Category: Features

November 22, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “Aren’t you making a mistake,” asks the lady selling cinema tickets. “Almost certainly,” sighs Alan Booth, a man who came to Japan to study classical theatre, and who finds himself glumly commissioned to sit through a ghastly Japanese teen movie so he can review it for a newspaper. No, says the ticket […]

November 19, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Many decades before Gunbuster, French director Jean-Luc Godard declared, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” In the 1980s a gang of Japanese geeks declared, all you need for an anime is a girl and a mecha… Okay, make that a girl and tons of mecha, in […]

November 16, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Scottish-born Iain Maloney writes of the way that he always needs a body of water somewhere nearby to feel grounded, to know which way is up. Living and working in Japan’s landlocked Gifu prefecture, he becomes aware that many of Japan’s early modern coastal defences, including a ring of vital lighthouses, were […]

November 13, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. War wracks you with terrible transformations, and turns you into a monster. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts takes place in an alternate America, renamed Patria, and begins in the fire of its civil war. In this world, the Southerners are winning, their firepower reducing the enemy to bloody meat (it’s plain from […]

November 10, 2023 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Of all the cities in the world where a witch might be able to blend in, Edinburgh is probably a prime candidate. Marie Blackwood is the “Black Witch of Albion”, a notorious sorceress who may be much older than she looks, who tries to maintain a low profile by running a magic […]