The sharper edge to traveling in Asia

Archive for the 'Japan' Category

WoWasis book review: Jerry Hopkins’ ‘Romancing the East’

We’re old fashioned, those of us here at WoWasis. We like books that have left room to include a few blank pages at the end. Author Jerry Hopkins, one of the more prolific writers of the last few years, has written a compelling book that lacks those blank pages. It’s called Romancing the East: A […]

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WoWasis book review: Bataan Death March: Mario Machi’s ‘Under the Rising Sun’

One of the most infamous incidents in World War II was the Bataan Death March, in which the Japanese military force-marched 60,000-80,000 Allied and Filipino prisoners along a 60 mile route. Along the way, thousands of prisoners died, bayoneted or shot by Japanese soldiers, or victims of wounds, disease, or malnourishment. And Mario Machi, an […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘I-Boat Captain,’ by Zenji Orita with Joseph Harrington

We first became aware of Japanese submariner Zenji Orita  in author Joseph D. Harrington’s book Yankee Samurai: the Secret Role of Nisei in America’s Pacific Victory (1979), which sent us scurrying to find Orita’s book I-Boat Captain: How Japanese Submarines Almost Defeated the U.S. Navy in the Pacific (1976). The book is alternately chilling and […]

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WoWasis book review: Haruki Murakami’s Japanese sci-fi novel ‘Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’

In his sci-fi novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (2003, ISBN 978-0099-448-785), Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami weaves a cerebral tale of speculative fiction that explores the concept of parallel worlds. In one, a man finds himself tasked with reading the memories of previous residents of a walled town, by drawing out the […]

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WoWasis book review: Kenzaburo Oé’s Japanese novel ‘A Silent Cry’

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oé’s novel A Silent Cry (1994) is a psychological thriller relating to the familial travails surrounding two brothers. As in much of the author’s writing, there are no heroes here, as all protagonists are enveloped by a deep-seated malaise that continues to descend as the book progresses. Oé is a master […]

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WoWasis book review: Kenzaburo Oé’s Japanese novel ‘A Personal Matter’

As translator John Nathan writes, “Kenzaburo Oé, awarded the 1994 Nobel Prizein literature, is in a real sense Japan’s first modern writer, both in the sense of having come of age in the postwar era, and also in the sense of dealing with contemporary, and deeply personal, issues in a direct and sometimes violent way […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘Yankee Samurai,’ Nisei working for the US in WWII, by Joseph Harrington

Author Joseph D. Harrington has written an informative and insightful history of the Nisei (Americans of Japanese Ancestry, or AJAs, the first generation to be born outside of Japan, and children of Issei, their Japanese-born parents living in the United States),  working for the U.S. armed forces in the Pacific during World War II. Yankee […]

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WoWasis book review: Haruki Murakami’s Japanese novel ‘Dance Dance Dance’

Haruki Murakami, Japan’s best-selling novelist, likes his protagonists troubled, in love, work, and play. Except they never get to play much. In Dance Dance Dance (1994, ISBN 978-0-679-75379-7) Murakami’s protagonist’s occasional insecurities are augmented by the fact that his name is not mentioned once in this 393 page book in which the story is told […]

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WoWasis book review: Haruki Murakami’s Japanese novel ‘Norwegian Wood’

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s best-selling novelist, and he’s a master of description and psychology. Norwegian Wood (1987, ISBN 978-0-099-55454-7) is a masterfully told coming-of-age story in which a number of students attempt to find their way in a complex world, buffeted by personal relationships, hormonal onslaughts, and the complex factors involving transitioning from adolescence to […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘Confessions of a Yakuza’ by Junichi Saga

At one point, former Yakuza Ijichi Eiji came into physician-writer Junichi Saga’s world as a patient, and thus began a series of conversations than turned into the memoirs  that became the remarkable book Confessions of a Yakuza: a Life in Japan’s Underworld (1991, ISBN 978-4-7700-1948-6). The narratives detail the path taken by Eiji to become […]

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