Torikaebaya Monogatari is a twelfth-century Japanese tale like no other. As suggested by its title, which literally translates to “if only I could exchange them” (torikaebaya) “story” (monogatari), it follows the complications that arise when a nobleman has his two children swap genders—his son living as a woman, and his daughter living as a man….
Lavishly illustrated, Samurai explores the reality and myths of the samurai from medieval times to today’s popular culture through objects from international collections. Essays by scholars throughout the book discuss the warrior class’s historical origins in the medieval period’s civil wars and stories they told of their own achievements. Although the samurai social class was…
English language children’s picture books that center around Asian folktales and themes are no longer as uncommon as they once were. Yet it’s still rare to find collections of folktales that originate from Asian countries themselves. Now David Conger, Liana Romulo, Joan Suyenaga and Marian Davies Toth have come together in Asian Folktales for Children…
The Osaka-based Hasegawas used to be a model family—happily married, two sons, a daughter, and a dog. But when the elder son Hajime dies at the age of twenty, their lives start falling apart. Each reacts to loss differently: Kaoru, the younger son and the narrator of the story, leaves to study in Tokyo but…
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and…
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book…
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War,…
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a…
Those who know other volumes in the “History in Objects” series from Thames & Hudson and the British Museum will find much that is familiar in this latest one on Japan: a wide and often eclectic collection of objects well-displayed on pages balanced with bite-sized yet informative blocks of text.
More than technology or trade, even more than defense, all societies need food, and agriculture is thus a vital hinge of power. Such is the focus of Nahoko Uehashi’s three-volume fantasy novel Kokun: The Girl from the West, the first volume of which has recently appeared in an English translation by Cathy Hirano.
Diplomats, soldiers, and spies tend to take centre stage in stories of war, as author and former journalist Evelyn Iritani writes in her history of the United States and Japan in the Second World War. In this book, the author tells a tale of civilians, rather than one of military men, a tale of victims,…
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover…
Part memoir, part meditation on the practice that Makato Fujimura has popularized as “slow art”, Art Is: A Journey into the Light is pithy yet expressive. In the acknowledgments, Makato Fujimura recalls his publisher’s exhortation to create a “beautiful book” emerging out of the malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic and this is indeed in many…
Biographies, at least in English, about Japanese who played key roles in the Second World War are relatively rare. Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin—each the subject of dozens of biographies—have all attracted a great deal of attention. General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s leader for…
Yumiko Kurahashi (1935-2005) is celebrated as a pivotal female writer in Japan’s growing post-war break with literary tradition. Informed by European writers and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, “third wave” writers in post-war Japan—Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Minako Oba, Meiko Kanai and dozens of others labeled experimentalists, avant-garde, and absurdists—were interested in the metaphysical,…