By Marty Friedman, with Jon Wiederhorn Permuted Press (Dec 3, 2024) Opus in Metal Review by Stephen Mansfield It’s a wonder I’m not seriously brain damaged, or at the very least, hearing impaired. As I recall, I spent a good deal of my teens with my head stuck inside giant speaker cabinets at More…
Category: Blog
Review—Autumn Embers
A fresh tale of intrigue driven once more by the savvy, small-town sleuth, Bianca St. Denis.
Review—Mornings With My Cat Mii
“Mornings With My Cat Mii is beautiful because Inaba is writing about love, the sort of love one could equally have for a human companion.” Nicky Harman
Review—Mami Suzuki: Private Eye
A charming novice sleuth who is a middle-aged single mother from Kobe.
Review—The Nature of Kyoto
Review by John Rucynski The Nature of Kyoto is the fifth anthology from Writers in Kyoto (WiK), a “group of published and self-published English-language authors working or living in the city.” Anthologies always run the risk of focusing on too narrow a theme, attracting a certain number of readers, but giving pause to many others More…
Review—A Passion for Japan
Snippets of life from people who have all come to live and search for a passion in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Interview—Two Manga Artists Tell You How to Draw Manga
Lots of American kids grew up doing chalk art, and they love manga, so it’s a great combination.
Review—Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata (transl. Takemori)
Review by Tina deBellegarde Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is a wildly imaginative and chilling short story collection about loners and outcasts. Once again, Murata writes about non-conformity and once again she does it in her unique subversive style. She presents us with a world turned on its head, where what More…
Review—3 Memoirs: Ian Buruma, John Nathan and Mayumi Oda
A Tale of Three Memoirs: A Tokyo Romance, by Ian Buruma, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere by John Nathan and Sarasvati’s Gift: The Autobiography of Mayumi Oda–Artist, Activist, and Modern Buddhist Revolutionary, by Mayumi Oda By Leanne Ogasawara It was Japan before the Bubble. And yet, despite the lack of economic miracles, 1960s Tokyo More…
Review—Spirit of Shizen: Japan’s Nature Through its 72 Seasons
An anthology to accompany the Spirit of Shizen exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg