About 15 years ago, I remember having a conversation with an Irish bartender in Osaka about the Japanese word "yabai." The word was originally used by Japanese criminals as indicating the threat of ...

This elegant novel of the Meiji period captures the opening in Japanese Confucian culture and the 250-year-old Tokugawa shogunate to the West and Western culture. It was published in 1914, two years ...

The book opens with the section “Sensei and I,” where the narrator is a young student digressing on his friendship with an older mentor of his, one he refers to as “Sensei.” This first section does an ...

Natsume Soseki, one of Japan's great Meiji Era (1868-1912) writers, is best known for the novels "Kokoro," "Botchan," " I Am a Cat" and his unfinished work "Light and Darkness." He was also a fan of, ...

This elegant novel of the Meiji period captures the opening in Japanese Confucian culture and the 250-year-old Tokugawa shogunate to the West and Western culture. It was published in 1914, two years ...

Natsume Soseki, one of Japan's leading novelists, lived in Camberwell between 1900 and 1902. But since his death at the age of 49, only a dozen or so of his novels have appeared in English. His ...