hmmn

Yesterday at Book Off I somewhat fortuitously — for I hadn’t even noticed the “foreign books” shelves until I was in the checkout line — picked up for 100 yen an old (2 years ago) edition of The New Yorker — the “Winter Fiction” edition.

I recently read two books about organized crime in Japan, which of course means books about the yakuza. I will summarize my thoughts briefly below. Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, Expanded Edition David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro (University of California Press, 2003) Originally published in 1986, this “expanded edition” was published a few years ago, and [...]

The Guardian’s “World Literature Tour” has now hit Japan, and while the comments are just getting started, one can’t help but feel a bit disappointed that most of the tried and true names are really all that’s being trotted out for recommendation: Oe, Mishima, Tanizaki, Murakami (Haruki), Kawabata. Obviously there is a problem in that [...]

Once again, I intended to go out taking photos and ended up shopping instead. This time it was Kinokuniya‘s Foreign Book Sale which was held this past weekend in the Shinjuku Takashimaya department store. About two-and-a-half hours after getting there, I was loaded down with books, less loaded with cash than I was before, and [...]

I spent the better part of last Saturday wandering in and around my favorite Tokyo neighborhood, Kanda-Jimbocho. K-J, if you don’t know, is, for lack of a better description, Tokyo’s “booktown” (in the same way that Akihabara is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”). Within a several block radius, there must be upwards of 30 – 40 bookstores, [...]