Upcoming Events

The Southbank Centre will host an immersive reading of Mieko Kawakami's new novel, Heaven on Saturday 23 October. Staged by Jack McNamara, Artistic Director of Live Theatre Newcastle, this unique onstage reading between two actors and musician Hatis Noit transports the audience to Japan and delves into the pleasures and perils of adolescent friendship.

Dance Umbrella, London’s annual international dance festival returns this October, featuring fun for all the family with the magical world of Takeshi Matsumoto’s Club Origami, a new sensory show for under 5’s. Club Origami offers the perfect way to introduce young children to the world of dance and the freedom of expression that comes with movement. Children and their families are invited to venues across London to explore what they can create with a single square of paper in order to stimulate the imagination as they experiment. The show will be touring London throughout October.

FIGURE/S: drawing after Bellmer explores the body as a site of oppression and liberation through the work of modern and contemporary artists, including three from Japan: Kumi Machida, Fuyuko Matsui and Tabaimo. It takes as its starting point the radical and transgressive drawings of Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), whose work simultaneously mimicked and resisted the dehumanisation performed by fascism and racism.

The Japanese Garden Society based in the UK in collaboration with the Gardens Trust is presenting a series of seven talks on Japanese Gardens. They are on varied dates at 6.30pm (UK time) from Saturday 23 October when the first speaker, Dr Jill Raggett, will talk on Japanese-style Gardens in the British Isles.

Organised in memory of the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, PICTURING THE INVISIBLE explores the realities of life in the wake of “3.11.” The exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society brings together seven talented photographers, working in the affected territories. Their art makes visible the legacies of 3.11: the ghostly touch of radiation, lingering traumas, and the resilience of those communities rebuilding their lives in its wake.

This major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will explore Tokyo through the varied and vibrant arts it has generated over 400 years, from its beginnings as the headquarters of the Tokugawa shoguns in the early 1600s to the sprawling modern metropolis and dynamic centre of art, photography and design it is today. *Supported by Japan Society Small Grants.

Discover a collection of rare drawings by Katsushika Hokusai – one of Japan's most celebrated artists, best known for his iconic print, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, popularly called The Great Wave. In a global first, this exhibition will display 103 recently acquired drawings by Hokusai, produced in the 1820s–1840s for an illustrated encyclopedia called The Great Picture Book of Everything. *Supported by Japan Society Small Grants.

Sumida River in Sign Language brings the natural and human worlds together in a drama of physical gesture and facial expression. Performed by deaf, unmasked actors, the play is suffused with the life of the river: pines bending in the wind, flocks of Miyako birds and mist swirling in from the bay.