Yuri Kochiyama
For my senior thesis, I am preparing to write a paper on the roles of women as portrayed by popular Japanese authors, both female and male. Reading the biography of one famous literary author, Tanizaki Junichiro, I was a little disturbed to read this passage from one of his essays:
One of the things […]

OK, so there is this series of books called Samurai Girl, which focuses on a protagonist named Heaven Kogo who is forced into marrying some guy because her father is part of a yakuza gang, and now she is learning how to become a samurai so she can avenge her brother’s death, who was killed […]

Title: Gold Rush (ゴールドラッシュ)
Author: Miri Yu
Year: 1998
Plot Summary: 14-year old Kazuki is disturbed by his surroundings, growing up in the depraved town of Kogane-cho, which is filled with prostitutes, gang members, and people stuck in this place of moral decay. The novel follows the unraveling of Kazuki’s mind as he struggles in an ambiguous […]

Photo taken by me in Ryukyu Mura, Okinawa
Read classic English literature and you will notice that there are often characters that are multilingual, speaking one if not all the romance languages. Why is this not the case anymore? As English speakers, why do we feel comfortable just knowing as much? […]

Introduction: I was never much a book reader until college, in which I took a Sociology course that encouraged reading as a way of increasing social capital. Reading books are also a great way to keep your vocab in shape, write better, and provide good conversation topics. Since 2005 I have tried […]

Introduction: I was never much a book reader until college, in which I took a Sociology course that encouraged reading as a way of increasing social capital. Reading books are also a great way to keep your vocab in shape, write better, and provide good conversation topics. Since 2005 I have tried […]

Photo by moi, taken in Okinawa Summer 2006By chance and absolutely as a spur-of-the-moment thing, I borrowed from the library 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by French author Jules Verne.
For those of you not familiar, the novel covers the adventures of three men who find themselves on board the Nautilus, manned by misanthrope and […]

Introduction: I was never much a book reader until college, in which I took a Sociology course that encouraged reading as a way of increasing social capital. Reading books are also a great way to keep your vocab in shape, write better, and provide good conversation topics. Since 2005 I have tried […]

I have been terrible at keeping up with posting, what with my being in Japan, the Internet being horribly slow, and the world ever turning without giving me time to catch up. Since I have no intention of abandoning this blog (ha famous last words?), I intend to update with smaller posts that will […]

Title: The Woman in the Dunes
Author: Kobo Abe
Year: 1962
Rating: 4/5
Thoughts: Extremely provocative, mind-bending, but most of all the uncomfortable. The story takes place in a remote town of Japan, a nonsensical place made of sand where the inhabitants spend their days toiling away under the wrath of the sun, digging their homes out of the […]