The Japan Society Review

By Douglas Clark Clark has scoured the archives, journals and relevant family records for photographs and sketches of the principal legal players so as to build up a fairly comprehensive picture gallery of them all – the most [...] Review by Chris Roberts

By Michael Lucken In this interdisciplinary study, the author attempts to both discern the past in contemporary Japanese art, while also focusing on its innovative characteristics, unpicking and complicating the idea of Japan as [...] Review by Dominika Mackiewicz

By Susan Southard This work joins an increasing number of books about the enormity of suffering undergone and delivered by the Japanese more than 70 years ago. Southard’s motivation to research the story of the hibakusha [...] Review by Elizabeth Ingrams

By Alex Kerr From the first page readers find themselves guided through the author’s extraordinary journey through vivid accounts of traditional Japanese life, from the landscape of Shikoku to the dressing rooms of Tokyo’s [...] Review by Harry Martin

By Yokoyama Hideo 1989 saw Japan move to the Heisei era. In the closing days of Shōwa, the novel’s first victim, seven-year-old Amamiya Shoko, was kidnapped and killed. The ascension of a new Emperor underlined the failure of [...] Review by Charlotte Goff

By Soji Shimada In 1930s Tokyo, an eccentric artist is found dead by his seven residing female relations, inside a room that appears to have been locked from the inside. With the body is discovered a note, detailing a plan to [...] Review by Chris Corker

By Oe Kenzaburo In a small, forest-shrouded settlement in rural Shikoku, it is conventional wisdom that as a person dies, he or she goes “up into the forest.” Returning to this, his childhood home, is Kenzaburo Oe’s protagonist [...] Review by Charlotte Goff

By R. Taggart Murphy This is a book by an American author directed primarily at American readers. It makes many good points and Japan specialists will want to read and carefully consider some of his analysis of modern Japan. Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi

By Barak Kushner The latest tour de force by Dr Barak Kushner covers the ambiguous post-war period in East Asia where congealing Cold War divisions and power vacuums created by the absence of peace in China [...] Review by Richard Coxford

Edited by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks and Masashi Matsuie The likely audience for this book will surely be expecting to be able to ‘discover’ Tokyo through this selection of short stories by ten different authors. Its emphatic title and stylish front cover highly resemble a [...] Review by Annabelle Sami