Since I came to architecture through classical archeology, writing about design was kind of like coming home. I made the switch to journalism after moving to Tokyo. At that time, Japan’s economy was going strong, boom cranes were everywhere, and the worldwide appetite for information about new construction was robust. An outgrowth of my success documenting architecture, my interest in design was sparked partly by the chairs and teapots created by Japanese architects but also by the superb array of daily-use goods available in Japan. The dearth of information about these items and their designers led me to cover design at various scales.
A graphic designer by training, Kenya Hara is one of Japan’s most theoretical design thinkers. He steps back and ponders possibility. Especially where the future of Japan is concerned.
Seated in his elegant office in downtown Tokyo, Hara explained to me years ago that Japan once churned out exports but now, as other countries assume that role, Japan must offer something else. In this book he indicates that something else not a physical object. It is the experience of the country’s rich culture, aesthetics, and underlying values.
Living in Tokyo for many years enabled many chances to savor the smell of fresh tatami mats and the toothsomeness of new harvest rice.
Hara’s thoughts resonate with me, but I hope Japan never stops making elegant, user-friendly housewares.
'Designing Japan' presents renowned designer Kenya Hara's vision of how his industry can support Japan in crafting a future founded on a unique philosophy of beauty as well as crowd-sourced wisdom from around the world. A master collaborator, meticulous organiser, and globally conscious innovator, Hara draws on more than three decades of participations in design work and exhibition curating, as well as deep professional interaction with creators from many fields.
In 'Designing Japan' Hara reveals methods that make publicly accessible aesthetic inquiries of how this island nation will proceed as its population ages, other nations take over manufacturing, and technology…
I am an architect from Greece who
traveled to Japan in the 1990s as an exchange student. Visiting Japan in the
early 1990s was a transformative experience. It led me to a career at
the intersection of Japanese studies and spatial inquiry and expanded my
architectural professional background. I did my PhD on the
Tokaido road and published it as a book in 2004. Since then I have written several other books on subjects
that vary from the Olympic Games to social movements. In the last 16 years, I've taught at Parsons School of Design in New York where I am a professor of
architecture and urbanism. My current project is researching the role of space
and design in prefigurative political movements.
Tokyo by Jinnai Hidenobu was
influential for me both as a source of information about the history of Tokyo and for its methodology of research. The author discovers the city via walking
and traveling across its water routes, an experiential methodology which he
first developed in his study of Venice. With the assistance of visuals, both
historical and newly drawn based on his field observations, Jinnai explores
modern-day Tokyo. His starting point is that Tokyo seems an anomaly when
compared with other world cities in its lack of historical structures which is
attributed to a series of wars and disasters that radically transformed the
city’s physical environment.
The impressive discovery of this inquiry
however is that despite the perceived newness of Tokyo, the spirit of Edo
(Tokyo’s name during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868) has not vanished in
today’s modern city. Through this book, we learn that the differences between
the…
Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city? The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before. Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his…
I grew up in a small town in the days before the internet and cable television, so books were my escape, and through them, I traveled to faraway places and learned about different customs and cultures. Later, I studied Chinese cultural anthropology and lived and worked in Asia for many years. Now, I write a series about a Chinese police inspector in the brutally cold far north province of Heilongjiang and use mystery stories to unpack some of the more fascinating and essential aspects of Chinese society, politics, and religion.
Ryu Murakami is a musician, writer, and film director. He deals in surrealism and the dark side of a rigid Japanese society – drugs, sex, alienation.
In this book, Murakami relates the tale of Kenji, a young man who makes his living guiding foreigners through Tokyo’s red-light district. Kenji’s new client is an extremely odd American named Frank.
As Kenji leads Frank through a labyrinth of hostess bars and peep shows, he comes to suspect that Frank may be the serial killer who has been on a rampage, murdering and dismembering teenage girls.
