Kwaidan (1965) (meaning "ghost stories") is a 182-minute horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Based on works by Lafcadio Hearn,...

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (known also for Maborosi (1995) and Our Little Sister (2015)) breaks the viewer's heart with Nobody...

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) is considered to be among the greats of modern Japanese literature. The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga...

Grass Labyrinth (Kusa Meikyū) is a Japanese film by director Shūji Terayama. Only forty minutes long, it was released in France in 1979...

Location: 35°40'11.0"N 139°41'46.3"E After leaving the Laos festival by Yoyogi park's outdoor stage on Sunday, I spotted a crow near the...

Norwegian Wood (1987) is a novel by Haruki Murakami. The first-person narrator, Toru Watanabe, takes a long and very detailed look back...

Meito Bijomaru (The Famous Sword Bijomaru) is a 1945 film by director and screenwriter Kenji Mizoguchi. Kiyone Sakurai forges a sword for...

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) is Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories which received the Pulitzer Prize for...

A Tokyo Romance (2018) is Ian Buruma's memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 when he was 23 and studied cinema at...

Rashomon. Among the most influential of all films, this 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic is better after the first experience. I first watched...

A Pale View of Hills (1982) is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. Its narrator, Etsuko, lives in England, and her second daughter, Niki, is...

Location: 35°46'11.8"N 139°36'33.1"E Tokyo has 23 wards (ku), each unique in its own right. I’ve lived in eight: Bunkyo, Minato, Edogawa,...

I sort of read this book by accident. I’ve heard about Shusaku Endo for years but never read his work, and I recently watched Martin...

Location: 35°45'59.7"N 139°36'35.1"E I took this a block from my house in Nerima-ku on April 7, 2019. This time of year the Shirako River...

Weighing in at 944 pages (roughly 375,000 words), this is the longest novel I've read in a while. Shantaram (2003) details the...

Location: 16°08'51.3"N 108°08'08.7"E I took this photo on the Hai Van Pass, north of Da Nang, Vietnam (February 27, 2019). There wasn't a...