The Old Nurse's Story
“Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age!" Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse's Story” (1852) is a classic that...
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- 1 min
Mad Monkton
This is the first story I’ve read by English writer Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), and it’s a very good ghostly Victorian tale, with eerie...
- 1 min
The Signal-Man
Written by Charles Dickens four years before he died of a stroke in 1870, and a year after the train to London he was on derailed, “The...
- 1 min
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) is a rather odd short story about an unnamed lawyer who tries...
- 1 min
Scandal
This 1986 novel by Shusaku Endo is a departure from a lot of his previous work, mainly historical fiction. Protagonist Suguro, a...
- 2 min
Notorious
The beauty of this film (besides Bergman) is its ending. The good guy does not stumble across a gun and shoot down the baddie. The bad...
- 1 min
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Short epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1774, is a tale of unrequited love that's...
- 1 min
Persona
Liv Ullmann plays Elisabet Vogler, a famous stage actress who has a breakdown and after refuses to speak. At a psychiatric facility she’s...
- 1 min
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...
- 2 min
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...
- 1 min
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
Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J.M. Coetzee is the first-person narrative of a magistrate in a fictional settlement at the frontier...
- 2 min
The Book
At about 160 pages, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) by Alan Watts is a fairly short read but leaves you with...
- 2 min
Pusher Trilogy
Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films are brilliant, bleak tales of wheeler-dealers each having a run of bad luck in...
- 1 min
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...
- 3 min
Yojimbo
Yojimbo (用心棒, 1961) is an Akira Kurosawa classic starring Toshiro Mifune, this time as a rōnin who happens upon a forsaken backwater...
- 2 min
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Published in 1970, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is a compilation of talks by the Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki, who taught Zen Buddhism in...
- 1 min
Tokyo Vice
Journalist Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a remarkable achievement on a number of...
- 2 min
The Inland Sea
The Inland Sea is a 1991 documentary-style film by Lucille Carra and an adaptation of Donald Richie's 1971 travelogue of the same name....
- 2 min
The Inland Sea
This is probably the pinnacle of all Japan travel memoirs by non-Japanese writers. Donald Richie, well known for his books and essays on...
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