By Amy Chavez I’ve read 84 books so far this year. According to my Goodreads “Reading Challenge,” I’m 15 books ahead of schedule, so I’m well on my way to hitting the 100 mark. In fact, I’ll probably surpass it. How did I go from reading 5 to 10 books a year to reading over More…
Category: Blog
Introducing “Roger Pulvers Reads” on YouTube
Interested in Japanese poetry? Author and translator Roger Pulvers offers a few minutes of poetry on his YouTube channel each update. His recitation of Masaoka Shiki above is typical of his offerings where he reads haiku and tanka. He introduces the poet, recites some of their well-known verses (that he translated into English himself) and More…
Sean Michael Wilson Ruminates on the Disappearing Japanese Garden
By Sean Michael Wilson What happened to the Japanese love of nature? There is a common assumption that Japanese people love nature. In some ways that is clearly true, thankfully. However, in various important respects what happens in practice seems to go very much against that. In a world increasingly focused on sustainability and protection More…
Limited Time Deal: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood $2.99/250yen
The novel that catapulted Murakami to superstardom in 1987.
Sorry, you missed this deal! This is an e-book only deal on iBooks and Amazon and will last only 24hrs, so grab it now by clicking the green “More info” button on the left. Norwegian Wood ノルウェイの森 (Noruwei no Mori) First published in Japanese in 1987. Translated into English by Alfred Brinbaum in 1989, then More…
Authors Unite to Support Each Other During COVID-19: Amy Katoh’s Blue & White store in Tokyo
By Amy Chavez Tokyo-based author and collector Amy Katoh has had her Blue & White store in Azabu Jūban, Minato-ku for 44 years. Her shop celebrates the Japanese love for blue and white, especially as represented in traditional textiles (kasuri, tenugui, zabuton cushions, etc.) and porcelain (Imari plates, vases, soba cups, etc). Many of our More…
Review—The Era of Great Disasters
Recent Release! A fascinating look at three of Japan’s most devastating earthquakes.
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The Era of Great Disasters: Japan and Its Three Major Earth Quakes, by Iokibe Makoto (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, July 2020) Review by Amy Chavez Included in the University of Michigan Press ‘Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies,’ The Era of Great Disasters is a scholarly but highly readable text that investigates Japan’s More…
Review—The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper
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…
15 years at Studio Ghibli by Steve Alpert
(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…
My Cute Kawaii Boutique, by Renae Lucas-Hall
(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…
Peaceful Circumstances, by Roger Pulvers
(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…