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Tag Archives: Japan

Hiroo-worship

Review of Werner Herzog’s Das Dämmern der Welt – or (probably) The Twilight/Dawn (of the?) World. — For Perspective

A season in ‘Hell’

Review of Jonathan C Slaght’s compelling Owls of the Eastern Ice: The Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl. — For Geographical

Black samurai

Yasuke: The True Story of an African Samurai by Thomas Lockley and Geoffrey Girard Sphere £20 (hardback) . In late July 1579, an enormous, well-dressed and well-armed African bodyguard stepped off a boat into the southern Japanese port of Kochinotsu. Yasuke – perhaps from ‘Isaac’ in Amharic – had (probably) been abducted as a child […]

NEWS AT A GLANCE

. Electricity is now used to improve the complexion. — The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908 . The Chinese Christian warlord Feng Yu-xiang (1882–1948) baptised his troops en masse, using a firehose. Vincent Kompany has suffered more than 40 injuries. Time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth. Poetry must be entered into by a personal encounter, or […]

Summoning Pearl Harbor

A commemoration of Pearl Harbor, through Alexander Nemerov’s ekphrastic explorations. — For The Oldie

Turning Japanese stomachs

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Penguin, 170pp, £8.99 . Born two years after the Great Earthquake of 1923, in ‘not too good a section of Tokyo’, Kochan is a sickly child, brought up by stultifying parents and a morbid grandmother. His first reliable memory is of the ‘night-soil’ man, and he immediately becomes […]

An honest pisstake

Pissing Figures: 1280–2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn (transl. Jeff Nagy) David Zwirner Books, 168pp, £11.95 . From a Cimabue cherub to Szydlowski/-lowska’s Lenin, simply everyone is pissing. In pen and ink, paint on canvas, plaster, wood, stone, polymer, block prints, engraving, chamber pots, aquatints, dishware, film, manuscripts, inlay, public statuary, trick-photography, and in a Japanese video […]

NEWS AT A GLANCE

. The telephone has a tendency to render the girl operators left-eared. — The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908 . Eight wickets for eight runs is the worst batting collapse in Twenty20 international cricket. St Blaise is the patron saint of sore throats, and of knitting. Estonian literature suffers from a dearth of stories […]

End of the Line

The Narrow Road to the Deep North By Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus 448pp £16.99) ‘We will die, and who will ever understand any of this?’ So asks Colonel Dorrigo Evans, second in command of the Australian Imperial Force’s 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station, slave worker on the Siam–Burma ‘Death Railway’, and redoubtable hero of Richard […]

On the 27th draft translation of Basho’s ‘Sound of Water’

Master, due respect: No-one cares about the pond. Or the frog. ……………(Plop.) ……………………(Splash!)