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May 03, 2024
 

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David Cozy
For David Cozy's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Dec 16, 2012
Opening old wounds unhealed after decades
NISEI SOLDIERS BREAK THEIR SILENCE: Coming Home To Hood River, by Linda Tamura. University of Washington Press, 2012, 346 pp., $24.95 (paperback) A minority group enters a community and through hard work and perseverance gains a measure of financial security and grudging toleration from their neighbors.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 18, 2012
'Cool Japan is over': a sociologist looks at Japan's art world
BEFORE AND AFTER SUPERFLAT: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011, by Adrian Favell. Blue Kingfisher, 2012, 246 pp., $24.95 (paper)
CULTURE / Books
Oct 7, 2012
Seen through the victim's eye
THE STORY OF MY ASSASSINS, by Tarun J. Tejpal. Melville House, 2012, 544 pp., $27.95 (hardcover) Tarun J. Tejpal's "The Story of My Assassins" begins, "The morning I heard I'd been shot I was sitting in my office. ..."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 23, 2012
The third space: the cafe's place in forming modern Japan
COFFEE LIFE IN JAPAN, by Merry White. University of California Press, 2012, 240 pp., $24.95 (paperback) Those of us interested in coffee, life and Japan will open Merry White's "Coffee Life in Japan" with high expectations. For most readers, alas, these expectations will be only partially fulfilled.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 2, 2012
A Borgesian look at a fictional Hong Kong
ATLAS: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung, translated by Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall. Columbia University Press, 2012, 192 pp., $24.50 (hardcover).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 3, 2012
Portrait of a pickpocket
THE THIEF, by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. Soho Crime, 2012, 304 pp., $23.00 (hardcover) In simpler times, in simpler tales, authors pitted heroes against villains, and there was no confusion about who wore the black hat and who the white. We no longer live in those simple times, and most of us have grown bored with those simple tales. We want, in the books we read, something that at least approaches the complexity of the lives we lead outside of those books.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 15, 2012
Competent fiction
THE TOMB IN THE KYOTO HILLS AND OTHER STORIES, by Hans Brinckmann. Strategic Book Publishing, 2011, 150 pp., $12.95 (paperback). The five stories that constitute Hans Brinckmann's "The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills" are all competent. The prose seldom obtrudes on the reader's consciousness; the characters are sometimes slightly implausible, but never enough to be awful. The focus on men at loose ends, and the manner in which women exist in some of the stories primarily as vehicles to aid men in their quest for whatever it is they're questing for, is tiresome, but not unusual. If the author displayed a sensibility that was profound or a vision of life that was startling and fresh, his stories might transcend mere competence, but unfortunately, though Brinckmann is neither insensitive nor dim, one sees little evidence in these stories of superlative sensibility or insight.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 8, 2012
18th-century murder mystery still delivers
MURDER IN THE RED CHAMBER, by Taku Ashibe, translated by Tyran C. Grillo. Kurodahan Press, 2012, 268 pp., $16.00 (paperback). Anthony West has called "Dream of the Red Chamber," a Chinese novel written in the 18th century, "beyond question one of the great novels of all literature," and many eminent scholars and critics have agreed with him. That being the case, one feels one really should read it. Many will hesitate, though, before committing themselves to David Hawkes' five-volume translation — as excellent as that translation is reputed to be. They might turn instead to Chi-Chen Wang's much shorter abridged version, and, as Arthur Waley has written, "in Wang's hands [they] will be perfectly safe." If, however, even a safely abridged version of a novel that is, after all, from a very different time and place seems daunting, there is now another port of entry: Taku Ashibe's "Murder in the Red Chamber."
CULTURE / Books
Mar 25, 2012
An unserious look at the work of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu
NORIKO SMILING, by Adam Mars-Jones. Notting Hill Editions, 2011, 239 pp., ￡12.00 (hardcover). "I can hardly be accused of being an expert on Japanese film," Adam Mars-Jones assures us early in "Noriko Smiling," his monograph on Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring." Such protestations at the beginning of a work are not, in an age that distrusts expertise and celebrates ignorance, unusual. In most cases, though, a writer who makes this move goes on to demonstrate, however obliquely, that he or she is not, in fact, ignorant at all. Mars-Jones takes a different approach.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 11, 2012
Fear of conforming effects a perspective on sex
TOWARD DUSK AND OTHER STORIES, by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, translated by Andrew Clare, introduction by James Dorsey. Kurodahan Press, 2011, 219 pp., ¥1600 (paperback). When the house in which Junnosuke Yoshiyuki grew up burned down, Lawrence Rogers tells us, "he fled the flames with only his Debussy records and some fifty poems he had written in a notebook."
