Love, marriage; marriage, love. It was so simple, once upon a time. No, that's not true. It never was. So ancient a subject calls for a classical allusion. The 14th-century "Tsurezuregusa" ("Grasses of Idleness"), random musings of a monk named Yoshida no Kenko (1283-1350), is a ...
"Go, my son! Fight, make your way in the world." But — the proviso is implicit — tell no one who or what you are. Ushimatsu Segawa, the protagonist of Toson Shimazaki's 1906 novel "Hakai" ("The Broken Commandment"), harbors a deep, dark secret: who and ...
There are so many reasons to hate your job, if you're lucky enough to have one. The top four, according to Spa! magazine, are: stagnant salaries; a sense of being underappreciated and underevaluated; an overriding, unfocused anxiety; and a lost sense of purpose. Sixteen additional ...
Children too young, one might think, to even know the word "radiation" have picked it up and flung it with gleeful malice at disoriented new classmates who have enough to cope with already.
'There was no room for mercy in view of their crime." None asked, none given. "They met their end ... with ... a touching acquiescence in their fate." The world we are entering is that of Osaka novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). It was, first of ...
Goerge Orwell's "1984" is a fitting best-seller for 2017, a year of "post-truth," "fake news" and "alternative facts."
It was morning in the land of the gods. "The mountains and the waters serve our sovereign," wrote a seventh-century poet. "And she (Empress Jito), a goddess, is out on her pleasure-barge upon the foaming rapids." Lovely times those must have been. If only they ...
Japan ailing? Japan suffering? Nonsense. "Japan is the richest country in the world," proclaims Sapio magazine. And the best. And the happiest. The brightest future looms. It's an interesting identity crisis Japan is going through. Is it a rich country or a poor country? Fortunate, ...
There is something morbid about selfhood in Japan. It is not native to the culture. In the West, Judaism, Christianity, philosophy, language itself all teach us to say "I." It is otherwise in Japan. The Japanese "I" was born in pain — the wrenching of ...
“God, Buddha — where are they?” asks Aera magazine. At the Cafe de Monku, is one answer. It's a good name for an establishment set up by monks for the airing of monku (complaints). Its very existence (in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture) is suggestive of a ...
