Yojimbo (用心棒, 1961) is an Akira Kurosawa classic starring Toshiro Mifune, this time as a rōnin who happens upon a forsaken backwater...

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...

Journalist Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a remarkable achievement on a number of...

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....

This is probably the pinnacle of all Japan travel memoirs by non-Japanese writers. Donald Richie, well known for his books and essays on...

"Life is a path of suffering that leads to death..." So begins What Made Her Do It? (1930, Japanese: 何が彼女をそうさせたか). (Silent film based on...

Yasujirō Ozu's 1932 silent comedy I Was Born, But... is still entertaining today. (Japanese: 大人の見る絵本生れてはみたけれど) One of Ozu's earliest...

Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn's earlier works on Japan. It starts off with the author's account of his...

Days of Youth (学生ロマンス 若き日) is a 1929 silent comedy by Yasujirō Ozu. The seven or eight films he directed before this are considered lost,...

An excellent, entertaining and, dare I say, enlightening memoir by Lawrence Shainberg that I've been meaning to read since it came out in...

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), by journalist Barbara Demick, chronicles the lives of ordinary people living in...

Four disparate short stories by one of Japan's greatest writers make up this collection. Written between 1917 and 1926, they're told with...

I've at last ventured into the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (Japanese: 仁義なき戦い; also known in English as The Yakuza Papers)....

Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies:...

Shusaku Endo's 1993 novel Deep River (深い河, or Fukai Kawa) follows a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of Buddhist sites in India. Each...

A dragon king, tongue-clipped sparrow, sake-drinking tortoise, vengeful rabbit, pitiful hare, flying paper crane, and luminous beings...

The Sound of Waves (1954) by Yukio Mishima is a fairly slim novel that rather surprised me. After reading his Death in Midsummer and...

Sansho the Bailiff (1954; also called Sanshō Dayū, and in Japanese 山椒大夫) is a film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi that Japanese cinema fans,...

The Memory Police, a novel by Yōko Ogawa, was published in 1994 and then translated by Stephen Snyder for its 2019 release in English....