japanamerica

 Japanese lit is lit! Happy December, friends! I hope you'll join me live THIS Tues Dec 3 6pm EST / Wed Dec 4 8am JST for a totally FREE online event to launch "Monkey New Writing from Japan" Vol: 5, the Creatures Issue! Register online in a New York minute here .  MONKEY is the only annual English-language magazine of excellent Japanese contemporary and classical writing, from short stories to poetry, haiku, tanka, manga and Noh--all brilliantly illustrated! I'll be joined by Akutagawa prize-winning author Tomoka Shibasaki (A Hundred Years and a Day), poet/translator Leo Elizabeth Takada (Perfect Days), and MONKEY co-founding editor and multiple award-winning translator Motoyuki Shibata. We're gratefully hosted by Japan Society of Boston and generously sponsored by The Yanai Foundation .  We'll have a bilingual reading with Shibasaki, a chat about literary translation and a poetry reading with Takada, and the sheer brilliance and wisdom of Shibata. Our show t...

I kept a stack of well-thumbed issues of The Nation Magazine in my New York apartment so it was an honor to host their first-ever Japan Tour these pasts two weeks along with Pico Iyer and other accomplished Japan-based authors, journalists and scholars.   We addressed a wide range of topics, from the aging society and shrinking population to the state of Japan's economy, politics (in the middle of LDP elections, no less), environmental policy, LGBTQ legislation, burakumin culture, spirituality and folklore (yokai and yurei included) and, of course, manga and anime. The tour hit Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Koyasan, Nara and Hiroshima. It was a proverbial tour de force for a great American magazine.    

I’ve been doing a series of JAPANAMERICA-themed talks in Tokyo via the generous and uber-competent WorldStrides agency for US universities including The University of Wisconsin , Vanderbilt University and DePaul University . The discussions have been wide-ranging and fascinating (I'm learning a lot myself!) and I am grateful for the enthusiastic student-professor audiences and the sterling support from the team at WorldStrides. Highly recommended.      

I returned to NHK for an interview on the explosive growth of Japanese arcade games in the US--specifically the "UFO Catcher/Crane Games" as they're known in Japan, and more aggressively in the US: "Claw Machines." Round One and Genda are investing heavily in the US market, opening bricks-and-mortar venues in targeted US regions (like Vegas). The driver? Character goods based on manga and anime characters, of course.  Got a little vociferous on this one. More of my interview at NHK .     

Movie animates Murakami's portraits of empty lives     American writer Nathaniel Rich once claimed that Haruki Murakami, lauded internationally and regularly short-listed for the Nobel Prize in literature, actually writes "genre fiction," the commercial label for stories that repeat formulas, conventions, plots and sometimes whole casts of characters to satisfy reader expectations (think "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter"). Genre works are distinguished from the less predictable and less marketable aims of literary fiction -- and have a much better shot at the bestseller list. The kicker, according to Rich, is that Murakami created his own genre, absorbing literary conceits into a blend of other recognizable storytelling tropes from the realms of noir, fantasy, horror and sci-fi. The most salient hallmark of the Murakami genre is its fluid shifts between a ruthlessly humdrum reality and poetic, often borderline erotic and prophetic dreamworlds. These ...

 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman' is an immersive journey into Murakami's world The first time I met Haruki Murakami, on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1999, he greeted my question about film adaptations of his fiction with a shrug. I knew the author had studied film as an undergraduate at Waseda University and was something of a Jean-Luc Godard aficionado, but the only two directors he said he would green-light immediately were David Lynch and Woody Allen — the latter of whom had apparently tried to contact Murakami’s office years earlier when the author was out of the country. Murakami was hard to find back then, especially in Japan. Notoriously camera-shy after he shot to fame domestically with his hugely popular third novel, “Norwegian Wood,” Murakami refused to appear on television or magazine covers, and had given only one public reading to support victims of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in his native hometown of Kobe. As Murakami’s fame and readership grew, film...