Wuthering
Expectations

I found Koda Rohan's short novel The Five-Storied Pagoda accessible* because I was able to slide it into a genre, stories-about-artists...

Not many 19th century Japanese writers have made their way into English. It takes Donald Keene 300 pages of Dawn to the West , his history o...

A complicated and rewarding trip. I have a few notes on Lady Isabella Bird and Koda Rohan, and maybe about a Kubuki performance, that should...

Two curiosities about Jiro Osaragi. I mentioned yesterday that Osaragi was a sort of a French Japanese writer. His museum contains his enorm...

Last weekend I visited Yokohama, where I strolled into the Jiro Osaragi Memorial Museum and discovered a few surprises, even though almost e...

An arrow shot by an archer or a poem made by a poet should cut through your heart, jolting the head. If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow, it’s...

“So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing – sometimes...

Let’s take one more dig at William Deresiewicz, using a couple of lines of his mentioned by nicole of My Life in Books in a comment: “I n...

There’s this essay , from The American Scholar , that’s been eating at me, and entertaining me. It’s by William Deresiewicz, until very rece...

"The inros, the netsukes, the sword-guards, and the delightful lacquer-work articles of the period, were playthings, and as such no emb...

This week I've looked at: A poem written by a Japanese empress, now used as a fortune;* A poem with serious philosophical content that...

The hero, or whatever he is, of the Icelandic Egil's Saga (1230?), is a poet, of improvised pieces, mostly. Here's how the muse stri...

Two Japanese poems. The first, above, is a 17th century "poem about painting". The characters shrink dramatically after the first ...

Colour and perfume vanish away. What can be lasting in this world? To-day disappears in the abyss of nothingness; It is but the passing imag...

The Meiji Emperor of Japan, who ruled 1868 to 1912, wrote, I am told, 100,000 poems, all in the 31 syllable waka form. At the Meiji shrine,...

Let's see. What's in MyPictures. Hmm, hmm. Is this guy depressed because he couldn't find the book he wanted, or is he groaning ...

A short stretch of the Jimbo-chi neighborhood in Tokyo is crammed with bookshops, dozens of them, one after another. They mostly look like ...

This little fellow, who loves books so much* that he reads while hauling firewood, is standing outside of the Yaesu Book Center, eight floor...

Chop off the good bits and hang them on the wall. This was once a piece of a long scroll dating from the 16th century, and is now a wall-han...

A 16th century Japanese poetry anthology, a 17 meter long scroll. Only about 8 meters are on display. Click to enlarge; oh yes, do. Picture ...