Issue 112 (March 2026, Volume 21, Number 1)

The March issue of The Japan Society Review opens with close attention to material culture and artistic practice, beginning with Nick Rowan’s Japanese Wine: History, Regions, Wineries (and Cheese). The review traces the development of Japan’s wine industry through regional histories, producers, and changing tastes, while also considering the growing place of cheese within Japan’s evolving food culture. This focus on craft and experimentation continues in Modern Japanese Printmakers: New Waves and Eruptions by Malene Wagner, which examines how contemporary artists have expanded the boundaries of printmaking while remaining in dialogue with the medium’s traditions.

Fiction in this issue turns to questions of intimacy, distance, and self‑understanding. Ruth Ozeki’s The Typing Lady and Other Fictions blends narrative play with philosophical reflection, exploring language, connection, and the act of storytelling itself. In Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives and Beautiful Distance, Yamazaki Nao‑Cola presents two sharply contrasting works: the former offers an unsettling portrayal of an emotionally imbalanced relationship, while the latter unfolds as a quiet and compassionate meditation on love, care, and everyday life.
Jackson Alone by Jose Ando adopts the pace and structure of a crime novel to explore race, sexuality, and visibility in contemporary Tokyo. Centring on a group of queer, mixed‑race men brought together by an act of digital violence, the novel uses genre conventions to deliver a socially incisive and unsettling portrait of marginalisation and belonging.

The issue concludes with cinema. A Pale View of Hills, directed by Kei Ishikawa, offers a restrained and atmospheric adaptation that engages with memory, trauma, and silence, drawing together personal histories and broader postwar legacies with emotional precision.