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“Last Samurai Standing” takes us to the Meiji period, where an impoverished former samurai, Shujiro Saga (once the infamous hitokiri Kokushu) enters a lethal game called “Kodoku” (seven checkpoints on the road to Tokyo, with name tags taken from other contestants) to win the prize money that could save his ailing family. Comparisons to “Squid…
After her boyfriend announces he’s marrying someone else, twenty-five-year-old Takako quits her job and takes up her eccentric uncle Satoru’s offer of the tiny room above his second-hand bookshop in Tokyo’s Jimbocho district. There, among the stacks of old books, at the Saveur coffee shop and in the company of new friends, she slowly rediscovers…
Uketsu’s “Strange Houses” is an atypical blend of crime, mystery, and horror, told almost entirely through dialogue, theories, and the analysis of unusual house plans The novel reads quickly, holds your attention easily, and draws the reader into an investigation whose dark twists aren’t easily predictable, although the second half demands a bit more concentration…
Mortal Kombat (2021) “Mortal Kombat” (2021) only truly works in its first ten and last thirty minutes, with everything in between falling into forgettable mediocrity. The sole genuine highlights are Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim, whose duels are masterfully executed, while the protagonist Cole Young turns out to be the film’s weakest and most unnecessary…
Maneki-Neko “Maneki-Neko: The Japanese Book of Lucky Destiny” by Nobuo Suzuki is not a typical self-help book, but rather a cultural guide through the Japanese (and broader Asian) perspective on happiness, with the maneki-neko cat as its central metaphor The book is organized as a collection of short chapters on various symbols and rituals of…
The Man in the High Castle “The best way to manipulate people is to tell them what they want to hear.” – Philip K. Dick “The Man in the High Castle” is not at all naive novel, both for reading and generally. This is perhaps the most famous work of Philip K. Dick (whose…
The Cat Who Saved Books “Who doesn’t read, at 70 years will have lived only one life. Who reads, will have lived five thousand years.” – Umberto Eco When did you recently read a warm, emotional and at moments touching book that talks… well, about love for books? About what those books do for…
The Catch “Peace is the time when sons bury fathers, war is the time when fathers bury sons” – Herodotus Kenzaburo Oe is a very interesting figure. He was 23 years old when he received the most prestigious and largest Japanese literary prize – “Akutagawa” (in 1958) for the novella “The Catch,” and in…
The Black Lizard “Give a crooked man enough rope, and he’ll provide enough evidence to hang himself” – Akechi Kogoro If you were to wonder which author influenced the development of literary genres like thriller, crime and mystery, an expected name would be Taro Hirai, known by his literary pseudonym Edogawa Ranpo. And the…
Akira “The future is not a straight line. It is filled with many crossroads. There must be a future that we can choose for ourselves” – Kiyoko (“Akira”) Eh, “Akira”… if you ask someone if they know who (or what) “Akira” is, most likely it’ll be one of these two answers: either they don’t…