Long-time readers know I’m not usually much of a manga reader. I prefer to read prose. But I’ve been needing to expand my reading, so I jumped into the first deluxe edition of Berserk. Berserk fans won’t be happy with me. I can summarize my reading of first volume in a word: meh. It’s not…
Category: Book Reviews
Otaku USA, the physical anime and manga magazine
Physical magazines have increasingly been going extinct. As far as I know, Otaku USA is the last-standing physical magazine that covers anime and manga in the US. At my library, the children’s department uses the magazine to help their manga ordering. The magazine reviews manga, anime, and video games as they release here in the…
Okakura Kakuro’s “The Book of Tea”
Okakura wrote The Book of Tea in 1906. The books seeks to bridge and explain the Eastern perspective to the West. At the time, most people weren’t familiar with Japan, China, or Korea. Japan had opened to the West in 1853. Fifty-three years isn’t a lot of time for people to understand another culture. As…
Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) offered a view into Japan during the Meiji Restoration with his books: Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Out of the East, Kokoro, The Boy Who Drew Cats, In Ghostly Japan, Kwaidan, and other books. He lived in Japan for 14 years before his death; his writings provide a snapshot of the land and…
Stranger in the Shogun’s City by Amy Stanley
History tends to represent the voices of men and those in power. Typically, governmental officials, who are most often men, know how to read and write. And those documents are what survive. The majority of people in the past were illiterate and unable to write. Because of this, their voices disappeared outside of a few…
Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District
Geishas and the Floating World by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet examines the history and development of Tokyo’s red-light district of Yoshiwara. The name of the book misleads a little. Most of the book focuses upon the prostitutes that worked Yoshiwara. The authors note that geisha weren’t sex workers, but geisha did blur the line as…