Mayumi Tsutakawa
My brother Deems: Not just the bridge, but the river itself
Several years ago, I was at an airport in Washington, D.C., returning from an arts conference, sitting on an awful chair, when I heard some cool jazz music over the sound system. Tapping my...
What? There’s already a fiction book about the pandemic?
Earlier this summer, when I discovered the book, A Beginning at the End, by Bay Area Chinese American science fiction writer Mike Chen, I doubted my eyes. Wait, we are in a pandemic right...
A new science fiction anthology indicates the growth and wealth of stories by international...
“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
The now-famous quote by the celebrated and deeply talented writer Octavia E. Butler (1947 to 2006), who spent her last years in Seattle, serves...
Yukio Mishima’s exquisite books mirrored a deeply emotional inner life
Two books:
Star by Yukio Mishima, New Directions Books, 2019, translated by Sam Bett (originally published in Japan, 1961)
Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima, Vintage Books, 2018, translated by Andrew Clare (originally published in...
Ted Chiang offers science fiction as a doorway to possible futures
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories is a new book of short stories from the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), which contained the novella that served as the basis for the...
South Korean teachers compare arts teaching methods with Washington state counterparts
Seven arts teachers and administrators representing the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service (KACES), a national government agency of South Korea, visited Seattle in mid-March to learn and compare methods of teaching arts in...
Honouliuli Gulch Camp site reveals the lives of Japanese Americans imprisoned in Hawai’i
This updated version of the article printed in the International Examiner published on August 15, 2018, includes slight revisions provided by sources.
As I travel around Washington state giving talks about Japanese American history, the...
Gannenmono exhibition reveals the genesis of Japanese settlement in Hawaii
The story of the Gannenmono (first-year people) is one of diplomacy and fortitude despite horrible labor conditions, but one which has borne vigorous fruit 150 years later.
The Bishop Museum (Honolulu, HI) exhibition of Gannenmono...
Ayame Tsutakawa Remembered
My mother, Ayame lwasa Tsutakawa, passed away a few weeks ago at Keiro Northwest in the special unit for memory care patients. For a decade and more, she lived with dementia. Although she remembered...
Junichiro Tanizaki’s translated works remind us of a creative drive within Japan’s strict codes...
The fascination for, and popularity of, fiction by one of Japan’s most famous 20th century writers, the sexually fixated and often ghoulish Junichiro Tanizaki (b. 1886, d 1965) continues. As I have explored my own cultural identity through travel to Japan, I pair that experience with reading translations of a wide range of Japanese authors over the years, and today love the works of Japanese writers of the international art community (Murakami and Ishiguro). So, of course, I am drawn to two new English translations of Tanizaki’s short fiction: “The Maids” and “Devils in Daylight,” and a reissue of The Gourmet Club.