Studio Ghibli’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies has been described as the greatest film someone will only watch once. Deeply emotional, director Isao Takahata’s tale of two Japanese war orphans struggling and failing to survive in the closing days of World War II is almost too painful to bear. But the story isn’t Takahata’s—Grave…
In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a…
Across fifty-odd flash stories (particularly short pieces of fiction) in The Woman Dies, Aoko Matsuda and translator Polly Barton lean into the weird, nitty-gritty world of womanhood. For the most part, there is no immediate throughline connecting the stories—and their rich inner worlds—to each other. Yet eventually, the lines blur enough for images of women,…
In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to who domesticated horses first–but Ludovic’s team came up with their answer: They emerged on the western Eurasian steppe around 4200 years ago.
Natsuo Kirino has a real gift for seeing the worst in people. Her characters cheat, steal, and murder with an apparent lack of remorse that makes them (one hopes) unrelatable for most, but they are at least sympathetic in being partially the result of their bleak environments. Kirino’s hopeless worlds of economic and social pressure…
Shōtarō Ikenami’s The Samurai Detectives, the first volume in his celebrated Kenkaku Shōbai series, arrives in English translation by Yui Kajita as a lively entry into Japanese historical fiction. Originally published in 1973, this novel captures the shadowy underbelly of Edo-period Japan through the eyes of Kohei, a grizzled ronin turned detective, his 24-year-old son,…
In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been…
The Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) is a literary festival and cultural event for the general public, but it is preceded each year by the Sharjah Publishers Conference, a rights marketplace and networking opportunity for publishers from around the globe.
Yoko Tawada’s Archipelago of the Sun, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is the third and final instalment of a trilogy. The first two volumes—Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars—introduce a diverse cast of characters centered around Hiruko, a Japanese woman in search of her homeland, which seems to have vanished from the…
Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on…
Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
That translator Dong Li calls Chinese poet Ye Hui “metaphysical” in his introduction to The Ruins—a characterisation repeated in the book’s marketing material—might seem challenging, but in the fact the poems, while not exactly straightforward or immediately obvious, are—for most part—eminently accessible and interesting. Ye Hui will often start with a line or two that…
Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of…
If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus. Zhang, whose career spanned from the 1980s until his untimely death from cancer in 2010, spent much…
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan…