The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories by Rebecca Otowa (Tuttle Publishing, March 2020) Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall This collection of fifteen short stories provides a delightful portrayal of urban and rural life in Japan of the past and present. Rebecca Otowa shows remarkable talent as she glides through a series of eclectic More…
(Photo of author, left, with Hayo Miyazaki and others) An excerpt from the upcoming release Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man: 15 years at Studio Ghibli By Steve Alpert (Stone Bridge Press, June 2020) Temporarily Misplaced in Translation When I first began learning Japanese I was struck by how beautifully it can express certain More…
(Feature photo by Joshua Chun on Unsplash) An excerpt from Tokyo Tales: A Collection of Japanese Short Stories By Renae Lucas-Hall ‘I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve been working part-time for a fashion shop in Yokohama for two years but now I’d really like to work for My Cute Kawaii Boutique,’ I told Junko, More…
(Feature photo: “The Red Room” by Lucy Pulvers) Peaceful Circumstances is the story of Karen, a twenty-one-year-old white woman from Los Angeles. Sitting beside the hospital bed of her father, who is in a coma, she is convinced that he can hear her; so, over a single night, she tells him what happened to her More…
A Mind-Changing Interpretation of Japanese Aesthetics In Praise of Shadows, by Junichirō Tanizaki (translated by T. J. Harper & E. Seidensticker) Vintage Classics, Nov. 2019. Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall A new fully-illustrated release of In Praise of Shadows by Junichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, has just been published by More…
(“Tree” photo credit: gratisography) Translation by Hiroaki Sato (For Sumiko’s birthday) God is, even if He is not. Also He is humorous enough to resemble some kind of man. This time with a gigantic phallus over the horizon of my dream He came on a picnic. Incidentally I regret that I did nothing for Sumiko More…
(Illustration by Rebecca Otowa) An excerpt from The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and other Short Stories from Japan By Rebecca Otowa Tuttle Publishing (March, 2020) I hate my dad. Every day of my life when I was a kid, he used to beat me. Some days it was just a tap across the face More…
(“Cat nose” photo credit: gratisography) In all the years I’ve been studying Japanese, one of my dreams has been to read Haruki Murakami in Japanese. I mean, I’ve done it, using annotated readers to study two of his essays, but it’s hardly the same as picking up his novels and breezing through them unassisted. Anyway, More…
Twentieth Century Surrealism Tempered by Literary Discipline Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems by Makoto Ōoka translated by Janine Beichman (Kurodahan Press, 2019) Review by Christopher Blasdel The title of this magnificently translated volume of poetry by the recently deceased Japanese poet Makoto Ōoka immediately conjures a sense of the surreal. Even More…
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon, Random House August 13, 2019) Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall This internationally-acclaimed writer transports you to a disturbing dystopian island where everyone and everything gradually disappears, leaving its vulnerable inhabitants at the mercy of a terrifying totalitarian regime. Imagine, if you will, waking up knowing More…
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