Search Results for: Japan

‘I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking’

Longreads Pick

Five years after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, a husband is still searching the sea for his missing wife, joined by a father looking for his daughter.

Published: Aug 2, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,140 words)

A Reading List of International Nonfiction Comics

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston.

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Comic books bridge continents. Superman spin-offs are a hit in China; Japanese manga trickled into American culture through Frank Miller’s Ronin and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Adventures of Tintin was translated from French into more than 50 languages. Alongside the superhero franchises and funny pages, a thriving genre of nonfiction comics has created new audiences and new appreciation for everything from war reporting to memoir. Here are five modern classics whose intricate illustrations have shaped the form.

1. Joe Sacco, “The Fixer and Other Stories”

The Fixer is a war story set in peacetime. In 2001, Joe Sacco traveled to Sarajevo, hoping to find the interpreter who’d helped him during the Yugoslav Wars. By this time, correspondents had cleared out and soldiers had become civilians. Memories of atrocity were starting to slip beneath the surface—but Sacco’s book excavates them. During one flashback, Sacco portrays his wartime arrival to Sarajevo, and it’s styled like film noir: hulking architecture, empty streets, long shadows. In a surreal scene at the Holiday Inn, the concierge points to the hotel on a city map. “This is the front line,” she says. “Don’t ever walk here.” Then, in the lobby, Sacco meets his fixer. Read more…

Riding the Rails: Celebrating Trains and Subway Commuter Life

My other half Rebekah and I recently returned from Japan, and we’re in that rapture phase where you wish the things you loved overseas were also available in America. I already miss the 24-hour action of Japanese cities, their automated restaurants, the street-side vending machines — and public transportation.

In Japan, trains run on time. When the Shinkansen says it departs at 2:43, it departs at 2:43. It travels at 200 miles an hour, so good luck catching it. If a train is late, it’s likely because the world has ended. If the world hasn’t ended and it’s still late, the train company will print a note for passengers to give their employers, confirming the train was in fact behind schedule, because no one’s going to believe that’s why you were late for work.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Illustration By Javier Jaén for the New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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When cuteness comes of age

Longreads Pick

What is “cute”? A writer flies to Japan to find a culture conflicted over cuteness.

Source: Mosaic Science
Published: Jul 19, 2016
Length: 20 minutes (5,153 words)

A Fish So Coveted People Have Smuggled, Kidnapped, and Killed For It

Photo: Qian Hu

Emily Voigt | Scribner | May 2016 | 18 minutes (4,498 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Dragon Behind the Glass, by Emily Voigt. This story is recommended by Longreads editor Mike Dang.

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Taiping, Malaysia, May 11, 2004

Chan Kok Kuan still wasn’t home. Too worried to sleep, his father, Chan Ah Chai, stood at the window watching for a sign of his son through the blinding downpour. The rain had started at midnight and was still pummeling the ground at 4:00 a.m.—flooding the streets and overflowing the lakes in the public gardens, where the century-old saman trees stretch their massive canopies over Residency Road.

A wiry, exuberant man of thirty-one, the younger Chan was not the type to stay out late without calling. He had been home for dinner that evening, as usual, after working all day at the aquarium shop he opened a few years back. Even as a child, he had loved anything with fins. Now he was expert in one species in particular: the Asian arowana, the most expensive tropical fish in the world.

In Chinese, the creature is known as long yu, the dragon fish, for its sinuous body plated with large scales as round and shiny as coins. At maturity, the primitive predator reaches the length of a samurai sword, about two to three feet, and takes on a multihued sheen. A pair of whiskers juts from its lower lip, and two gauzy pectoral fins extend from its sides, suggesting a dragon in flight. This resemblance has led to the belief that the fish brings prosperity and good fortune, acting as a protective talisman to ward off evil and harm. Read more…

How Author Helen DeWitt Uses Language to Address the Problems In Her Life

Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt. Photo by Zora Sicher/New York Magazine

In New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen has an interview with Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods. Owing to a combination of misfortunes, misunderstandings and publishing-related snags, the critically acclaimed novelist has been perennially broke. But, despite a history of brushes with suicide, she has a secret weapon against letting life’s problems get her down:

There is something else that has all along kept DeWitt going in the face of academic disappointments, publishing fiascoes, and overextended credit cards. DeWitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese. Throughout her adult life she has taken refuge in these languages, and they were central to The Last Samurai. “The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she said. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.”

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Marie Kondo and the Ruthless War on Stuff

Longreads Pick

Brodesser-Akner profiles Marie Kondo, the best-selling Japanese author has started a formal training program for her organizing methods. Kondo has devoted followers, but also many detractors from the National Association of Professional Organizers, who find her methods too draconian.

Published: Jul 6, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,753 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by James West for Mother Jones

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Ghosts of Fukushima

Longreads Pick

Five years after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, only a small percentage of evacuees have returned to the Japanese town of Naraha, which the government has deemed safe following an expensive cleanup effort.

Published: Jun 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,539 words)