Early on in Natsume Soseki's 1908 campus novel "Sanshiro" — one of the most important expositions of the inter-connectedness of visual and literary art ever written — a young scientist, Nonomiya, looks up at a long, thin, white cloud floating diagonally in the sky. "Do ...

The "return" on your investment in a home in Japan is best measured in terms of the pleasure it will yield and the doorway to the intimacies of community and the Japanese mind it will lure you into.

Question: Is it really the case that for a large part of the 20th century Japan enjoyed a golden age of literature? Or is this just misty-eyed nostalgia? One of the hallmarks of a golden age is an atmosphere of competitive creativity in which a ...

In the autumn of 1956, Japan's most renowned literary critic, the 54-year-old Hideo Kobayashi, engaged in taidan ( a "conversation" to be published in a magazine) with 31-year-old rising literary star Yukio Mishima. Early that year Mishima's novel, "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," had ...

A British academic concludes that the only way he can truly enjoy and develop his love for Japan is by excluding his love life from the equation.

In 1933, when Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) published his short but landmark essay "In Praise of Shadows," it could hardly be seen as anything other than a riposte to the "enlightening" agenda of the great cultural critic Fukuzawa Yukichi of the preceding Meiji Era (1868-1912). Fukuzawa ...

Japanese society and culture seem intrinsically suited to bicycles, which require a degree of safety of environment and intimacy that are alien to many thunderously car-based, brash and crime-ridden Western societies.

This 1957 novel has at its heart Shusaku Endo's fascination with a seemingly tranquil and civilized postwar Japan still traumatized by the horrors of the Pacific War. Even a harmless-looking gas station attendant might be a grizzled war veteran involved in brutal killings on ...

Ask just about anyone with a keen interest in Japan to name their favorites from the nation's rich literary history and they are likely to rattle off a few famous names. But ask the same person for their favorite Japanese critics, and stony silence ...

After flirtations with city and country, a roaming suburban boy finds that true bliss lies somewhere in between.