David Cozy - The Japan Times

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David Cozy

For David Cozy's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

Events / Events Outside Tokyo

Mar 9, 2007

Richie turns painter again

"Donald Richie: Still Lives and Nudes" will come as a pleasant surprise to those under the impression that Richie's substantial oeuvre begins and ends with his writing.

CULTURE / Books

Feb 25, 2007

In fallen cities, where money trumps love

Love in a Fallen City, translated by Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang. New York: New York Review Books, 2007, 321 pp., $14.95 (paper) Money and the scramble to get it are at the center of many of our best novels, and this is nowhere truer than in the work of Jane Austen. The financial security that Austen's heroines are always chasing is so inextricably entangled with courtship, love and marriage that one can lose sight of the pound notes (not to mention the plantation slavery) behind the lilies, lace and wedding veils.

CULTURE / Books

Dec 3, 2006

Magic in the ordinary world

BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 334 pp., $24.95 (cloth). Just as fiction that is purely mundane can be, well, mundane, fiction that is only fantastic is often only dull. Authors such as Paul Auster and Jonathan Carroll are successful precisely because they don't write in one mode or the other, but rather in both, and at the same time. By placing the mundane next to the fantastic these authors are able to show us the beauty of such everyday affairs as coffee or conversation; by placing the fantastic next to the mundane they provide the contrast necessary for readers to discern what makes their fancy other than facile.

CULTURE / Books

Nov 12, 2006

No ordinary guide to China

SHENZHEN: A Travelogue From China, by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2006, 152 pp., $19.95 (cloth). Surely those dinosaurs who believed that comics were suitable only for stories of men in tights have all died off. With the popularity of comics growing by leaps and bounds, it is now common knowledge that, like any other art form, they are capable of giving us the news about topics as diverse as the politics of Noam Chomsky, the philosophy of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural, and the angst of Harvey Pekar. Artists such as Marjane Satrapi in her comics about Iran, Joe Sacco in his work on Palestine and the former Yugoslavia, and Guy Delisle in "Pyongyang" have shown us that comics can also be used to explore other cultures as effectively as the best travel writing and foreign reportage.

CULTURE / Books

Sep 24, 2006

Dark tales of a neglected Tokyo underclass

ABANDON THE OLD IN TOKYO by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, edited and designed by Adrian Tomine, introduction by Koji Suzuki. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 200 pp., $19.95 (cloth). An old man is reduced by the debt that has ruined him to performing like a dog ("Why don't you spin around three times and bark?"). He later finds relief performing with a dog. A younger man consumes an eel that, until captured, had swum free in the city's sewers. A woman, face and breasts destroyed by botched cosmetic surgery, gets revenge on the men she had hoped to please with her altered features. A man who works among the consumer goods that urban Japanese have discarded hears a coworker say, "People get rid of anything old," before going home to his aged and incontinent mother. A pet monkey is murdered when thrown together with his fellow primates at the zoo.

CULTURE / Books

Aug 27, 2006

Cultural insight past the twaddle

FULL METAL APACHE: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America, by Takayuki Tatsumi, foreword by Larry McCaffery. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 272 pp., 2006, $22.95 (paper). Literary theorist and critic Takayuki Tatsumi's new book, "Full Metal Apache," is both good and bad. As it is often in such cases, the bad is spread evenly throughout, making it difficult to appreciate the good with which it is mixed. Tatsumi, however, has done us the service of quarantining the twaddle largely -- but not entirely -- in his first section. That this section is entitled "Theory" will give ammunition to the theory-phobes out there, and this is regrettable.

CULTURE / Books

Jul 30, 2006

Strip down and soak up some Japanese culture

GETTING WET: Adventures in the Japanese Bath, by Eric Talmadge. Tokyo: Kodansha, 255 pp., 2,400 yen (cloth). In the last few years we have seen books about cod, salt and potatoes, and the authors of these tomes appear to have employed a roughly similar method. Settle on a topic, learn everything -- and I do mean everything -- about it, and then weave all the facts and factoids, tidbits and anecdotes into a narrative that will keep readers plowing through more pages than they had ever imagined could be written about cod, salt or potatoes.

CULTURE / Books

May 21, 2006

The search for a legendary sword

MISHIMA'S SWORD: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, by Christopher Ross. London: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins, 262 pp., £14.99 (cloth). On Nov. 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima committed seppuku or, to employ the term he preferred, hara-kiri. He did so with a great deal of fanfare (he had hoped to have the event televised) at the Tokyo headquarters of the Ground Self-Defense Force after he had harangued the soldiers there about yamato damashi (Japanese spirit) and other arcane and outdated concepts.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 19, 2006

Myths behind the rise of the mobile

PERSONAL, PORTABLE, PEDESTRIAN: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 357 pp., $39 (cloth). Consider the refrigerator. The changes this appliance brought in its wake are monumental. Thanks to that big humming machine in the kitchen, the range of foods that we are able to eat has expanded, illness connected with food spoilage has decreased, and our lives have become more convenient. We seldom bother to think about refrigerators, though, because they have become one of those things that have, to quote sociologist Haruhiro Kato, "become utterly unremarkable and ubiquitous presences."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jan 29, 2006

