Japan

  • Books Set in Tokyo

    We are well into the second week of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and while many events are held indoors, catching glimpses of the city as triathletes, runners and more move through it has me craving deeper engagement with the people and places of Tokyo. So I have turned, naturally, to fiction. Here are a few… Continue reading

  • SPL Discoveries: David Peace

    Okay, maybe we didn’t exactly discover them,  but here are writers, old and new, that we’d love to see more readers to discover themselves. It happens this way a lot at the library: call it serendipity in the stacks. I stumbled upon David Peace’s unsettling works quite by chance. Picking up a book titled Occupied City, I was arrested… Continue reading

  • Crime: Evil under the Rising Sun.

    Watching the cherry blossoms burst forth and fade always makes me think of Japan. But my Japan is not a place of samurai, ninja and serene Zen temples. The Japan I think of is lit by neon rather than a rising sun. A place of tailored suits, leather jackets, discos and hostess bars, a place where… Continue reading

  • Allen Say’s Beautiful Children’s Books

    Allen Say was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1937. At age 16 he came to the United States. He first went to a military high school, and then to different colleges to study art. In 1989, he earned his fist Caldecott honor award for his illustrations for The Boy of Three-Year Nap written by Dianne… Continue reading

  • Historical mysteries with an Asian flair

    Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill One of my favorites features a delightfully quirky 70-plus year old Dr. Siri Paiboun, a coroner living in 1970s Laos. A French trained doctor and an ex-freedom fighter who fought to throw off colonialism, he is philosophically resigned as well as amused by the inept bureaucracy that’s become… Continue reading

  • The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, by Gail Tsukiyama

    I haven’t really thought about the lives of ordinary Japanese people during World War II  until I started to read The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama. The concepts that were deeply rooted in my mind were how the war and Japan’s soldiers brought disaster, tragedy, and despair to the Chinese people and… Continue reading

  • Mishima’s Sword

    Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend  by Christopher Ross. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I lived in a southern city in China called Guangzhou. At that time Guangzhou was more vibrant than ever.  People were pouring into this so-called Window of the South Wind city to look for opportunity. Many… Continue reading

  • Cherry blossoms bloom herald the spring

    The appearance of cherry blossoms marks the arrival of spring in Japan, sending revelers of all ages outdoors to enjoy wine and picnic lunches under flowery pink canopies in the nation’s parks and orchards. One cannot delay cherry blossom viewing, or “hanami,” because the cherry blossom is like life: beautiful and tragically fleeting. In Seattle,… Continue reading