Three Poems from Robert MacLean’s new book Waking to Snow (Isobar Press, Oct. 2020) My First Guide to Kyoto Next-door neighbour’s pug-nosed Sakura tied up all day whimpering beneath the stairwell: no way to treat the earliest cherry blossoms in Kyoto. So I take him for a walk – rather he takes me, charging More…
Todd Wassel walks the 750-Mile, 88-Temple Pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan and finds some surprising things along the way.
(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…
(“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…
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…
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…
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