It is a cliché that retiring academics look forward to some variation of “finally getting some research done”, freed of the daily tasks that come with a university career. William Steele retired from International Christian University in Tokyo in 2018, and his newest book, Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, draws upon a career of teaching 19th- and…
That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes…
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom…
Sunny Seki opens his new children’s book, Hokusai’s Daughter, with Hokusai, the famous painter and printmaker from the Edo period, walking alongside his young daughter.
The diversification of Japanese Literature available in translation means that the release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami is not met with quite the fanfare it once was, but interest in movie adaptations of the author’s work is higher than ever. This is due at least in part to the enthusiasm with which critics…
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, tourism is again booming in Japan. July 2024 saw the highest inflow of visitors ever recorded—more than 3 million entries in the month alone. For many, if not most, tourists, the city of Kyoto will rate a very high priority. The spring and autumn are usually regarded as…
Ruth Mandujano López starts her book Steamships across the Pacific with, as seems almost de rigueur now for almost any book about Latin American-Asian relations, with the history of the Manila Galleon, but for her, this is a point of comparison and departure.
A much-loved memoir about a Japanese author’s relationship with her cat is translated into English for the first time by award-winning translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Writer Mayumi Inaba won many prizes for her stories and poems before her untimely death from cancer in 2014. She was well-known as a cat lover, particularly her calico, Mii….
In the corner of a busy cafe in Tokyo, three men meet over coffee. But the trio of Goto, Takumi, and Sasaki are not who they seem—they are rehearsing carefully scripted roles in a property scam. With real estate values soaring in the city, schemes to make a quick profit are on the rise.
Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are, one comes to realize, one of the earliest example of mass commercial art, at least purely secular art, and one that still resonates with modern sensibilities. As testament to their volume, Britain’s Victoria & Albert Museum has, quite literally, tens of thousands of prints, a…
In Rio Shimamoto’s prize-winning novel First Love, a young woman kills her father. Her legal defence team must comb through the past and present, exploring her platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships to find a motive for murder. Though the novel begins as a crime thriller, it’s a genre-bending story that transforms into a romance, murder…
Is it a commendation or criticism of the author or translators that one would never have imagined, had one not already known, that Keiichiro Hirano’s Eclipse was originally written in Japanese for a Japanese readership? Set in late 15th-century France and deeply permeated with Christian theology and late medieval philosophy, Eclipse evokes nothing as much…
Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager—its fifth in as many years—he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.
Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a…
Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator … and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared information on US aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of US capability.