The Korean word for South Korea is hanguk, but South Koreans more often refer to it as uri nara, “our country”. The equivalent term in Japanese is mainly used by octogenarian ultraconservatives, but in South Korea everyone says it. They also speak of uri mal, uri eumshik, uri ddang, uri minjok – “our language”, “our […]
Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 opens in the middle of an unusually scored Tokyo traffic jam: “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta — probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either.” His passenger, a young […]
Whenever someone has made progress studying a foreign language and asks which author they should try reading in that language, I always recommend the same one: Haruki Murakami. Though perhaps an obvious choice for students of Japanese, his mother tongue and the language in which he writes, his work has now made it into about […]
이번 (타와다 요코 표지가 있는!) 호 Axt (1월/2월, #010)에 내 첫번째 한국어로 쓴 서평은 나온다. 구원과 JM 쿳시의 <엘리자베스 코스텔로>에 대한 것이다. My first print article in Korean, on redemption and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, in this month’s issue of Axt (January/February 2017, #010) — and one with a Yoko Tawada cover, no less!
Roland Barthes first visited Japan in 1966, not long after the defeated and reconstructed country announced its return to the international community with the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Japan would have hosted its first Olympic Games there in 1940, had World War II not caused the duty to pass to Helsinki. Now, half a century […]
Stuff Koreans Like, a short-lived imitator of the mid-2000s satirical blog Stuff White People Like, only took ten posts to get to travel essay books. “Usually set in foreign cities (mostly New York or Paris),” writes its author, “they feature soft-focus photographs of café facades and interiors, coupled with inane text with no depth or […]
Korea has inspired several volumes of English-language travel writing, even narratives of extended sojourn in or repeat visits to the country over long periods of time, but a full-fledged, high-profile memoir or novel of the expatriate-in-Korea experience has yet to materialize. Kevin M. Maher’s No Couches in Korea, which recounts the experiences of a young […]
나는 거의 매일 글을 쓰러 커피숍에 간다. 일주일마다 두 번 정도 가는 커피숍은 없지만 일주일마다 한 번씩 꼭 가는 커피숍은 몇 군대가 있다. 그 곳들 중에서 일본인 소설가 무라카미 하루키 씨를 테마로 한 피터캣이라는 북카페가 있다. 왜 카페가 그렇게 흔히지 않은 이름을 가지냐면 무라카미 씨 작가가 되시기 전 70년대에 도쿄에 있는 피터캣이라는 재즈바를 운영하셨기 때문이다. […]
Forty years ago, four Japanese writers and photographers came to town and invented Los Angeles. Or rather, they invented an image of Los Angeles they could distill, package, and sell — first to Japan, then to the rest of the world — with the debut issue of Popeye, published July 1976. Described in its own […]
“Now I know subjective opinions can vary,” the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, “but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer…” Three years later, Raphael’s words appeared in print again as an […]