Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.58 (536 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0974199508 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-07-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
-- Suzanne De Gaetano, co-owner, Mac’s Backs bookstore, Cleveland, OHJapan emerges in fits and starts, stripped of its abstractions, defiant, utterly unique, and surprisingly tender. -- Reader FeedbackThe book is particularly valuable to those who have spent or will spend an extended period of time in Japan. It is beautifully produced Plus, there is such a wide range of literary styles inside. 2004. It’s a great anthology. -- Joseph Badtke-Berkow, Paper Sky magazine, 2005Thank you so much for taking the time to collect great stories and pictures in such a well-designed way. -- AJET Across Japan, Sept
"dis-com-bobulated" according to G. Wells. Small (manga-sized or thereabouts) with tinier-than-normal print makes reading a chore, and the amateurishness of several of the writers only makes things worse -- parts of this book read like a high schooler's livejournal. \Other parts are put together better, though. So it's not a complete disaster.(My favorite book on Japan has long been The Roads to Sata. I'd recommend that instead.). And it comes with a bookmark too. B. M. Chapman Kuhaku is a difficult book to classify. Part cultural observations from long-term foreign residents in Japan, part translations of essays and stories by Japanese authors, and part insight into a street populated with cartoon rabbits and a family of cubes. Canned coffee, extra-marital affairs, a kegger at a buddhist temple, a stay at a hotel that caters to dogs, a man writing his way to a Nobel Prize by doing articles about sex shops in Tokyo; Kuhaku is nothing else but varied in the stories it tells.But the one thing that Kuhaku systematically achieves is a vision. The vision is to capture a feel, an attitude -- the zeitgeist if you will. Prostitutes, poetry, and a bilingual dog Nathan Schreiber What does infidelity have to do with recycling? And what does canned coffee have to do with suicide?The obvious link between the widely varied stories within Kuhaku is the backdrop - all the events and stories take place in contemporary Japan. While sex and consumerism show up in more than a few tales, bigger themes - like loneliness and modern alienation - penetrate further. Kuhaku's paradoxical collage - the vivid forms of commercialism, sex, and modern technology combining to form an empty grey - tells a sometimes beautiful, sometimes bleak story of a society whose humanity appears in jeopardy.Its not all so serious, though - between
Just about everybody responded favorably.Kuhaku's stories come from everywhere: tales told over beers in a pub, stories of corporate drudgery related during the lunch hour, doodlings on napkins at the local Starbucks and professional pieces produced on deadline.. We weren't looking for Ph.D. We tracked the writers down, asked permission to publish their tales, or more often, prodded them to put that story they had told us down on paper. dissertations, just smartly told tales from the street.Having lived in Japan for a long time, we realized these stories were everywhere. It also has an irreverent and informative glossary of real-world Japanese terms, four-color artwork and a Zen whiskey priest who would make Graham Greene proud.When we set out to find stories for Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, we knew what we wanted: candid tales of life in Japan that weren't trying to slice and
He designed Kuhaku and also did many of the illustrations.Kozyndan are a husband and wife team known for their realistic illustrations of modern Japan cityscapes that come complete with fantastic characters like skipping pink giraffes, out-of-control robots or little tofu creatures. Rutledge edited Kuhaku after founding Chin Music Press in 2002.