In Suzuki Suzumi’s new novella, an unnamed woman plods through her routine life while the ghosts of her traumatic past resurface, to her increasing dismay. Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell, Gifted was shortlisted for Japan’s respected Akutagawa Prize, making its English release highly anticipated. With a style both clinical and aloof, the novella…
Now available in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories, a story set in a photography studio that belongs in a space between the world of the living and the afterworld, is the most recent example of Japanese “comfort fiction”.
There is a tendency with Osamu Dazai, who in his lifetime struggled with addiction and ultimately committed suicide, to focus on the more overwrought and confessional elements of his prose, hoping to find a mirror of the tragedy of his life in his writings. For his dedicated readers spanning the globe, the relatable elements of…
Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor.
Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. Ashiya is a city about two hours east of her childhood home by the brand new shinkansen.
Like many stories, Amy’s begins long before she was born. Amy is an “all-American” young woman from Hawaii, but author Sherri L Smith and illustrator Christine Norrie start their graphic novel Pearl in 1886 in Japan, where Amy’s sosōbo (great-grandmother) is a pearl diver from Okinawa.
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing…
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers…
Despite being full of lively characters, the most vibrant personality in Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo might be the city itself. Tokyo here is a fascinating hybrid gleaned from the novel’s ten individual perspectives, and the introduction of each new set of eyes reveals, piece by piece, a city that is as multifaceted as it is…
Hong Kong has often been called a “cultural desert”; while this is both uncharitable and less than entirely accurate, few question that Hong Kong punches below its weight culturally and has long failed to make optimal use of its many natural advantages. John Duffus’s recent memoir, Backstage in Hong Kong, provides a blow-by-blow narrative as…
Nanako Hanada’s The Bookshop Woman chronicles the unique magic books have to connect people. In her 30s with her marriage and career on the brink, Nanako joins an online matching service that she refers to as PerfectStrangers. Though it resembles a dating site, it’s meant to connect people for thirty-minute conversations around shared interests. To…
All three of the short pieces included in Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks by Akutagawa Prize-winning author Natsuko Imamura are stories of escalation—in each, the mundane finds itself quickly replaced by the tragically absurd.
On the evening streets of Tokyo, in the heart of the Shinjuku district, a white sedan “reeking of blood and cigarettes” hosts Shindo, the battered and bruised protagonist of The Night of Baba Yaga. These elements—inconspicuous cars, bloody seats, violent people—make up the bulk of Akira Otani’s novel. Beyond the gore lies a queer love…
Riko, the first-person narrator of Hiromi Kawakami’s densely intertextual The Third Love, is a forty-year old woman in contemporary, Reiwa Era Japan recalling her life. Riko isn’t even two years old when she falls in love with her cousin, Naruya Harada (“Naa-chan”). It’s almost a fated love, and it has shaped the narrative of her…
In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the US.