Elderly Shanghai neighbor Zhu Wen thinks she’s seeing ghosts. It’s been over fifteen years since her next door neighbors left their traditional Shanghai longtang apartment and asked Zhu Wen to watch over their unit.
Visceral and enigmatic, Ye Lijun’s collection translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain reveals the intimate relationship between man and Nature. From home-brewed wine, Lake Huai to an intellectual’s return to her hometown, the poems in her first bilingual volume draw on the interaction between the environment and one’s internal states of being, reflecting on the seen and unseen in everyday life.
Indians continue to engage with the Mughal Empire in a way they don’t with any other dynasty.
For those of us who live in Hong Kong, the past six-eight months have been a roller-coaster. The (it is almost now universally accepted) ill-advised extradition bill—the proximate cause of the discontent that has roiled the city—has been withdrawn, but too late to stem the tide of protest, which took on a momentum of its own and which has been a matter of almost daily conversation, argument, newspaper commentary and, for no small number, involvement.
There is no earthly reason to write about the new off-Broadway musical Romeo & Bernadette except that it’s very clever. Mark Saltzman has repurposed some 300 hundred years of Italian song—Giordani through de Curtis with side trips via Rossini, Bellini, Leoncavallo, Cannio and Falvo—as songs and lyrics of a thoroughly modern (albeit 1960s-retro) musical.
In his 1978 work Orientalism, Edward Said accused Western artists and intellectuals of instrumentalising their perception of the Islamic world to support the narrative of Western dominance and colonialism. The British Museum’s show of Orientalist painting from the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, allows us to evaluate the truth of Said’s statement.
Lew Paper’s new book In the Cauldron charts the diplomatic road to Pearl Harbor, mostly through the eyes of the then-US Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. Paper portrays Grew as a voice crying in the wilderness, showing the way to peace when everyone around him in official circles in both Japan and the United States drifted towards war.
In 1935, Ruth Day paid a six-week visit to her mother and step-father who were at that time living in Shanghai. When she returned, she published a short book on the trip. The book had a run of just 200 copies and seems to have quickly disappeared—but at least one copy found its way to the New York Public Library, where it was found by then PhD candidate Andrew Field, who contributed an introduction to its republication.
From popular genre films to cult avant-garde works, this book is an essential guide to Japan’s vibrant cinema culture. It collects two decades of the best of Mark Schilling’s film writing for Variety, Japan Times, and other publications.
In the dead of winter, a Frenchman arrives at a small guest house in Sokcho where Franco-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin’s narrator works in a dead-end job as receptionist and run-about. Sokcho is a nondescript seaside town not far from the North Korean border. In the summer, Sokcho is a beach resort, if not the most upmarket; in winter, there is not much going on.
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