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...
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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...
4 min
What Made Her Do It?
"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...
2 min
I Was Born, But...
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...
2 min
Exotics and Retrospectives
Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn's earlier works on Japan. It starts off with the author's account of his...
1 min
Days of Youth
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,...
1 min
Ambivalent Zen
An excellent, entertaining and, dare I say, enlightening memoir by Lawrence Shainberg that I've been meaning to read since it came out in...
1 min
T-Men
T-Men, a 1948 film starring Dennis O’Keefe and directed by Anthony Mann, is a noir procedural singed with greed and paranoia. In the...
1 min
Nothing to Envy
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), by journalist Barbara Demick, chronicles the lives of ordinary people living in...
1 min
Red Roofs and Other Stories
Four disparate short stories by one of Japan's greatest writers make up this collection. Written between 1917 and 1926, they're told with...
1 min
Gun Crazy
Gun Crazy (a.k.a. Deadly Is the Female) is a thrill ride of a film, directed by Joseph H. Lewis and released in 1950. It stars Irish...
2 min
The Long Take
One of my favorites this year so far. The Long Take (2018; also known as A Way to Lose More Slowly) is a novel in narrative poetry form...
2 min
Naked City
A heavy case... A heavy, heavy case... So veteran detective Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) tells novice cop Det. They've been called to...
2 min
Key Largo
Bogie and Bacall shine in this 1948 noir set in Key Largo, but Edward G. Robinson steals the spotlight. Frank McCloud (Bogart), a...
3 min
The Plague
In the midst of Covid-19, it's hard to read Camus' The Plague (1947) and not regard it as representative of today. For me it also served...
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