Nō drama, which integrates speech, song, dance, music, mask, and costume into a distinctive art form, is among Japan’s most revered cultural traditions. It gained popularity in the fourteenth century, when the actor and playwright Zeami (1363–1443) drew the favor of the shogun with his theatrical innovations. Nō’s intricacies and highly stylized conventions continue to…
Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade. Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo,…
The war between the Heike and Genji clans in the 13th and 13th centuries is among the most compelling and significant moments in Japan’s history, immortalized in The Tale of the Heike. Beyond the events recorded in this canonical text, the conflicts of the surrounding years are crucial to medieval Japanese culture and history. In…
How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and…
As the clock approaches 8 pm, a young boy hears the howling wind and believes it is asking him to come out and play. When his mother informs him that it’s bedtime, Ricky settles down for the night. The wind, however, does not.
Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island…
The civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists drove the largest refugee exodus in the modern history of China, across the sea to the southern island of Taiwan. Martial artists of many styles were among this diaspora. In the 1940’s areas of Taipei, Taiwan were terrorized by local gangsters. Supported by desperate martial artists…
Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a story of Japan’s pleasure quarters in 1903 and 1904. Fifteen-year-old Aoi Ichi grew up on a rocky volcanic island, “the sort of place where stumbling upon a folkloric demon would come as no surprise”. She always expected to grow up like her mother, a strong swimmer and…
Futaro Yamada, discovered by the hugely influential mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, was hugely prolific in his lifetime, with many of his stories being adapted to film, such as Nagisa Ōshima’s thriller Pleasures of the Flesh (1965) and Samurai Reincarnation (Kinji Fukusaku, 1981). If Yamada’s name is known in the Anglophone world, however, it is usually…
South Asian fiction based on the Partition of 1947 is generally concerned with specific incidents of trauma and violence. Urdu writer Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, recently translated into English by Naima Rashid, adds a different dimension to the existing ways of narrating fiction. Its story begins several years before the partition and ends several…
In Maria, Just Maria, a woman born in the dense humidity of Kerala, with talking pets and petty saints as her friends, finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. The novel steps backwards, beginning with Maria as a recently divorced woman searching her memories for clues that might explain why she ended up in a hospital….
Harlequin Butterfly opens on a transpacific flight. Businessman AA Abrams introduces himself to an unnamed, first-person narrator and shows him a tiny butterfly net. “I use this net to go around capturing fresh ideas. That’s my trade,” he says. The rest of the chapter explains who Abrams is and the role of his net in…
Those of a geographical, or perhaps geopolitical, frame of mind might find it fitting that Elisa Shua Dusapin’s, after novellas set in Korea (Winter in Sokcho) and Japan (The Pachinko Parlour), has placed her third in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East. Other writers (Paul Yoon comes to mind) have also set their work in this…
Film and television that satirize South Korea’s class division has garnered considerable audience and critical attention in recent years, notably the award-winning Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and the record-breaking Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021). Less well known internationally, however, is literary fiction that takes aim at South Korea’s social hierarchy. Im Seong-sun’s The Consultant, first…
“For the first time in my life, I experienced the terror of international limbo, unable to enter any country. What would happen to me? Would I be trapped forever in an airport?” Japan’s 1972 termination of diplomatic ties with the Republic of China left 9,200 Chinese residents stateless. Author Chen Tienshi Lara was one of…