When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era.
Writers responded to the triple disasters of 11 March 2011 with a new genre of Japanese literature: shinsai bungaku or “earthquake literature”. Almost 13 years later, it’s easy to forget just how terrible 11 March 2011 really was. The Great East Japan Earthquake triggered a tsunami that may have reached heights up to 40 meters….
A piano competition in a seaside town near Tokyo brings together pianists from around the world. Among the competitors are a former prodigy who left the competition circuit seven years earlier after her mother died, a third-generation Japanese-Peruvian, and a teenaged child of a beekeeper. Riku Onda’s Honeybees and Distant Thunder, the basis of a…
Austrian author Milena Michiko Flašar’s latest novel, Mr Katō Plays Family, makes use of the range of feelings experienced during retirement to explore imagination, relationships, and family. This heartwarming and quiet story, translated from German by Caroline Froh, unfolds in an almost dream-like, stream-of-consciousness style as Mr. Katō connects with others and renews his sense of…
Amid the scorching heat of August 1947, the Edo Tattoo Society hosts a spectacle that captivates the city: a competition to crown the person with the most exquisite body art. Held at a garden restaurant, their first post-War meeting draws a large crowd. Among the attendees is Kenzo Matsushita, recently returned from the war where…
In his 1994 speech accepting the second Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe claimed that, in the history of modern Japanese literature, “the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those ‘post-war writers’” who “tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by…
The tales in Ao Omae’s People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice are about sensitive people trying to navigate an unjust world. Take Nanamori, the protagonist of the collection’s title story. The characters in “People Who Talk” are members of the university Plushie Club. Members justify the club to university officials as an organization…
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is the story of a psychiatric patient who claims he once spent time in a land of water-loving creatures out of Japanese folklore. Most of Akutagawa’s contemporaries—as most Japanese readers today—would have been familiar with this famous folktale monster. A kappa is about three feet tall and, according to Patient No 23,…
On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against…
From the critically acclaimed author of BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick The Cat and The City, comes a love-letter to Japanese culture, landscape, and literature, in a beautifully crafted representation of love, life, and loneliness.
On 29 September 1985, four men arrive at the Mill House, located deep in the mountains of Okayama prefecture, for their annual visit, but the weekend quickly spirals into a sinister nightmare: two bodies are discovered, a guest goes missing, and a valuable painting disappears. Exactly one year later, the remaining guests gather again, hoping…
Latin America is home to a large East Asian diaspora, the result of much the same forces that created the not dissimilar diaspora in North America; the authors arising in that other diaspora, however, write in Spanish (and perhaps Portuguese, depending on how one defines things) rather than English. Very few of these works end…
Akira Mizubayashi’s Fractured Soul opens in Tokyo in 1938. Rei sits quietly to the side while his father Yu conducts rehearsal for a string quartet playing Franz Schubert’s “Rosamunde Quartet”. Yu plays first violin, accompanied by three exchange students from war-beleaguered China. When Yu realizes they’re about to receive an unexpected visit from Japan’s military…
In Anarchy of the Body, art historian KuroDalaiJee sheds light on vital pieces of postwar Japanese avant-garde history by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political trajectories of artists across Japan in the 1960s. A culmination of years of research, Anarchy of the Body draws on an extensive breadth of source material to reveal how the…
History of Japanese Art after 1945 surveys the development of art in Japan since WWII. The original Japanese work, which has become essential reading for those with an interest in modern and contemporary Japanese art and is a foundational resource for students and researchers, spans a period of 150 years, from the 1850s to the…