Tag
East Asia
-
Protesters of the World, Unite
Individual protests, like those in Hong Kong, may be defeated. But the global protest movement is only beginning.
-
The Met Goes to China
In July, while in New York, I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much buzzed about “China: Through the Looking Glass,” a visually stunning multimedia exhibit that showcases the varied ways that Western fashion designers have been inspired by Chinese art and culture. The show has set attendance records, and is the Met’s most visited…
-
Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is nonetheless a country backwater. The town lies aside narrow Route 291, which snakes and tunnels its way to Yuzawa, the onsen (hot spring)…
-
Rebellious Anti-Rebels
Kyung-sook Shin’s I’ll Be Right There, originally published in South Korea in 2010, features illness, injury, rape, kidnappings, and at least four types of suicide, one of which is possibly murder. This excess will not surprise readers familiar with Shin from Please Look After Mom (2008), in which a country mother disappears during a visit to…
-
Edible Comics
Comics and food have a longstanding relationship, most spectacularly in a unique genre known in Japan, its country of origin, as ryôri manga, or cooking comics. These are comics entirely devoted to food—its preparation, its appreciation. Today we can find food comics in France and the US, but this is a genre that traces its…
-
Notes on a Reading
We asked novelist and Public Books contributor Ellis Avery to tell us about the Public Books event she recently hosted at Three Lives Books in Manhattan’s West Village with Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.…
-
Periphery to Periphery
Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them in their work.1 literature.” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 24–30. ] But after so many repeat…
-
For Now and for Nao
Both of the protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, set out to tell one story and wind up telling another. “Ruth”—like the book’s author a novelist living on an island in …
-
A Heike for the Ages
The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), often referred to as Japan’s “epic,” is the subject of a lively new translation by Royall Tyler, the preeminent translator of Japanese classics. A work on par with the early 11th-century Tale of Genji for its national cultural significance, the Heike is an account of the Genpei War…
