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Discover quality writing from Asia in our award-winning magazine. Stimulating interviews and profiles; excerpts of works translated from Asian languages; fiction, poetry and book reviews, as well as a fresh look at the city KJ calls home.
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Migrating Genius: The Art & Life of Jack Madson
“There’s so much to learn from birds. When I was a child they were my first absorbing fascination in life.”
Chasing Deer
I had just cycled over seven hours through Mie Prefecture and was now stuck on this deserted mountain road somewhere in the Kasagi Mountains, approximately 10 kilometers northeast of Nara city, searching for a campsite I had circled in my Kansai Mappuru guidebook when planning the trip from home weeks before. I thought of home now back in Kanagawa, and my wife Rui, who would be sitting at the table eating dinner at about this time. Make sure you take pictures of the deer in Nara, she would remind me every evening.
Ashes to Ashes
I met my in-laws for the first time on New Year’s Day 1966, shortly before my wedding…
Even in “Just Enough,” There is Abundance
For nearly 40 years Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic work, “The One-Straw Revolution” has lured people back to a traditional life of farming. Yoshikazu Kawaguchi, considered the leading proponent of Natural Farming in Japan, began his approach to farming by adapting Fukuoka’s method of forgoing plowing, fertilizers, weeding, and chemicals…
Writers and the War Against Nature
Although human beings have interacted with nature – both cultivated and wild, for millennia, and sometimes destructively so, it was never quite like “war.” It has now become disconcertingly so…
The Poetry of the Gardens
Connecting gardens and poetry, author and garden designer Marc P. Keane illuminates something that is unique to Japanese landscape-art history.
Step Inside the World of Noh: An interview with Diego Pellecchia
“I’m hoping to transmit the ethics of Noh. Respect for the space and discipline, work ethics, orderliness, cleanliness. “
Women In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012
What does it mean to connect the fifty women artists of sixteen different Asian countries and regions represented in this exhibition by calling them “Women In-Between”?
Knowing Nature
A rambling conversation between two of America’s most original poets –– clear-eyed, unsentimental outsiders, both outdoorsmen who have spent their life probing the nature of nature.
Lok Say: Hong Kong Remembers Tiananmen
…They had asked the university council to place the Goddess of Democracy — a twenty-foot statue commemorating the sacrifice of the Tiananmen students — on campus following tonight’s vigil….
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Notes of a Crocodile is not a book that shows teenagers how to live a straight life, in any sense of the term. And yet it is intended to be a survival manual for teenagers, for a certain age when reading the right book can save your life…
Doctor Stories: Excerpts from the journals of Kenjiro Setoue
Dr. Setoue was a successful surgeon who agreed to take a job at a clinic on a small rugged island off the west coast of Kyushu. For many years the only surgeon on the Lower Koshiki Island, he was the last and only line of defense when there was a medical emergency.
Japlish Whiplash
Japlish Whiplash is a book that gleefully transgresses boundaries — the boundaries between the United States and Japan, between English and the Japanese language, between academic poets and slam poets, between “artistic” and “plebian,” between “high” and “low,” and between “avant-garde” and “urban.”
Photography, Community, Space: Kyotographie’s Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi
Our theme will be “Tribe,” but not in an ethnic sense—it’s more in the sense of a community that shares the same sense of values.
Life Goes On: Fukushima and Dalian, China
Dalian has a long and mixed history with Japan. It is the site of the initial invasion in 1931; the anniversary of the invasion is still observed every September when sirens are sounded at the same time they were originally heard eighty years ago…
Buddhism and the Film
There would on the surface be little to connect the Buddhist faith with the cinema. This is an entertainment which is largely based upon satisfying our desire for the various attachments which Buddhism counsels us to give up. There are, however, a few promising areas where some agreement might be detected.
