Printed Matter, "Tokyo's International Literary Review," which boasts of being Japan's oldest English literary journal, can now claim to be Japan's largest.
The 20th-anniversary issue, published last year, was more than twice its usual dimensions and volume, tipping the scales at coffee-table book proportions with 237 pages of poems, prose, reviews, translations, photographs and drawings.
Since its humble beginnings in the late 1970s as a collection of papers gathered from members of the Tokyo English Literary Society, Printed Matter has undergone a series of editors and contributors, developing from a sporadic mimeographed publication to small magazine quarterly and now a shiny, weighty, glossy-covered catalog. To launch the latest issue, the current editor, Edgar Henry, has assembled a cast of performers and artists from varied disciplines for an event dubbed Tokyo Rose, to take place Jan. 30 at Shibuya's Club Asia.