The bulk of "Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism" is a collection of essays by Rijin Yasuda (1900-1982), a Shin Buddhist thinker in the modernizing tradition of Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903). Yasuda "taught a conception of Amida and the Pure Land that made them existential realities in ...

From the 17th to the 19th century, Japan's only official window on the West was the Dutch factory in Nagasaki. The trickle of scientific and geopolitical information that came through with the merchant ships was gradually curated by enthusiasts into rangaku or "Dutch learning," ...

"Strange Glow" hits all the notes you'd expect from a book described as "the story of people's encounters with radiation" — from physicist Ernest Rutherford's overturning of the"plum pudding" model of the atom to the "radium girls" who were poisoned by the glow-in-the-dark radium ...

Mechademia is an annual English-language academic journal on Japanese pop culture and related topics. Each issue has its own theme, and volume 10's is "World Renewal." In theory, this includes not only the branching timelines and parallel worlds of games and anime such as ...

Partly inspired by the wartime experiences of author Keiko Itoh's mother, "My Shanghai, 1942-1946" is a comfortably old-fashioned epistolary novel told entirely through diary entries. The story begins in January 1942 as London-educated protagonist Eiko Kishimoto arrives in the Shanghai International Settlement with her ...

Ominous demographic trends, ineffective governance, the not-if-but-when prospect of another devastating earthquake ... the litany of topics addressed by "Japan: The Precarious Future" will already be familiar to readers of this newspaper. A collection of essays from specialists in relevant fields, the book offers ...

In the the late 19th and early 20th century, when Japan's modernization was well underway, Japanese readers acquired a taste for a certain kind of monster: the twisted almost-human, bearing a grudge and wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting and upright citizens around them. Critics ...

In the introduction to "New Selected Poems" Shuntaro Tanikawa is described as a "poetic volcano," but a volcano, like the proverbial hedgehog, only does one big thing; Tanikawa offers something new in every book. New Selected Poems, by Shuntaro ...

Before we turn the page on the year, here's a selection of our reviewers' favorite books.

Subtitled "Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan," William R. LaFleur's book surveys an expanse of Japanese literary history ranging from the "Nihon Ryoiki" of the early ninth century to Basho's posthumous "Narrow Road to the Deep North" (1702). This is a more ...