Sep 11, 20211 minThe 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...
Aug 26, 20211 minThe Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious StateI enjoyed this one. An excellent book that’s hard to put down. Walsh brings to life the settings—Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Quetta—to...
May 18, 20212 minTokyo JunkieRobert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie covers the author’s ties to Japan’s megacity over a period of more than half a century, including his...
May 10, 20212 minRunaway HorsesMishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who...
Mar 6, 20212 minZen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceThis meandering, dense, rather insane book is chockablock with ideas, which gelled at times and at others never fully took shape for me,...
Feb 13, 20212 minThe SamuraiShusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or...