From postmodern Renaissance man Ryu Murakami, master of the psychothriller and director of Tokyo Decadence, comes this hair-raising roller-coaster ride through the nefarious neon-lit world of Tokyo's sex industry. In the Miso Soup tells of Frank, an overweight American tourist who has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife. But Frank's behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion-that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It is not until later, however, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how…
Lonely
Castle in the Mirror is a wonderful puzzle of a story that explores mental
health in youth and how a gentle hand can help someone grow beyond their fears.
It tells the story of a girl name Kokoro, who is too afraid to go to school due
to bullying. Then, she discovers a castle through her bedroom mirror run by a
girl in a wolf mask. While in the castle, she and six other students have a
chance to search for a key that will grant their wish. But only one can have
their wish granted.
A touching story of full of sympathy and warmth, it shows
how much one can gain by reaching out to others.
For fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD, fairy tale and magic are weaved together in sparse language that belies a flooring emotional punch.
'Strange and beautiful. Imagine the offspring of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle with The Virgin Suicides' GUARDIAN 'Genuinely affecting. A story of empathy, collaboration and sharing truths' FINANCIAL TIMES
Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami _______________________________
Would you share your deepest secrets to save a friend?
In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining.
At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a…
Although I write Fantasy, I’m a Cyberpunk enthusiast who mentally lives in the high-tech effed-up future authors and artists imagined in the ‘80s. My imagination has been so influenced by Cyberpunk since I watched (and eventually read) Akira as a kid that I ended up creating a Fantasy world with a retro-futuristic, low-life/high-tech vibe, and a lot of motorcycles. An awful lot. I’m also a rebel by heart and a queer person, hence my stories always feature a fight against society and LGBTQ+ characters. I like reading about dystopias, morally grey characters, and dark content. This is what I read, and this is what I write about.
Akira is a must-read manga masterpiece, a deep analysis of government corruption, political upheaval, criminality, and decay of society. Apart from the breathtaking art, what caught my attention was the complex story and the nihilistic, harsh, and hopeless world Akira shows. There are virtually no good characters in this story and it fits the apocalyptic, decadent reality they face and live. Expect a lot of psychic abilities and motorcycles, along with gritty, graphic violence.
Akira 1 introduces readers to a gritty Neo-Tokyo, built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by a blast of unknown origin that triggered World War III. The lives of two streetwise teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, change forever when paranormal abilities begin to waken in Tetsuo, making him a target for a shadowy agency that will stop at nothing to prevent another catastrophe like the one that levelled Tokyo. At the core of the agency's motivation is a raw, all-consuming fear of an unthinkable, monstrous power known only as Akira.
From the age of 11, and an encounter with an illustrated anthology entitled The World of Zen, I have been drawn to and fascinated by the spiritual, philosophical, and folkloric aspects of East Asian Culture. I studied the subject at Cambridge University and subsequently trained in Zen Shiatsu therapy. Most of my books draw from my passion for East Asian culture, and Japan in particular. I have travelled widely in Japan over the last two decades, and for Tsunami Girl spent four years researching, interviewing survivors, and visiting Fukushima. I am now working on a new book on Japanese yōkai and ghosts…
On my very first night in Japan, some twenty years ago, my friend told me a local ghost story as we ascended a deserted, dark back street of Tokyo. It featured no-face ghosts (nopperabo) and, memorably, the chills merged with my jet lag to bring me face-to-almost face with the world of Japanese spirits in my first hours in the country. A couple of days later my friend gifted me a copy of Hearn’s Kwaidan and it remains a treasured book to this day. Hearn’s retellings of classic Japanese ghost stories are as valued to this day in Japan as in the West. He’s a great writer. More importantly, Hearn was a sensitive, thoughtful, and wonderful chronicler of other cultures, particularly supernatural Japan. His life and work continue to be an inspiration to me.
This collection of Japanese supernatural stories is a classic work in the field of Japanese horror.
Known primarily as an early interpreter of Japanese culture and customs, the famous writer Lafcadio Hearn also wrote ghost stories-"delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches"-about his adopted land. Many of the stories found in Kwaidan, "stories and studies of strange things," are based on Japanese tales told long ago to him by his wife; others possibly have a Chinese origin. All have been re-colored and reshaped by Hearn's inimitable hand.
