“Do you want to join the army, or do you want to go to jail?” This question—typically posed by a judge to a teenager charged with a petty crime—animated ...
Tag: Japan
Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter ...
B-Sides: Satomi Myodo’s “Journey in Search of the Way”
As spiritual autobiographies go, Journey in Search of the Way is a bit of a romp ...
Japan’s Isolation 2.0
The taxi driver who took me from Tokyo train station to my hotel had turned his cell phone sideways, like a television, and propped it up on the dashboard of his car. He was watching a historical ...
The Fortunes of Senso-ji, Tokyo
Asakusa is just west of the Sumida River in the shitamachi, the “old town” of Tokyo. Much of this part of Tokyo, including most of the venerated Buddhist temple ...
Our Migrant World
Within the rhetorical toolbox of contemporary political discourse, the language used to characterize international migration, refugee crises, and border crossings might fairly be called impoverished ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Hirado, the End of the World
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The journey from Tokyo to the island of Hirado, just off the coast of Nagasaki ...
What Global English Means for
World Literature
Globalization is one of the great issues facing universities today, particularly in humanities departments. It means different things to different people, but most agree that globalization pluralizes ...
Rediscovering Classics: The Essays of Tosaka Jun
Editor’s Note: What follows is the beginning of a new series, “Rediscovering Classics,” that features overlooked or forgotten works of thought and literature that remain relevant and powerful today ...
Murakami on Friendship
It might be fair to say that Haruki Murakami has had two narrative modes in his novels and short stories. Works like Norwegian Wood (1987) illustrate his “normal” mode, in which he recounts a ...
What Makes a “True Novel”?
Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is an utterly absorbing love story set against the broad backdrop of pre- and postwar Japan. It tells the story of Taro Azuma, who grows up as an orphan in grinding ...
Japanese on Montagu Street
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “My colleagues think I’m going to come back with this crazy haircut,” says the man in ...
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 ...
In the Yellowstone Valley, a Beet Farmer with an Artist’s Soul
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
