What we learn by the end of this urbanely written, empirically tested book is that Bushido is not merely a set of strategies for combat but a system of thinking eminently suited to preparing us for life and all its concealed hazards.
Legendary 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi authored this book in the last years of his life, expanding his "two heavens as ...
Touted as "Japan's preeminent writer of metafiction," Tsutsui is an expert at deftly employing this narrative device to underscore his ...
Way before Marie Kondo taught us how to clean out our closets, American Andy Couturier was learning how to live without extra stuff from folks in rural Japan.
Give the lingering late-summer heat the slip and duck into the shadows with "All She Was Worth," a classic Japanese crime mystery.
If you'r e Japan resident and retirement is now closer than your college graduation, you probably need this book.
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 ...
As members of Japan's postwar baby boom generation approach their seventh decade, they have been wallowing in an extended nostalgia boom over the historical and cultural accouterments of the Showa Era (1926-89). If you feel left out of the discussion, the antidote is to ...
Lieutenant Reiko Himekawa heads a team of homicide investigators at Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters. They are dispatched to the city's gritty Ota Ward, where a human hand had been found without a body. From fingerprints, its owner is soon identified as Kenichi Takaoka, operator ...
Fifty-one minutes after the earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, a massive wall of water inundated the grounds of the Ishinomaki Municipal Okawa Elementary School in Miyagi Prefecture, killing 74 pupils, 10 staff and the school bus driver. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life ...
Okinawa at times is like heaven and hell in equal measures: tropical beaches next to ammunition dumps. A garrison island where people come to take vacations, the most politicized region of Japan can seem like being teleported back to the agitprop heyday of the ...
Ennui and existential loneliness have become synonymous with contemporary Japanese literature, and those sentiments receive one of their most direct treatments in this newly translated novel from 2002. "The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside" is as unrelentingly bleak as its title suggests. The ...
I first met James Lee Byars in Kyoto in early 1967 and, at his invitation, participated in his "performance." At the time I didn't know that he'd been back and forth between Japan and the U.S. for nearly a decade already. I was also ...
How a short but fruitful relationship with Natsume Soseki led to the most productive years of Akutagawa's tragic life.
"Mother, when are you ever going to die?" Inheritance From Mother, by Minae Mizumura.447 pages OTHER PRESS, Fiction. The question is shocking indeed. But Mitsuki Hirayama, a teacher and translator of French and the heroine of Minae Mizumura's new novel, "Inheritance from Mother," dreams of the day ...
