This week: how does the Taiheiki depict its most famous characters? How does it describe the downfall of the Hojo?…
The Taiheiki is arguably one of the most dismissed works of literature in Japanese history, doomed to always exist solely…
This week: the manga industry during World War II. Plus some thoughts on the development of shojo manga, and finally…
Histories of manga tend to skip from the colorful woodblocks of the Edo period directly to the post-WWII industry we’d…
This week, we’re tackling the most legendary samurai in Japanese history: Miyamoto Musashi. Why is he so famous, what do…
This week, we’re covering one of the most titanic names in Japanese literature–Natsume Soseki–and the work that propelled him to…
This week, the story of an Edo period writer whose primary claim to fame was producing decent ripoffs of people…
This week: what can we learn about the past if we look not at elite literature, but at the lowbrow…
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?