By Amy Chavez The Nakasendo was an Edo Period (1603-1868) road used for travel between the capital of Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto, the former capital. The 69 post towns along the way provided accommodation and services to daimyo and their entourages, who passed through on their sankin kōtai biennial visits to the Tokugawa shogunate. I’m More…
How many cartoons have I seen in which a man climbs a craggy precipice in search of a wise religious figure? Why must sages dispense advice from the highest places? To put it more broadly, why do people think that one has to ascend to find religious purity? It must be related to the idea More…
By Amy Chavez The Wakasa Road is a historical trail that helped advance Japan’s culture and cuisine. The Wakasa region of Fukui Prefecture, on the nation’s west coast, was one of the strategic miketsukuni regions of Japan that produced food for the emperor in ancient times. Wakasa-mono were delectables from the Japan Sea such as More…
on the road’s edge 道の端 five snake gourds からすうり五個 protect the mountain 山護る (michi no haji, karasu uri go-ko, yama mamoru) I knew all about the magic of using rice straw. It is one of the main methods of Fukuoka-san’s Natural Farming (see One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka). In the mountains of Kyōto, his More…
A Murakami-esque short story It was the most traumatic night of my young life. A chilling experience for a thirteen-year-old girl. I’d always been a light sleeper but I knew it wasn’t the wind or an earthquake tremor that woke me in the wee hours of the morning. It must’ve been two or three o’clock. More…
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) (Harvill Secker, Penguin U.K., 2018) Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall A trend has developed over the past few years whenever there’s a discussion on Haruki Murakami or a review of his latest book. Murakami is a prolific writer, novelist, and translator who has written More…
If you love Ryu Murakami, you won’t be disappointed with this novel, a fictional account of North Korea invading Japan.
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From the Fatherland, With Love by Ryū Murakami (Transl. Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf, Ginny Tapley Takemori) (Pushkin Press, 2013) Reviewed by Andrew Douglas Sokulski From the Fatherland, With Love is an exhilarating, poetic, tearful, shocking, thrilling, and intensely realistic novel that focuses on what could occur if a force from North Korea were to More…
An exclusive Books on Asia interview with Jane Lawson Before we start our interview with Jane, I want to give a little background on my first encounter with her Tokyo Style Guide: Eat, Sleep, Shop. I was traveling in Australia with my husband and we stopped in one of those typical little Aussie country towns More…
Every December, a Kyoto-based kanji organization chooses a kanji that best represents the feeling of the past 12 months. For 2018 the winner was 災, which indicates “disaster.” Last year Mother Nature walloped Japan with floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and a record-breaking heatwave, all of them proving fatal. As if that weren’t enough, there was recently a More…
From her flight bag Chiharu Kobayashi drew out a Chanel cosmetic purse and popped its clasp. In front of the mirror she touched up her lashes, eyebrows, then her lips. She examined her teeth and made a mental note to pick up a bottle of Hibiki 17-year in Dubai before the onward leg to More…
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