitalize Tsuyazaki, a scenic fishing area facing the Genkai Sea in Fukutsu, Fukuoka Prefecture. She plays four other roles as well, when she is called upon. On ...
Review Jun 16, 2013
Historical biography captures the spirit of early feminist Japan
by Kris Kosaka
Time distorts, concealing the individual drops of humanity within the great tide of history. “Beauty in Disarray” attempts to reveal one such individual threatened to be lost in time, a woman named Noe Ito. In telling Ito’s tragic story, biographer Harumi Setouchi (now known ...
Review May 12, 2013
Allowing Nijinsky's ballet to tell his life
by Peter Conrad
How can we separate the dancer from the dance? Vaslav Nijinsky’s art was a vanishing act, and his mystique depended on gestures that lasted only a second, like his leap through a window in “The Spectre of a Rose,” or the slight but scandalous ...
Review May 5, 2013
Revealing the many masks of Mishima
by Paul Mccarthy
This is a whale of a book — both unusually massive and extremely informative and stimulating. The title means “mask” in Latin and is probably an allusion to Yukio Mishima’s first full-length novel, “Confessions of a Mask,” published in Japan in 1949 and translated ...