Critical Analysis of Anaïs Nin in Japan, edited by Paul Herron. State College, PA: Sky Blue Press, 2023, 216pgs. ¥2,998 (paper).  “In Japan,” the French-born American novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin writes in her Diary in the summer of 1966, “I had a weeping fit. The sweetness, kindness, consideration touched me. For once in my life I felt I was treated as I always treated people.” These words lead Yuko Yaguchi to conclude of Nin in her introduction to Critical Analysis of Anaïs Nin in Japan that the country “captured her heart.” Nin was in Japan for the launch of her novel, A Spy in the ..read more

How to Stand Up to a Dictator, by Maria Ressa. New York: Harper, 320 pp., $29.99. There is a moment, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa recounts in her new book, when she goes from being an early supporter of the Facebook social media phenomenon as a force for global good to viewing the Internet-based platform as a threat to her media company, her country and the planet. That awakening of sorts for Ressa arrives in 2021 with Facebook’s deletion of a post by Rappler, the online news company she founded, warning the public that one of its past news stories was being used deceptively as a propag ..read more

VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958-1987. Edited by Taylor Mignon. Introduction by Eric Selland. Tokyo: Isobar Press.   120pp., ¥3,057 (paper).       This anthology, VOU, presents striking visual-poetry (often called “vispo,” by practitioners). Visual-poetry combines visual art and poetic sensibility by manipulating images and letterforms. It’s sassy, cheeky, and sometimes three-dimensional. Vispo is fluid, non-semantic expression that’s beyond the poetic conventions of renga, tanka, waka, haiku, or chōka. The VOU anthology showcases some of Japan’s finest avant ..read more

Marilou looked out over the condominium pool. The surface of the water lay still, unbroken. Hard glass like the surface of the Lims’ living room table that she cleaned after every meal. Usually, even at this time of the night, there would be a couple of swimmers doing laps. Working off their dinner. Not anymore. Everyone was too scared of community spread to use any of the common facilities. The only movement below her was a middle-aged man jogging along the footpath, a lone wind-up action figure patrolling the circumference of the estate.   Was Joriz alright? Marilou’s son, back home in ..read more

I live in the spare, high desert of the American Southwest, a land of apparent and often illusory emptiness, a blinding bowl of light that triggers one to write with an economy of words. The eye follows winding arroyos, mouse tracks, and blowing seed. The breath gathers momentum along ridges, faults, and prehistoric waterlines. Fossils scatter at the feet, clay shards glisten after a sudden rain. With the sun’s return, the abstract configurations and anthropomorphic designs on the shards dry into muted colors. Pinched fingerprints in the clay reveal the hands of a vanished artisan. I am remind ..read more

  Given the choice, most people would rather hear a sermon on heaven than experience heaven directly—this maxim describes a hidden quandary in Michael Goldberg’s admirable film A Zen Life: D. T. Suzuki.  The Bodhisattva dilemma: if all sentient beings are saved then the Bodhisattva is annihilated—an obsolescence which ironically signals the Bodhisattva’s salvation.  A spiritual co-dependence is critical to the relation between the enlightened and the sentient, between teacher and student.  Moreover, if we accept the Buddhist notion that form (in this case, film) is emptine ..read more

The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. Albany, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2022, 300pgs. ¥3,069 (paper). Hiromi Ito’s remarkable work, The Thorn Puller, takes readers on a pilgrimage across time, space, and literary genres. First serialized between 2006 and 2007 in the magazine Gunzō as Thorn Puller: New Tales of the Sugamo Jizō (Toge-nuki Jizō: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi), the work won the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize in 2007 and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize in 2008 before appearing as a single volume published by Kōdansha in 2011. The Thorn Puller offers the kind of experimentation ..read more

Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists by Alice North, Halsey North, and Louise Allison Cort. New York: The Monacelli Press, 352 pp., $65.00 (cloth). In attempting to make contact with a garden’s genius loci, landscape designer Sadao Yasumoro, has said that, “While listening to the kami (gods) living at the site, and bearing in mind the feelings of the owner, I begin to work.”     There are, for those with the requisite sense, currents, energy flows, and dialogues to be discerned in the Japanese garden. Shunmyo Masuno contends that when ar ..read more

By Leath Tonino Some texts are just plain hard. Finnegans Wake , for instance, or anything by Martin Heidegger. I appreciate the challenge of dense, weird writing, and I appreciate the argument that stories and ideas occasionally demand the experimental stretching of language and logic—otherwise, the argument goes, we remain in a too-comfortable and too-familiar realm, the words on the page mere inky markings, not moving, breathing, life-disrupting, life-enhancing powers. Sure, but still. Every time I crack certain tricky books—every dang time!—my eyelids get heavy and my mind wanders and t ..read more