Graphic view of Pyongyang

PYONGYANG: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005, 176 pp., $19.95 (cloth). A consideration of North Korea must be, one supposes, a howl of rage, a moan of despair, or some combination, and this anger and despair must certainly be molded into one of the standard forms available for expression. It could be a polemic, a memoir, an expose, or a harsh and realistic novel. It would not, one feels certain, be a wry and witty comic book, but Guy Delisle's "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea" shatters that certainty.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Sep 25, 2005

What could have been from what was seen

KANNANI AND DOCUMENT OF FLAMES: Two Japanese Colonial Novels, by Katsuei Yuasa, translated and with an introduction and critical afterword by Mark Driscoll. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005, 193 pp., $19.95 (paper). The odd rightwing extremist excepted, it is difficult to find anyone these days who has a good word for colonialism, much less imperialism. Thus it is easy to forget that back when the Japanese imperialists were riding high there were thoughtful artists and intellectuals who believed in and supported what might be called "liberal colonialism," and that one can, without being an odd rightwinger oneself, write, as Mark Driscoll does, of "pluralist innovations in colonial governance that were a feature of Japan's imperialism until 1940."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 26, 2005

Intriguing mix of loose ends and aimless youth

THE METHOD ACTORS, by Carl Shuker. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005, 512 pp., $16 (paper). There has been a great deal of discussion and debate about where literary modernism ends and postmodernism begins. The confusion arises in part because, far from being something entirely different than the modernism that came before it, postmodernism has appropriated many of the techniques employed by the modernists, including, most fruitfully, collage.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 8, 2005

The urban underclass of a modernist Tokyo

THE SCARLET GANG OF ASAKUSA, by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Alisa Freedman, foreword and afterword by Donald Richie. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2005, 231 pp., $17.95 (paper). "Art is bad," Guy Davenport posited, "when it is poor in news," and it is not surprising that a literary modernist such as Davenport would think so. The tremendous detail with which James Joyce recreates, in "Ulysses," the Dublin of June 16, 1904, is emblematic of how rich the modernist strand of literature is in information, and of how much denser in knowledge this type of writing can be than many works in the realist or naturalist traditions.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 2, 2005

Memoirs of an activist

RESTLESS WAVE: My Life in Two Worlds, by Ayako Ishigaki. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004, 286 pp., $16.95 (paper). Those who know something about Ayako Ishigaki (or who have cheated and read the afterword to "Restless Wave" before the text proper) will find the first section of Ishigaki's memoir fraught with anticipation. Watching her proceed through a comfortable girlhood and young womanhood, we find scarcely a hint of the feminist and communist rebel she would become.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 27, 2005

Where there's magic, there's Buddha

THE DHARMA OF DRAGONS AND DAEMONS: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy, by David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew, foreword by Jane Hirshfield. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004, 155 pp., $14.95 (paper). David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew's "The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons" is subtitled "Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy," which is a more accurate description of what the book is about. Though Loy and Goodhew have clearly enjoyed the fantastic works they examine, their primary focus is less on the works as such than on the Buddhist lessons the works might impart.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 12, 2004

Nostalgia is a green monster

GODZILLA ON MY MIND: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, by William Tsutsui. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 240 pp., $12.95 (paper).

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Aug 22, 2004

Looking for an idyllic tribe, finding cultural revelation

DREAM JUNGLE, by Jessica Hagedorn. New York: Viking, 2003, 325 pp., $23.95 (cloth). In 1971 a wealthy Filipino, Manuel Elizalde, discovered a lost tribe in a jungle on Mindanao living in a manner apparently unchanged since the Paleolithic period. This group of hunters and gatherers, called the Tasaday, appeared to enjoy an altogether idyllic existence. It was reported, for example, in virtually every contemporary account of the group that they had no words for "war" or "enemy." Unfortunately, the notion that the Tasaday were noble savages unsullied by the 20th century seems to fall under the heading: Wonderful, if True.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 18, 2004

The literary perfect crime

SAYONARA, GANGSTERS, by Genichiro Takahashi, translated by Michael Emmerich. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2004, 311 pp., $19.95 (cloth). A poet is talking to a refrigerator. The refrigerator with whom he is conversing is Virgil -- yes, that Virgil, author of "The Aeneid" and later Dante's guide through the inferno. Virgil the refrigerator, Virgil the bard, is telling his young interlocutor about the calling they share: "A poet is always aiming to commit the perfect crime. But what, you ask, is this perfect crime? It is to create an entirely indecipherable work of art."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 28, 2003

Burning passion in Shirley Hazzard's 'Great Fire'

THE GREAT FIRE, by Shirley Hazzard. Virago Press, 2003, 320 pp., £15.99 (cloth). As much as we may enjoy the pot-boilers and penny-dreadfuls we pick up to keep us company on the beach or on the bus, the pleasures they afford always pale when placed next to the real thing: literature. Literature, we are reminded upon encountering a novel such as Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire," affects us in ways that the beach-reads -- as much fun as they are -- never can. Take, for example, the first paragraph of Hazzard's book: "Now they were starting. Finality ran though the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain."

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 14, 2003

Harboring American memories

DATE WHICH WILL LIVE: Pearl Harbor in American Memory, by Emily S. Rosenberg. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003, 236 pp., $24.95 (cloth). History is not a record of facts and just the facts, but rather a collection of significant tidbits plucked from among the accessible data and then arranged and interpreted. Historians do this plucking, arranging and interpreting for a living: They publish their arrangements and interpretations as articles and books.

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