For years after her disappearance in the summer of 2000, Lucie Blackman still haunted the streets of Roppongi. The 21-year-old had arrived in Tokyo on a tourist visa, accompanied by a close friend, both of them hoping to pay off the debts they’d accumulated in England by working at a hostess club. On July 1, ...
Middle-aged photographer Robert “Foss” Fossick has been living as a recluse since his wife died in a tragic holiday accident, prone to panic attacks and guzzling fistfuls of medication to make it through the day. When his senile mother takes a fatal fall on the nursing home patio, she leaves him in possession of a ...
It may be the defining text of samurai culture, but Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure was always a bit of a slog. In its original form, it rambled on across more than 1,300 stories and assorted nuggets of philosophy, ranging from tales of valor and seppuku to advice on how to stifle a yawn and the correct ...
Before pocketing France’s prestigious Prix Décembre literary award a few months ago, Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint had already documented his international fame in fiction. In Self-Portrait Abroad, which has just been released in English, a protagonist named Jean-Philippe jet-sets around the world, speaking about his own novels at a circuit of international literature symposia. Each ...
For over two centuries, mainland Japan’s only official link with the outside world was a cramped artificial island in Nagasaki Bay. Though it was initially built to accommodate Portuguese traders, Dejima would give a more permanent home to the trade mission of the Dutch East India Company. From 1641 until 1853, its residents provided Japan ...
Jorge Luis Borges employed all manner of meta-mindbending devices in his fiction, but one of the most ingenious was the way that he would outline an entire novel’s worth of material in the course of a short story. Stripped of such niceties as contextualization and character development, the implication was that a few pages were ...
What does it say for an author when her most widely translated work is also her most sexually explicit? In Japan, Yoko Ogawa is best remembered for 2003’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, the gentle, ambling story of an amnesiac mathematician and the single mother who works as his helper. But to readers in Portugal ...
Donald Richie, that great interlocutor of Japanese culture and elder statesman of the expat literary scene, has gone and made a coffee table book. Tokyo Megacity sees the writer team up with photographer Ben Simmons, his co-conspirator on 1987’s Introducing Tokyo (Kodansha International), to create a portrait of the capital circa 2009-10. This new volume ...
My Darling is a Foreigner, Saori Oguri’s illustrated tales of her life with American husband Tony László, has been tough to avoid recently. First released in 2002 to modest acclaim, the series became a slow-burning success, eventually ratcheting up sales of more than 2.5 million copies. If you spent much time riding the JR over ...
It’s tough being the second most famous in fiction. Not too long ago, my girlfriend got all the way to the end of Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue before realizing, with not inconsiderable disappointment, that it wasn’t by Haruki. I should state for the record that my girlfriend is Japanese and, to the best of ...
One of the strangest weeks I’ve had in Tokyo was spent accompanying some journalists from FHM around the city’s sex clubs. The itinerary took in an S&M hostess bar in Roppongi, a bondage stage show in Shinjuku (complete with audience participation section), and a “happening club” in Shibuya that came with wipe-clean furniture and plentiful ...
Let’s get one thing out of the way: yes, the cover’s dreadful. Mitsuyo Kakuta may be one of the most lauded novelists of her generation, but the English edition of The Eighth Day comes sheathed in what looks like a vanity publisher hand-me-down. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, let that put you off: this is engrossing, ...
One of the more frustrating aspects of reviewing translated Japanese literature is the waiting. While Haruki Murakami is hampered only by the length of time it takes Jay Rubin to bang out a decent translation, most modern writers will wait a decade or two before seeing their work appear in English, by which point it’s ...
The Sleeping DragonKodansha International, 2009, 304pp, ¥2,730Available from Amazon Japan and Amazon US. The Devil’s Whisper Kodansha International, 2009, 264pp, ¥1,260 Available from Amazon Japan and Amazon US. “The talent is well hidden indeed,” reads a quotation at the start of The Sleeping Dragon. “How else could it have remained submerged for centuries with only ...
The Rough Guide to AnimeBy Simon Richmond(Rough Guides, 2009, 304pp, $18.99) Available from Amazon US and Amazon Japan. The Rough Guide to MangaBy Jason S. Yadao(Rough Guides, 2009, 304pp, $18.99)Available from Amazon US and Amazon Japan. Britain’s Rough Guide series has been helping itinerant travelers navigate foreign destinations for nearly 30 years. As globetrotting becomes ...
When Donald Keene was awarded the Order of Culture last year, there was really only one sensible reaction: what on earth took them so long? As a translator, scholar and historian, the 87-year-old is virtually unrivalled in his contribution to furthering understanding of Japanese literature in the West—and, it must be said, here in Japan ...
Late last month, the World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Index, which ranks countries on how equitably they divide resources and opportunities between men and women. While Iceland topped the list, closely followed by the rest of Scandinavia, Japan placed a dismal 75th—an improvement on the previous year, but still no match ...
When the magazine I used to work for in Nagoya ran a short story contest, the guest editor lamented that most of the entries from male writers were about bonking Japanese women. M. Thomas Gammarino’s debut novel drags that carnal obsession to its final, ridiculous extreme. Brain, the American anti-hero of Big in Japan, is ...
How refreshing: a phrasebook that goes beyond “o-namae wa nan desu ka?” and actually tries to get you speaking like the locals. “The phrases included are specifically designed to help English speakers who plan to stay in Japan… say exactly what they want to say in colloquial Japanese,” explains Kit Pancoast Nagamura in the preface ...
Hirotaka Adachi was just 17 years old when he had his first story published. “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse” was the grisly tale of a 9-year-old girl’s attempts to dispose of her friend’s dead body after killing her—narrated by the deceased herself. It served as a fitting statement of intent for a writer who has ...
There’s no shortage of writers who have picked up literary awards for their debut novels. Far rarer are the ones who have had a new prize created because of them. Such was the case with Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s The Summer of the Ubume. When it was first released in 1994, the book was deemed too long ...
David Peace is a tough bugger to enjoy. His prose is knotty, claustrophobic, obsessive to the point of monomania: constantly repeating, repeating, full of endless repetition and CAPITALIZATION. “IN THE OCCUPIED CITY, I hear boots in the mud, I hear sirens in the sky. But I am falling again. In the Occupied City, people are ...
Today’s transgression is tomorrow’s in-flight magazine. For every taboo-busting work of fiction that’s retained its capacity to shock or disgust (American Psycho springs to mind), there are acres of one-time controversy courters that now seem quaint, or else have assumed the flatulent tediousness of a washed-up old rocker losing the battle against incontinence in a ...
Carp streamers and genki matters