The Japan Society Review

At the beginning of After Hiroshima British soldiers come across the ruined city, four months after the dropping of the bomb. One soldier recounts the harrowing experience, of the shadows burnt into the [...] Review by Annabelle Sami

By Suzuki Atsuto What to do when the dolphin you are ‘keeping’ in a fish tank at home ‘evolves’ – introducing himself as meat-eating Putin, born to parents from the Sea of Okhotsk? The play is hilarious, full of surprises and [...] Review by Susan Meehan

Japan Now, an all-star panel with writer Ian Buruma, journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, and Professor Shimazu Naoko, and chaired by Christopher Harding who pulled together conflicting view points and provocative [...] Review by Jenny White

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

Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima Despite its English-language title, “Kamikaze Girls” actually has nothing to do with war, pilots or even women taking on traditionally masculine roles. The literal translation of its Japanese title is ‘Shimotsuma [...] Review by Simon Cotterill

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