Kouichi Tohei (藤平光一) was a skilled martial artist who leveraged difficulties in his life to reach an amazing level of ability, and went on to established his own style of Aikido called Ki-Aikido, more formally known as Shin Shin Touitsu Aikido (心身統一合氣道). But he did more than simply practice physical martial arts techniques; Tohei Sensei… Read More »
It’s rare that I read blogs written in English about Japanese, but there is one blog I do check out pretty often so I thought I would highlight in a focused post: landofnu.com. This blog, which seems to have started in February 2011, has a variety of topics: Japanese (kotowaza and 4-letter compounds), fiction, non-fiction,… Read More »
In this post I review Skritter, an app designed for learning how to write in Japanese (as well as Chinese). Although I highlight a bunch of nitpicks, overall Skritter is a useful app that is worth checking out.
Books on Asia was kind enough to post an excerpt of one of the stories from my recent book: “Days & Nights: Stories of classic Japanese women’s literature”, which contains my translations of Hayashi Fumiko’s fiction works.
The other day I saw a reference to María Ortega García’s book “Weaving Words: The Alchemy of Languages” (amazon link) on Twitter somewhere, and both the title and book summary sounded really interesting, so I contacted the author. She was kind enough to send me a review copy of the paper version of this book,… Read More »
I picked up “To Avoid Being Swept Away by a Large Bird” by Hiromi Kawakami for the usual reasons––an interesting description on the cover, a curious title, and a reasonable length––but reading the first few paragraphs helped me close the deal (although I admit it was more because the prose was easy to read than… Read More »
I reviewed the first season of “Alice in Borderland”, a pretty interesting series (based on a manga) that is available on Netflix.
The other day I was going through Netflix and having a tough time finding a series or movie that I could really get into. After some searching I discovered the anime movie “Blame!” (supposedly pronounced “Blam!”, though the Japanese title is ブラム), and after a few minutes I was hooked, finishing off a roughly two… Read More »
In this article, I reviewed the novel 首里の馬 (“The Horse of Shuri”) by 高山 羽根子 (Takayama Haneko), a book with interesting ideas that I felt fell a little short on execution.
I reviewed the latest novel by Matayoshi Naoki (又吉直樹), titled “Ningen:” (人間).
The majority of the review is via a Youtube video, but I have also provided a summary of my findings.