Overall, I like what I do for my day job— some parts more than others. I think I started down this road (Japanese literature/ Japanese studies) because I enjoyed reading and finding out new things. I still do, of course, and there’s nothing like that moment when a bunch of…

Two cats sat in the window, watching the world go by. One had a white belly and gray stripes on her back, and the other one was a tabby. They were sisters, and always seemed to get along (until they didn’t…). …

I have given one or two academic presentations about Meiji period (1868–1912) writers and their discussions on realistic description, and I often talk about this in my classes, too. …

…is what our yoga instructor keeps telling us, and every time I imagine a little monkey inside my skull, jumping up and down trying to escape, bumping her head against the bone, clawing at my eyes, ears, and nose from behind. …

Well, of course I don’t have to, but I guess I should, because I said I would a few posts ago (here, when I first mentioned Nakajima, and here , where I got to talking about Loti). Mariyan, in the eponymous novella by Nakajima Atsushi, is a Kanaka woman from…

In Japan (and maybe in other places, too, but I wouldn’t know) there is such a thing as a literary walk (bungaku sanpo), where you go strolling around the places described in a piece of literature. With all the allusions to American music, literature and culture in general, Murakami Haruki’s…

The other day, my husband shared a link to a little project about human-AI collaboration by this PhD student at a university in Australia. The human is supposed to write two words/ phrases, and then the AI is going to generate the first paragraph of a story that the human…

You might be familiar with Akutagawa Ryūnosuke because of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 movie “Rashōmon,” which is based off of two of his novellas. Or perhaps you’ve read about the increasing number of female authors who have recently received the Akutagawa Prize and went on to acquire some degree of international…

The name Pierre Loti came up in my previous post, where I talked about Nakajima Atsushi’s stories of the Southern Seas; in probably the most famous of them, “Mariyan,” the protagonist of the same name, a Micronesian Kanaka girl, is reading one of Loti’s books, Rarahu. Loti is also linked…