William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary

The utopia envisioned in his novel News from Nowhere harked back to precapitalist society, yet nothing could be more radically forward-looking than its dream of a world without exploitation.

July 31, 2021

George R. Stewart’s Perfect ‘Storm’

By turning a force of nature into his chief protagonist, the novelist created a foundational text of eco-fiction that has only gained in power eight decades later.

July 28, 2021

What the US Could Learn from the USSR

Getting into a good school is a baffling process riddled with inequity. For all its abuses, one thing about the Soviet system I grew up in was its broad access to higher education.

July 25, 2021

Tokyo Street Theater

Together, the careers of Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama span Japan’s postwar experience. What unites the two photographers, above all, is their central protagonist: the city.

July 23, 2021

The Marvel of Comics, If Not of Movies

“However technologically wondrous, Hollywood films are less interesting to me than they’ve ever been. I never want to have to see, or have an opinion about, another superhero.”

July 31, 2021

Found in Translation

“For me, there’s my life before I learned French and my life after. Akira Mizubayashi writes that he was born in French at the age of nineteen. I feel similarly.”

July 24, 2021

Dredging Up the Ever-Living Past

“History itself is a form of storytelling. We learn about the human condition, about decency, about love, about cruelty, about all manner of matters.”

July 17, 2021

Tea with Okakura

For Kakuzo Okakura, Japanese art was a vital national tradition, where roots needed cultivating in order to keep the living tree healthy.

May 25, 2000 issue

Embers of Guilt

Why, if Christianity and Japanese culture are so hopelessly at odds, did Shusaku Endo devote a very active career to exploring the hopelessness of it all?

February 19, 1981 issue

‘Fukushima Devil Fish’: A Nuclear Pastoral

That the nuclear disasters ushered in a new era in Japanese culture is widely recognized. That they also inspired a reappraisal of what had been made in the past is only partially so.

August 18, 2018

Delicate Paintings of Edo Japan

“Painting Edo,” the ambitious jewel of an exhibition currently on view for no one at the Harvard Art Museum, is perhaps arguably experiencing its most historically authentic moment in the strangeness of ours.

May 9, 2020

Writer, Rightist or Freak?

Yukio Mishima was a great craftsman of Japanese prose, and deep down seemed to be a sensitive and vulnerable man, but his obsessions with provocation and his inability to tolerate boredom drove him to extraordinary aggressiveness.

December 11, 1975 issue

Cult of the Sword

Administrators, poets, sages, and warriors: for three centuries, the samurai class in Japan maintained its military spirit during times of peace and preserved its traditions of art and philosophy during times of strife.

October 11, 1979 issue

Kurosawa’s Japan Revisited

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru may have looked a bit more broad and didactic than I remembered. But since I moved to Japan, the film somehow still touches on a world that grows deeper within me every autumn.

December 30, 2015

Japan: Prose of Departure

last flickering shift / of flame flutters off. The log’s / charred forked shape is left. A travelogue; or mourning a friend from afar.

December 18, 1986 issue

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

November 25, 2010 issue