When Westerners first began to visit Japan in the mid-1500s they were struck by the refined beauty and quality of the country’s arts and crafts. It was a kind of beauty and quality that they had never seen before.
This special quality of Japanese things was so commonplace that the Japanese themselves did not consider it […]

One of the funniest men on the planet, David Sedaris, has a new book out: When You’re Engulfed in Flames.  I saw him interviewed by Jon Stewart (another one of the funniest men on the planet) last night on The Daily Show.  In the interview, he discusses the new book in which he moves to Hiroshima to […]

Diane Rehm interviewed (audio) Martha Sherrill the author of Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain.  Sherrill spent some time in Japan and found out about the story of the Akita, its near extinction, and its preservation by Morie Sawataishi around WWII.  If you’re a dog lover, you’re sure to enjoy the interview and the […]

I often have conversations with a slightly older generation of people in Japan about how cultural values have changed, and how youth no longer respect their elders. An izakaya owner put it to me like this: “They are now more individual, but they do not have the respect for tradition that we did.” It’s a […]

Do you know the story of the “homeless junior high school student”?
When Hiroshi Tamura was was just ten, his mother died of an illness, which was a terrible shock to his family. A bigger surprise was in store five years later, however, when Hiroshi and his older brother and sister arrived home to find […]

Japundit reader Mark Robinson has written in to let us know about his new book, titled Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook a food culture and cookbook that gets behind the counters and into the kitchens of Japan’s izakaya.
Here’s what they say about it on Amazon.
Product Description
Japanese pubs, called izakaya, are attracting growing attention in Japan […]

We’ve just received word that famed JAPUNDIT contributor Marie Mockett has accepted an offer from Graywolf Press to publish her first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, which is scheduled to start hitting bookstores in 2009.
Marie tells us:
I’m so excited to have a home with Graywolf. They are considered a “small big press” and a […]

A blogger has won Japan’s top literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. Her name is Mieko Kawakami and she started her blog to try to promote her music, but soon found herself writing about more personal matters. She wrote her first novel entirely online; her third book won the prize.
But here is the interesting part; the […]

Friday, March 7th, Ellis Avery read an excerpt from her lovely novel, The Teahouse Fire, at Asia Society.
We then had a good discussion about her work and her work habits and this was in turn followed by a tea ceremony performed by Noriko-san of Cha’an.

Two lucky winners from the audience were selected to […]

A while back we got mail from the University of California Press telling us that they have recently published by a book that might be worth reading. It is by now Japan resident Charles Jenkins, and it is titled The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea.
Charles Robert Jenkins is a […]

At the end of his book, “Princess Masako,” Ben Hills ominously declared that there would be no happy ending for Princess Masako, her husband the Crown Prince and their daughter, Princess Aiko. The strangled, cloistered world in which they all lived would never change. In “The Commoner,” John Burnham Schwartz’s fictionalized account of the life […]

For those interested in finding the real Japan of old here is a site dedicated entirely promoting. . .
a wider understanding and appreciation of The Tale of Genji - the 11th Century Japanese classic written by a Heian court lady known as Murasaki Shikibu. It also serves as a kind of travel guide to the […]

around the age of 20 i was first introduced to the books of haruki murakami with the acclaimed novel, kafka on the shore. It hooked me instantly drawing me into a world of believable fantasy characters, haunting and nostalgic scenery, and plots that stretched the boundaries of absurd all while allowing the maintenance of […]

Readers of Japundit will remember my rapturous review of Ellis Avery’s delightful novel, The Teahouse Fire.
Avery is also an artist and bestows upon us a beautiful world of embroidered silks, glazes, good posture, grammar lessons and even a socially uppity geisha or two. There’s plenty here for lovers of Japanese aesthetics to feast upon.
Nearly […]

Richard Chmura (no relation, I think, and creater of GoStats) writes in to point us to an interesting article in The Mirror about Toujours Tingo, “a new book which draws on more than 300 languages exploring the areas where English fails us.”
Kaelling - Danish: a woman who stands on her doorstep yelling obscenities at […]

And now for something completely different (as they say)…
Hitotoki: a narrative map of Tokyo.

I recently received an inquiry from a reporter in Sweden who is looking for someone to interview by telephone about popular young Japanese female writers. She says. . .
I’ve read several articles about young japanese female writers conquering the Japanese readers. Risa Wataya, Hitomi Kanehara, for example.
Now, I’d like to do a short […]

Has anyone out there read this?

Amazon has a synopsis that says. . .
Julian Cope, eccentric and visionary rock musician, hip archaeologist and one time frontman of Teardrop Explodes, follows the runaway underground success of his book “Krautrocksampler” with “Japrocksampler”, a cult deconstruction of Japanese rock music. “Japrocksampler” reveals what really happened when East […]

While we’re waxing nostalgic about Japanese music, crazed rocker Julian Cope has recently published his Japrocksampler (to compliment his earlier but now out of print Krautrocksampler), which, according to the British New Statesman, details the time when:
Tokyo, 1969. The Spiders, the Mops and myriad other identically suited “Group Sound” beat combos making post-Beatles guitar […]

A JAPUNDIT reader who is also a long-term resident of Japan sends in the following passage by Helmut Schoeck in his masterpiece Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior:
In primitive societies, “No one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off. Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and […]