'The Journey': Jiro Osaragi depicts a society coming to grips with defeat and occupation
Jiro Osaragi's "The Journey" is an intriguing literary and psychological depiction of a society coming to grips with the aftermath of defeat and occupation.
Wabi lies at the heart of Japanese history
You could spend your entire life in modern Japan without ever hearing the term wabi, though no overview of Japanese history or art is complete without it. It's a beautiful word, hard to define like most beautiful words. Poverty is the heart of ...
Surviving a sudden transition to democracy
What is the worst thing that has ever happened to humankind? History is long and frequently awful, but a war that consumed 60 million people and added "Hiroshima," "Nagasaki" and "Auschwitz" to the world's vocabulary surely stands apart. And suddenly it was over. Suddenly Japan was ...
On most lists of great 20th-century Japanese writers, Jiro Osaragi's name does not figure. He was popular and respected in his own day (1898-1973), mostly as a writer of historical fiction, but literary immortality has eluded him. So? The ...