Some critics attribute Hearn's fascination with eerie tales to his partial blindness. Whatever its roots, he…
I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context. Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan. Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades. More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.
Cities often look quite different from the bottom up than from the top down. The practical demands of making cities work often rest on the shoulders of the most local of officials. Consequently, neighborhood officialdom often engages with citizens and residents more openly, even in authoritarian systems. Such engagement may hold the seeds of future democratic change. Hastings’ study of Honjo Ward and other proletarian Tokyo districts before World War II reveals a surprisingly robust participatory political and cultural environment across the early twentieth century.
In this pre-World War II analysis of working-class areas of Tokyo, primarily its Honjo ward, Hastings shows that bureaucrats, particularly in the Home Ministry, were concerned with the needs of their citizens and took significant steps to protect the city's working families and the poor. She also demonstrates that the public participated broadly in politics, through organizations such as reservist groups, national youth leagues, neighborhood organizations, as well as growing suffrage and workplace organizations.
I’ve been writing poetry for most of my life and only recently began a real crash course in fiction with my first novel. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but not for the reasons I thought. In poetry, you learn to locate meaning, but you don’t learn narrative structure. Who knew being an existential genius was easier than finishing a sentence? Once I started studying literature that I felt embodied both, I was able to visualize how my poetic voice wasn’t just applicable, but useful, in the world of fiction.
Novellas are a perfect place to start for poets who are interested in writing longer, more narrative work. They’re slim, lyrical, and less daunting. I read this novella in college & haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It takes place in what I can only refer to as a “Sleeping Brothel” where elderly men pay to sleep beside young women. The story is haunting, but it doesn’t take cheap horror shots. Instead, it delves into the complexity of loneliness, the shared vulnerability of sleep, and the human need for comfort.
Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.
In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.
Besides creating inventive best friends Melia and Jo, Jennifer Oxley and Billy Aronson created problem-solving best friends Peg and Cat, stars of Peg + Cat picture books and the PBS TV series which airs around the world. While creating those sets of best friends Jen and Billy became best friends themselves, brainstorming together, learning together, singing and dancing together, sharing pizza, inspiring and supporting each other, and laughing together many times a day. So yeah, they know a lot about best friends.
In Chirri and Chirra, Japanese author and artist Kaya Doi captures the magic of best friendship with gorgeous colored pencil illustrations and a dream-like tale. When twins Chirri and Chirra head off into the woods for a bike ride they find themselves in a wonderland that blends the strangeness of Lewis Caroll with the sweetness of Goodnight Moon. Along the way they stop to enjoy chestnut coffee, clover blossom tea and jelly sandwiches, all served by forest animals. They swim in a lake, nap under a tree, and ride on to a cozy hotel just in time for a forest animal concert that lights up the night of the girls’ perfect day.
The first book in a completely charming series by a well-known Japanese author and illustrator, Chirri & Chirra introduces two girl characters who go on wonderful adventures together through the natural world. Vibrant, lively, and astonishingly sweet in a pure, unsentimental way, these pages present us with relatable children, small animals, lots of food, atmosphere, and many mysteries.
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Kaya Doi graduated with a degree in design from Tokyo Zokei University. She got her start in picture books by attending the Atosaki Juku Workshop, held at a Tokyo bookshop specializing in picture books. Since then she has…
Full confession: I originally selected this work because of its short length. My goal was to read 50 books in 2023, and I had fallen behind. What a rewarding surprise, then, when this novel turned out to be my favorite of the year!
This book details the circumspect life of a woman who does not engage in relationships in the same ways as other people. Her thoughts and emotions revolve, instead, around the convenience store where she works.
This novel explores the tyranny of societal expectations and the difficulties atypical people face, two of my favorite themes both to read and write about. It also offers an up-close and fascinating view of everyday life in modern Japan. As a translator, I’m drawn to translated works and very much enjoyed the naturalness and idiomatic phrasing of this very good translation.
