Category: Japan

December 13, 2013

Excerpt from Natsume Soseki's Light and Dark, Part II

This week our featured book is Light and Dark: A Novel by Natsume Sōseki, translated with an introduction by John Nathan. Throughout the week, we will be featuring content about the book, its author, and its translator on our blog...

December 12, 2013

Natsume Soseki: The Merits and Flaws of -isms

Read “The Merits and Flaws of -isms,” by Natsume Soseki, excerpted from The Theory of Literature.

December 11, 2013

John Nathan's Introduction to Light and Dark

This week our featured book is Light and Dark: A Novel by Natsume Sōseki, translated with an introduction by John Nathan. Throughout the week, we will be featuring content about the book, its author, and its translator on our blog...

December 10, 2013

Excerpt from Natsume Sōseki's Light and Dark

Read the first nine chapters of Natsume Soseki’s masterpiece, Light and Dark!

October 7, 2013

Interview with Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature

The following is an interview with Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. In the interview, Emmerich discusses, among other subjects, how The Tale of Genji became a classic of Japanese literature, how it...

July 24, 2013

Samuel Moyn: Global Intellectual Life Past and Present

This week our featured book is Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. Today, we are cross-posting a short article by Samuel Moyn, originally published on Interdisciplines, which uses David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob...

November 6, 2012

Japan Embraces Donald Keene

Read a profile of Donald Keene, long-time professor of Japanese literature at Columbia University, in the New York Times.

April 18, 2012

National Poetry Month: National Haiku Poetry Day

April is National Poetry Month and April 17 was National Haiku Poetry Day, so we’ve selected a number of haiku in honor of the occasion.

April 12, 2012

National Poetry Month Selection: Kanshi of Ema Saiko

Our second selection is taken from Hiroaki Sato’s translation of the kanshi of Ema Saiko, Breeze Through Bamboo.

March 9, 2012

Chage & Aska "Say Yes" — More from Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

In “Bubblegum Music in a Postbubble Economy,” the concluding chapter to Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical History of J-Pop, Michael Bourdaghs discusses the very popular Chage & Aska (C&A), whose 1991 single “Say Yes,” became a breakout hit. Bourdaghs’s...

March 8, 2012

Happy End — More from Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

In the early 1970s, more Japanese rock bands started to sing in Japanese rather than English. One of the first groups to do this was the folk-rock group Happy End. Some might be familiar with the band from their song...

March 7, 2012

"We’re The Spiders!” — More from "Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon"

“Made-in-Japan Beatles? I hate it when they call us that. We’re the Spiders!”—Tanabe Shochi on why The Spiders passed on opening for The Beatles Michael Bourdaghs has a very informative and fun companion blog to his new book Sayonara Amerika,...