This week on the podcast, we’re all about literature. We’ll be exploring the varieties of poetry and prose that have…
Oe Kenzaburo is about as different a writer as you can think of from Kawabata Yasunari, and yet he’s Japan’s second ever Nobel laureate in literature. What sort of concerns defined his work, and what can we learn from looking at him in conjunction with Kawabata?
We’re taking a look at the first of two Nobel laureates in literature from Japan: Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata didn’t believe his work–focused on what he saw as a distinctly Japanese context–would translate out of the country. So what is it about his style that developed such a following?
This week, the tale of Ogimachi Machiko–the aristocrat whose literary descriptions of her life in a samurai family became one…
This week, we’re taking a look at the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets: Ki no Tsurayuki. His…
This week, we’re unpacking a rather odd classic of Japanese literature: the Ise Monogatari, a collection of short tales that…
Today, we’re taking a look at a fascinating literary text from 1000 years ago, the Kagero Nikki (most commonly translated…
This week, we’re taking a deep dive into a distinctly Japanese literary genre (zuihitsu, or ‘wandering brush’) by looking at…
This week, we’re talking about one of the most famous stories in Japanese history: the bamboo princess Naotake no Kaguyahime…
This week, we’re talking about one of Japan’s most famous collections of supernatural tales, the fantastic Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of…