The Everyday and the Macabre: Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge – Eleven Dark Tales

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I began reading Yoko Ogawa's Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. The opening pages of the first story did nothing to dispel my uncertainty which describe a woman going to buy a strawberry shortcake at a bakery. There are a few stray details that open the possibility that something …

A Kafka-esque tale for our Kafka-esque Times: Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory

Years ago I had a job where I had to organize over two thousand pieces of paper. Each page was covered in numbers, but only one mattered. That told me where it fit in the order. But the pages were all mixed up – one page might be number 3 and below that you’d find …

A Japanese Iliad, Noh Drama, and Khan Academy: The Timeless Tale of Atsumori

To understand the power and significance of "The Death of Atsumori" in Japanese culture, consider the following: Odysseus blinding the Cyclops. The Fall of Troy. Dante moving through the ninth and lowest circle of Hell, facing the Devil himself. Whether you've read the Odyssey, Aeniad, or Inferno, I'm willing to bet you have some notion of all of …

Love with…Unusually Heavy Baggage: Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake

In this review, I'm going to go through some of the many elements that make Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake such an excellent novel. But first, I want to make an seemingly odd comparison between this novel and the TV show version of  Game of Thrones. By now the entire world is aware that viewers were, by …