CULTURE / Books
Feb 26, 2012
A quintessential Korean epic to rival the very best of Tolstoy
LAND, by Pak Kyung-ni, translated by Agnita Tennant. UK: Global Oriental, 2011, Three Volumes, 1,172 pp., $187 (hardcover) Given its length — the 1,167 pages translated, in three volumes, into English, are only one section of a five-part, 6-million word epic — and given its scope, comparisons between Pak Kyung-ni's "Land" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace" are inevitable. The titles, however, illuminate a key difference between the two sagas.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 8, 2012
Sophisticated and sordid: a geisha's dance
RIVALRY, by Nagai Kafu. Translated by Stephen Snyder. Columbia University Press, 2011, 165 pp. $20.00 (paper) Nagai Kafu's "Rivalry," according to the late Edward Seidensticker, is "on the one hand nostalgic, lyrical, and reminiscent, and on the other a modern social novel, purporting to show how life for geisha really is."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 1, 2012
Unknown quantity rich in quality
ZERO and Other Fictions, by Huang Fan. Translated by John Balcom. Columbia University Press, 2011, 152 pp. $19.50 (paperback) Huang Fan, translator John Balcom informs us, is "a literary phenomenon" and "a bright star among Taiwan's so-called new generation of writers." He was, according to Balcom, "such a prolific author during the 1980s that the decade is often referred to as the Age of Huang Fan."
CULTURE / Books
Dec 25, 2011
Fantasy alive in the real world
Fantasies are central to several of the best books published in the last year. These works are not, of course, tried and tired swords-and-lords style epics, but rather books that tackle the imaginings that have made and molded the world in which we live.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 27, 2011
Viral entertainment at full throttle
REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. William Morrow, 2011, 1042 pp., $35 (paperback). Neal Stephenson's novels can be counted upon to offer two things: a lot of information and a lot of pages.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 23, 2011
Tying up the loose ends of gaijin life
A ROOM WHERE THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER CANNOT BE HEARD: A Novel in Three Parts, by Levy Hideo. Translated by Christopher D. Scott. Columbia University Press, 2011, 115pp., $19.95 (hardback) One is certain that more than a few reviewers of Levy Hideo's "A Room Where The Star Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard" will trot out Samuel Johnson's oft-quoted line: "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
CULTURE / Books
Oct 16, 2011
Russia's grand schemers
RED SHAMBHALA: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books. 268 pp., $17.95 (paper). Alexander Barchenko was a "dropout medical student and popular mystery writer." He believed that "by introducing the elite of Red Russia to Tibetan Buddhism and to the knowledge of Shambhala ... he [would] be able to make the communist project in Russia less violent."
CULTURE / Books
Sep 18, 2011
Ai Weiwei: an enemy of the state
AI WEIWEI'S BLOG: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, by Ai Weiwei. Edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy. The MIT Press, 2011, 307 pp., $24.95 (paper) The Chinese government hates the artist Ai Weiwei, and it's easy to see why. The artful criticism he posted on his blog from 2006 until the government shut it down in 2009 is, like his art, relentlessly honest. He pulled no punches, and he did so under a very real threat of imprisonment (as we recently saw) or worse; this makes the "bravery" of ranters in more open countries seem just a little less impressive.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 21, 2011
Modernity on the move
Movement is central to modernity. Baudelaire's flaneur, a walker drifting through city streets, "a perfect idler, ... a passionate observer," who is a part of the urban throng even as he remains apart from it, is paradigmatic.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 14, 2011
Blavatsky's Book of the Dead
THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD: A Biography, by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton University Press, 2011, 175 pp., $19.95 (hardcover) In 2005 a journalist telephoned the eminent scholar of Buddhism and Tibetan Studies, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and asked him whether "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" was the most important work in Tibetan Buddhism.
Weak yen fattens tourist wallets in Japan
People visit the Ameya Yokocho market in Tokyo's Ueno district during the Golden Week holiday on Tuesday.
Number of vacant homes in Japan hits record high of 9 million
A vacant house in Tokyo is seen demolished in January 2020.
'So hot you can't breathe': Extreme heat hits the Philippines
A pedestrian cools himself with a folding hand fan as he waits for a ride along a road in Manila on Wednesday, as extreme heat hit the Philippines.
Kishida sets sights on energy and climate in South America trip
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will use a policy speech in Sao Paulo to set out his vision for ties between Japan and South America, almost 10 years after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe advocated for stronger ties between the two in the same city.
Town to block view of Mount Fuji in response to overtourism
The town government of Fujikawaguchiko, Yamanashi Prefecture, decided to set up a 2.5-meter-high screen to prevent tourists from taking pictures of Mount Fuji looming behind a convenience store.
Kishida sets sights on energy and climate in South America trip
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will use a policy speech in Sao Paulo to set out his vision for ties between Japan and South America, almost 10 years after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe advocated for stronger ties between the two in the same city.
Yellow sand allergy: A health issue made worse by climate change
A screenshot of the Meteorological Agency's satellite image of clouds and yellow sand (in pink) on Sunday.
Climate change, chalky grains and the risks for Japan’s rice farmers
A farmer plants seedlings in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture. Japan’s self sufficiency rate for rice is nearly 100%, compared with 38% for food overall, on a calorie basis.
Japan wants you to spend more with ‘luxury tourism’
Performers play a traditional drum unique to Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, in the prefectural capital of Kanazawa on March 16 to mark the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line to Tsuruga Station in Fukui Prefecture.
Theaster Gates’ ambitious ‘Afro-Mingei’ brings Black Chicago to Tokyo
Theaster Gates' “A Heavenly Chord” lines up church pews before seven speakers and a Hammond B3 organ, a type of electric organ prevalent in Black American churches.

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