She was born the daughter of a Manchu prince in Beijing in 1907. Later, as she grew up in Japan, she earned notoriety for her flamboyant challenges to gender roles and her military exploits as a princess-spy. Even today Yoshiko Kawashima still stokes controversy, ...
That the Japanese are great cat-lovers should come as no surprise: a taste for the elegant, the mysterious and the quirky leads in a feline direction, after all. There are paintings of cats from the classical period of the imperial court and prints from ...
"I don't know much about manga but I know what I like" could well be the title of this review. Despite the urgings of enthusiastic friends ever since the 1970s, I sedulously avoided reading works in this genre.
For most readers, Japanese literature may suggest romantic/erotic works by Nagai Kafu, elegantly classical and humorously or sinisterly "kinky" fiction by Tanizaki, or coolly stylish contemporary works by Haruki Murakami. For such readers, this volume will come as a shock — both refreshing and ...
That the Western world has lost interest in Japan, and particularly in Japanese literature, and is turning its attention more and more to the colossus across the sea (China, not America) is a constant plaint on the part of Japan specialists and translators. JASMINE, by ...
The English reader has in this volume a complete translation of works of fiction, interspersed with thinly disguised autobiography and essay-like passages, composed by a young Japanese man who was to go on to become one of the finest Japanese writers of the 20th ...
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 ...
INDIAN SUMMER, by Mieko Kanai, translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Cornell East Asia Series, 2012, 149 pp., $24 (paperback) Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and '80s, ...
WE, THE CHILDREN OF CATS, by Tomoyuki Hoshino, edited and translated by Brian Bergstrom with an additional translation by Lucy Fraser. PM Press, 2012, 266 pages, $20 (paperback) In a moving preface to the English translation, author Tomoyuki Hoshino speaks of his love for the ...
It may seem like cheating, but my first best book of 2012 is "The Best American Essays of 2012" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), part of the Best American Series. I read it each year and am never disappointed. This year's selection was made by David ...
