I’ll be the first to admit that the novel “Boy of Civilization” was a hyoushigai (表紙買い) for me, which basically means I bought it after being attracted by the cover. Not only was it beautiful on its own, but it also reminded me of the cover of “Lagos on a Journey” (旅のラゴス) by Yasutaka Tsutsui.… Read More »
Last year I reviewed Yoko Ogawa’s wonderful novel “Little Bird” and at the time I was even considering translating a small portion of the book for translation practice, and to give English-speaking readers a taste for the style of the book. But I got busy with other articles and translation projects, and never got around… Read More »
Fellow blogger and podcaster John Sensei of Manga Sensei has recently created a Kickstarter for a new Japanese learning app, Japanese Verb Conjugator. Rather than be a jack-of-all-trades app that tries to do everything, this app will target the process of conjugating verbs in Japanese (活用, katsuyou). While I feel verb conjugation is a little… Read More »
This is another post in my Read & Answer series of articles where I give a short dialog in Japanese followed by one or more questions to test your understanding. You can see more about this series here, and a list of the other articles in it here. This will be Level 1, which is… Read More »
Japanese particles are small words packed full with meaning and often don’t have direct parallels to English. In a few past articles I’ve talked about a few particle combinations (での, への, では、and ならではの). In this post I’d like to go over the combination のに (“no ni” or “noni”) which is pretty commonly used. There are… Read More »
When I first discovered Juza Unno’s “Eighteen O’Clock Music Bath” (now published as part of the compilation “Fast Forward Japan”), I was really excited to find a Japanese dystopian novel. At the time, I felt like there was very few Japanese dystopian works, however after doing a little research I discovered there is quite a… Read More »
This is another post in my Read & Answer series of articles where I give a short dialog in Japanese followed by one or more questions to test your understanding. You can see more about this series here, and a list of the other articles in it here. This will be Level 1, which is… Read More »
With a country like Japan that has tens of thousands of years of history, I guess it’s not much of a surprise that there is always more to learn. This includes cultural stuff, but also words and expressions that you may not have had exposure to on a daily basis (especially if are studying Japanese… Read More »
(Update: I have since republished these stories in a larger compilation that you can find here, which is available in both paper and ebook format. I have changed the links in the article below to the original short e-book to point to this newer book.) (Quick link to the book on Amazon) Early this year, I published… Read More »
The novel Lolita, written in 1955 by Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, is a classic piece of literature that I think many people are at least vaguely familiar with (heck, even Sting has apparently read it back in the 80s). While I admit I haven’t read it, recently at the library I stumbled upon another… Read More »