Lolita Fashion
Drawing by Jane Mai, from the cover of So Pretty/Very Rotten. Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Kamikaze Girls (aka Shimotsuma Monogatari)? It came out back in 2004 (released in the United States...
View ArticleIt’s Always Never a Good Time for Short Fiction, and Other News
Georg Achen, Interior with reading woman, 1896. What is a short story, and who is it for? Is it alive? Is it dead? The answer, after many centuries of heated argument, is this: no one has a fucking...
View ArticleWhere the Farts Come In
In Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning, well-placed farts stand in for the limits of language. Still from Good Morning. In 1953, two years after my mother was born in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was...
View ArticleA Study of Kanai Mieko
Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on...
View ArticleLight Effects: On Miyoko Ito’s Abstract Inventions
Center Stage, 1980, oil on canvas. In the fifties, when she was in her early thirties, Miyoko Ito was “called an old lady painter, passe.” She recalled the slight when she was sixty and nearing the...
View ArticleThe Unburied Stone
Manazuru peninsula, Japan Hanōkizawa-san tells me to stop the car, and from the backseat points at an anonymous granite cliffside ten meters away. “There,” he says. “That’s where it came from.” We are...
View ArticleAlways a Tough Guy at Heart
An essay by cult manga star Tadao Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg My comics have been turned into a movie. It’s titled Vagabond Plain. The script and the direction are both by veteran director...
View ArticleMy Younger Brother Spreads His Palms, Maple Leaves: Yukio Mishima’s Haiku
Yukio Mishima. Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Yukio Mishima—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of...
View ArticleDark Fashion
Darkness in fashion is seldom bland. Even where it fails, its objective is to make its mark, whether one of elegance or uniformity, modesty or dangerous seduction. Like red wine rather than white, it...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Features, Films, and Flicks
Still from Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Photo courtesy of StudioCanal. You Were Never Really Here is a disturbing and poetic piece of cinema. I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie...
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