Japan Navigator

This weekend, as an experiment, I have started listing books I read recently (the last year or so) on Goodreads. Here are a few short reviews I wrote there today.
The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Tuna went from cat-food to the most popular [...]

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Nogami Teruyo was the script supervisor and loyal assistant of Kurosawa Akira (1910-1998). This extraordinary women was at his side from the filming of Rashomon on to the very last. She wrote some of her personal memories down after Kurosawa’s death for the Japanese magazine Cinema Club – she could not have done this while [...]

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Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was Japan’s infant-terrible of the sixties of the last century. Genius, avant-gardist, iconoclast, photographer, director, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, cultural critic and poet. In his time, his work incited scandal and outrage. Today, he is a cult hero. In his all-too short life, he wrote 200 literary works and made 20 short and [...]

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Reimen (“Cold Noodles”) is one of my favorite summer dishes – how hot it may be, or how low my appetite, this delicacy always works its wonder! It always helps to revive me thanks to the sourness of the vinegar in the sauce and the lightness of the thin noodles and the vegetables.
Reimen are boiled, [...]

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Via Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee I started reading the stories of Feng Menglong again. I guess few people will have heard of this author. Feng Menglong lived from 1574 to 1645, in what is now Wuxian (near Suzhou) in middle China. He was a writer who mainly edited and compiled histories, novels, story collections [...]

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When I studied at Nanjing University in 1979-80, at one time the university organized a trip to a nearby city, Yangzhou. I think it was in the early spring of 1980. Especially the Japanese students (three “Mitsubishi boys”, young salarymen from the large trading company studying Chinese for a posting to China) were told to [...]

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This small memoir, that ends on a tone of disillusion, is one of the best accounts of a Westerner coming to terms with Zen and meditation. The Empty Mirror, Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, written by the Dutch adventurer, businessman and author Janwillem van de Wetering, is not perfect (the end is a bit [...]

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