(“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…
Every December, a Kyoto-based kanji organization chooses a kanji that best represents the feeling of the past 12 months. For 2018 the winner was 災, which indicates “disaster.” Last year Mother Nature walloped Japan with floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and a record-breaking heatwave, all of them proving fatal. As if that weren’t enough, there was recently a More…
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