The Dandelion
It’s impossible to trust any text that’s incomplete, and Kawabata’s novel The Dandelion (also Dandelions, Tanpopo) was published...
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- 2 min
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
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,...
- 1 min
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...
- 2 min
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
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
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
The Samurai
Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or...
- 1 min
The Big Clock
Directed by John Farrow and starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Rita Johnson, this 1948 noir is a combination...
- 1 min
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
The Big Goodbye
A behind-the-scenes look at the lives and times that brought us the 70s film noir classic Chinatown. Well-researched and compelling,...
- 2 min
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...
- 1 min
The Lady from Shanghai
“Some people can smell danger. Not me.” Says Irish-born boatswain Michael O'Hara (Welles) to Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), in the dark...
- 1 min
Chinatown
"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.” I've watched this two or three times before but not for ten years at least. Roman Polanski's Chinatown...
- 2 min
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...
- 1 min
Rosemary's Baby
This is another film I'd heard of countless times but watched only recently. Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, is a 1968...
- 1 min
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
I’ve heard about this 1956 sci-fi horror film a thousand times since I was a kid but didn’t watch it till just the other day. Directed by...
- 1 min
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
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
A very good "haunted house" story, and my first time reading Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). Years before the...
- 2 min
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Roger Ebert wrote that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is arguably “the first true horror film.” And whether...
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