Features Lifestyle & Travel
Ida Torres on May 7 2013
Best-selling author
Haruki Murakami, in a very rare public appearance, talked about his new book "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage" at a special event at Kyoto University on Monday. He says his latest novel, which has sold more than a million copies a week since it launched last month, is a reflection of his deep interest in people and their relationships with each other.
As the World War II U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are quite inseparable from their legacies,
Clifton Truman Daniel – President Harry Truman's grandson – said on Thursday that he plans to make good on his desire to write a book about A-bomb survivors in Japan. Daniel said that he is planning to travel to Japan with his son in June to interview and record the survivors' stories in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Caroline Pover, a British writer and publisher who has lived in Japan since 1996, has been so taken by the idyllic, seaside landscape of Ohara,
Miyagi Prefecture that she is now spending a big slice of her time raising awareness and funds to help the disaster-stricken town. Ohara, a remote town devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, had a bus stop which was heavily damaged by the disaster – a town fixture now completely improved and renovated through Pover’s efforts, and she doesn’t plan on stopping there.
The first Tokyo International Literary Festival took place in eight venues across the city on March 1–3. The festival brought together leading novelists, poets, editors, and translators, aiming to encourage new dialogue about
books from different countries and cultures, and the diverse areas of the publishing industry.
Researchers have confirmed that a previously unknown short story printed in a Fukuoka newspaper in 1927 was in fact written by
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan's first Nobel Prize-winning author. While known for his award-winning novel
Snow Country, Takumi Ishikawa and Hiroshi Sakaguchi stumbled upon
Utsukushii! ("Beautiful!") while searching the newspaper's archives, and had it verified as one of the author's earliest works.
He has fans around the globe and his novels have been translated into numerous languages, and now readers are only two months away from his latest work. Well, readers in Japan that is.
Haruki Murakami's Japanese publisher, Bungeishunju, announced on Saturday that the author's latest full-length novel will be released this April.
A short story by celebrated novelist
Yasunari Kawabata has been published for the first time in the literary magazine
Shincho. The story entitled "Hoshi o Nusunda Chichi" (The father who stole a star) is an
adaptation of the play "Liliom" by Hungarian author Ferenc Molnar.
One of the country’s top writers’ associations,
Japan PEN, and the internet giant,
Google, have entered into a strategic partnership that is aimed at ensuring a tightened protection of copyrighted works in Japan, specifically, as regards the Google Books Library Project. Authors have often opted out to show their contents through the Google service because they fear open theft of their works. However, moving forward, it is the intention of the duo to minimize this by putting the authors at ease.
A Japanese publishing house revealed this week that an until-now undiscovered manuscript by celebrated, award-winning author Kobo Abe was found at his brother's home in
Sapporo. Shinchosha Publishing Co. says the short story will be published for the first time in the December issue of literary magazine
Shincho next week. The story has been confirmed as authentic, with even Abe's oldest daughter, Neri, identifying her father's handwriting.
There is always a humane story to life when dispute and controversies surround a situation. So the humane angle to the
Senkaku Islands dispute is the attempt of Japanese writer Akiko Aoki to bridge the Japan between China and Japan through a book that can help the Japanese better
understand the other side.
