'Maritime Ryukyu' review: Marauders, smugglers and a colorful cast of adventurers
As a fulcrum of exchange, the Ryukyu archipelago was multilingual and multicultural from its earliest days.
'Zainichi Literature' review: What is the nature of exile?
A product of postwar Japan and virtually unknown internationally, Zainichi literature often explores the nature of exile and the conflict of identity between homes.
'The Diving Pool': Three psychologically subversive novellas
In these unsettling novellas — "The Diving Pool," "Pregnancy Diary" and "Dormitory" — Yoko Ogawa subverts expectations of traditional female milestones.
Tomoko Keira's 'The Spirit of Huci': A year of living with an Ainu elder — review
One part Ainu cookbook and three parts a cultural record of Ainu values and beliefs, Tomoko Keira's "The Spirit of Huci" offers, for the first time, the voices of Ainu women in English.
'Mr. Straight Arrow' review: An overdue look at the life of journalist John Hersey
"Mr. Straight Arrow" is a refreshingly thoughtful biography about the reclusive journalist John Hersey, best-known for his novel "Hiroshima."
'Uneven Moments' review: An equal light shined upon Western and Japanese thinkers
"Uneven Moments" collects essays that span Harry Harootunian's career and brings Japanese thinkers into analyses often dominated by a Eurocentric focus.
'Contraceptive Diplomacy' review: Contextualizing women's rights in the U.S. and Japan
"Contraceptive Diplomacy" by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci's illuminates the world of Margaret Sanger and Japanese birth control activists such as Shizue Ishimoto, tracing a history that still shapes women's health rights to this day.
'Family Traits' review: A world of myth and whimsy comes to life
"Family Traits: The Fantastic Bestiary of a Father and his Sons" is a collection of watercolor illustrations by Thomas Romain, a Tokyo-based animator, and his sons' whimsical drawings that inspired them.
'Falling From the Floating World' review: A fast-paced underworld thriller with a twist or two
Readers who like their yakuza with a dash of morality, lead characters out of their depths and their cops dumb and bent will find much to enjoy in Nick Hurst's thriller, "Falling From the Floating World."
Kyoko Nakajima's 'The Little House': Secrets hiding secrets, and much left unsaid
Kyoko Nakajima's "The Little House" is the story of how generations in Japan talk — or don't talk — to each other, and their inability to connect across eras.
Yusuke Kimura's 'Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge': Tohoku refuses to be silenced
In Yusuke Kimura's two novellas, "Sacred Cesium Ground" and "Isa's Deluge," the aftermath of the 3/11 disaster plays out across two stories exploring the post-disaster relationships between humans and animals.
Rich history is woven into each of the essays in "The Land We Saw, the Times We Knew," forming a picture of a Japan not unrecognizable to that of today, but one which has not yet made the Meiji Era leap into modernity.
