"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, . . . Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . . '' From "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) "Large numbers of people in ...
Adopt "a correct view of history," China and South Korea demand of Japan. Fair enough. We can all agree on the merits of a "correct view" of anything. The difficulty is to define "correct.'' As the intensifying acrimony unfolds over who did what to whom ...
"Listen," said Nishizawa-san. "I'm listening," I said. He was silent. He seemed to have forgotten my presence altogether. This was typical. There were sounds all around us -- music, a TV talk show, a girl giggling somewhat hysterically, almost fiercely -- but Nishizawa-san had the gift ...
A year is a novel that writes itself. The plot may be incoherent and the main characters disappointing, but the overall effect never fails to be riveting. Take this Year of the Monkey for instance. Has there ever been a year like it -- ever? ...
The miracle is no blood was shed. On the contrary, the Americans and the Japanese rather liked each other. That too is something of a miracle. They met under strained circumstances, one party menacing, the other defenseless. And they had so little in common, these ...
"The world is wider than we can imagine," said the novelist Iharu Saikaku (1642-93). It's a pregnant thought under a regime doing its utmost to narrow the world. A contemporary of Basho's, Saikaku shows us a restlessness of spirit quite different from the monkish ...
"God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse . . ." -- Christopher Columbus, 1498 "Here am I, in the Second Year of Genroku, suddenly taking it into my head to make ...
KAZUYOSHI UEHARA -- not the Kazuyoshi Uehara -- rang the doorbell. He sensed a pause, a hesitation, an interrupted action -- his imagination no doubt -- and tensed slightly as approaching footsteps grew audible. "Yes?" said Shizuko through the door. "It's me." The lock clicked; the door ...
"Mori is a large, ramshackle village . . . a wild, dreary-looking place with a number of . . . disreputable characters . . . a forlorn, decayed place." Yubetsu "looks like the end of all things, as if loneliness and desolation could go ...
"It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow.'' -- Isabella Bird, 1878 Japan's story begins with rice and pottery; Hokkaido's, with mammoths and obsidian. The element of art and refinement apparent in Japan's earliest known past is missing from Hokkaido's. The brute ...
