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Miss Oyu
Miss Oyu (お遊さま) is a 1951 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on Junichiro Tanizaki's 1932 novella entitled The Reed Cutter (蘆刈)....
3 min read


River of Time
Drawing from his experience as a journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Ethiopia, Swain looks back on his love affair with...
2 min read


Something Strange Across the River
Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) brings us to the streets of early 1900s Asakusa (then the center of...
2 min read


The Dandelion
It’s impossible to trust any text that’s incomplete, and Kawabata’s novel The Dandelion (also Dandelions, Tanpopo) was published...
1 min read


Souls on the Road
Souls on the Road (Rojō no Reikon), directed by Minoru Murata and released in 1921, is one of Japan’s best remembered silent films and...
2 min read


Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere
Japanologist, translator, documentary filmmaker John Nathan gives us a memoir packed with delightful stories from his years in Japan and,...
2 min read


The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
"The Dancing Girl of Izu", particularly its last three pages, is excellent for its delicate poignancy. After that comes a series of...
1 min read


Tokyo Junkie
Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie covers the author’s ties to Japan’s megacity over a period of more than half a century, including his...
2 min read


Runaway Horses
Mishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who...
2 min read


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This meandering, dense, rather insane book is chockablock with ideas, which gelled at times and at others never fully took shape for me,...
2 min read


The Samurai
Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or...
2 min read


Confessions of a Mask
Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白, Kamen no Kokuhaku) was first published in 1949, following the 1948 release of his first...
1 min read


Snow Country
“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous first line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country...
2 min read


Onibaba
Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964) is a Japanese horror film directed by Kaneto Shindo. Set during the aftermath of a fourteenth century civil war near...
2 min read


The Human Chair
"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn't so much a scary tale as it is a deviant's disturbing fantasy come to life. An ugly...
1 min read


Scandal
This 1986 novel by Shusaku Endo is a departure from a lot of his previous work, mainly historical fiction. Protagonist Suguro, a...
1 min read


Kafka on the Shore
After reading and enjoying Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood, I was disappointed in his 2002 novel, Kafka on the...
1 min read


The Burmese Harp
The Burmese Harp (1956) (ビルマの竪琴) is a Japanese anti-war film directed by Kon Ichikawa and based on a novel for children (same name) by...
2 min read


Pachinko
This multigenerational family saga by Min Jin Lee is very good and quite a feat considering the breadth and complexities of the...
1 min read


Kiku's Prayer
Kiku's Prayer first appeared as a newspaper serial in the Asahi Shimbun between November 1980 and July 1981. An English translation was...
1 min read
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