Blog | danielwarriner

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Japan's Longest Day: A Graphic Novel About the End of WWII: Intrigue, Treason and Emperor Hirohito's Fateful Decision to Surrender

I enjoyed the graphic novel Japan's Longest Day (picked up at Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama), despite the noticeable repetition of many...

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The Dry Heart

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg starts with a bang—literally—with the protagonist confessing that she "shot him between the eyes." This...

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The Ballad of the Sad Café

The Ballad of the Sad Café explores themes of isolation, self-estrangement and unfulfilled dreams in a far-off place, which many of us...

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Miss Oyu

Miss Oyu (お遊さま) is a 1951 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and based on Junichiro Tanizaki's 1932 novella entitled The Reed Cutter (蘆刈)....

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River of Time

Drawing from his experience as a journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Ethiopia, Swain looks back on his love affair with...

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Something Strange Across the River

Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) brings us to the streets of early 1900s Asakusa (then the center of...

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The Dandelion

It’s impossible to trust any text that’s incomplete, and Kawabata’s novel The Dandelion (also Dandelions, Tanpopo) was published...

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Souls on the Road

Souls on the Road (Rojō no Reikon), directed by Minoru Murata and released in 1921, is one of Japan’s best remembered silent films and...

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Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere

Japanologist, translator, documentary filmmaker John Nathan gives us a memoir packed with delightful stories from his years in Japan and,...

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The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

"The Dancing Girl of Izu", particularly its last three pages, is excellent for its delicate poignancy. After that comes a series of...

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Tokyo Junkie

Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Junkie covers the author’s ties to Japan’s megacity over a period of more than half a century, including his...

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Runaway Horses

Mishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who...

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This meandering, dense, rather insane book is chockablock with ideas, which gelled at times and at others never fully took shape for me,...

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The Samurai

Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or...

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The Big Clock

Directed by John Farrow and starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Rita Johnson, this 1948 noir is a combination...

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Confessions of a Mask

Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白, Kamen no Kokuhaku) was first published in 1949, following the 1948 release of his first...

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The Big Goodbye

A behind-the-scenes look at the lives and times that brought us the 70s film noir classic Chinatown. Well-researched and compelling,...

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Snow Country

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous first line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country...

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The Lady from Shanghai

“Some people can smell danger. Not me.” Says Irish-born boatswain Michael O'Hara (Welles) to Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), in the dark...

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Chinatown

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.” I've watched this two or three times before but not for ten years at least. Roman Polanski's Chinatown...