Tag: books

May 24, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In 2013, the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe took the remarkable step of appearing on YouTube to talk about Japanese food. He was addressing the nation, and the world, about Japan’s unique culinary tradition, or washoku, as part of an effort to get it rated as one of UNESCO’s treasures of intangible […]

April 21, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even when you’re talking about some future society, if you write with full faith in our present world, then nothing changes, you just end up with the same […]

April 18, 2021 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Copper is an unremarkable little boy, short in stature, high in grades, with a family in genteel poverty after the death of his father has caused a little bit of downsizing to the lower middle class. But he has a vivid imagination and a kind heart (unless you are one of the […]

April 6, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Long overdue for inclusion in the BFI’s Film Classics series, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies finally gets the critical treatment, courtesy of Alex Dudok de Wit. In 100 closely argued pages, he takes the reader through the film’s genesis at Studio Ghibli, the peculiarities of its director, its major themes and […]

March 19, 2021 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author at work). David Karashima’s book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami is dedicated to areas that hardly anybody ever talks about – the way that the […]