A fresh tale of intrigue driven once more by the savvy, small-town sleuth, Bianca St. Denis.
Category: Reviews
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.
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
Review—The Widow, The Priest and The Octopus Hunter
Portraits of the lives of 31 members of a small community on a tiny island in Japan’s Inland Sea, spanning the Taisho to Reiwa periods (the past 100 years).
The Widow, the Priest and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island Review by Tina deBellegarde With The Widow, the Priest and the Octopus Hunter, Amy Chavez has presented us with a gift of cultural preservation. The author conducted a year-long oral history project on the Island of More…
Review—Kanazawa by David Joiner
In Kanazawa, David Joiner delivers a slow-burning family drama reminiscent of a film by Yasujirō Ozu or Hirokazu Koreeda.
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Joiner adds a layer of reading pleasure by intertwining key aspects of Izumi Kyōka’s works into his own narrative.