david

Rio Shimamoto’s First Love , an overdue English-language debut by an important Japanese author translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a portrait of patriarchy as a series of glassy, threatening surfaces. It turns a procedural setup—Yuki, a psychologist, investigates the case of a woman who stabbed her father to death, seemingly without motive—into a... See more

Why do small children in Japan ride the subway alone?

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2024/12/19/why-do-small-children-in-japan-ride-the-subway-alone

from The Economist

I picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary—alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank’s selection is eclectic—of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce’s Ulysses ), some unexpected (H.... See more