Tag: Japan

The “I” in Murakami

Discussing Murakami within the Japanese literary tradition is in itself rare. He is, by his own admission, less well-loved in Japan than abroad.

Mend Your Ways

An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.

Make Allies, Break Empires

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...