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…
In this issue we introduce books—classic and new—on the many famous journeys through Japan documented via guidebooks and travelogues. We cover mountain hikes, old roads to Edo, ancient pilgrimage trails, an island-hopping excursion and nation-crossing peregrinations. From classic must-read travel writing such as Oliver Statler’s Japanese Pilgrimage and Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea to Japan’s 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.
Support BOA by ordering From the Fatherland With Love through these links:
Thanks for helping support Books on Asia!
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…
A story in the style of Murakami Haruki and his English translators One late-autumn Sunday morning when I set out into the back garden wielding the hedge trimmers, I found the well was gone. It wasn’t that I’d particularly liked the well when it had been there—it hadn’t provided us with delicious ice-cold water in More…
In this issue we introduce books we feel are essential reading to understand the great capital city of Tokyo. From historical reads and memoirs by English language authors Edward Seidensticker, John Nathan and Ian Buruma, to contemporary Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Ryu Murakami and Haruki Murakami, this selection of books brings together old More…
By Cathy Hirano Nahoko Uehashi is a prolific and well-loved Japanese author of fantasy as well as non-fiction. The list of awards she has won is impressive and includes the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, considered the Nobel Prize of children’s literature. During her writing career, which extends over three decades, she produced the More…
Your guide to finding quality books
on Japan and Asia
