Globe Corner Blogs

Has anyone made it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the new exhibition of Japanese armor? The MFA has been marketing the exhibit simply as “Samurai!” which I find very effective. This month, in conjunction with the museum’s show and with spring’s cherry blossoms, we’re promoting Japan as our Destination of the Month. And I’ve decided to call our display shelf filled with Japanese literature, guides, maps and cookbooks: “SAMURAI!!!”

Before you make your way to the MFA–or to Japan, for that matter, swing by Booksmith and get the literature you need to guide you through the sites. If you want to read about a real life Samurai hero of feudal Japan, we’ve got The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi. Mushashi was a revered samurai warrior who believed mastery of the mind was as important as technique in martial arts, a teaching that he expounded in his Book of Five Rings. His influence can still be seen in books and films today and is beautifully evoked in this biography by William Scott Wilson.

We’ve got plenty of guides to introduce you to Japan, as well as some fun literature to guide you through some of the more nuanced aspects of Japanese culture, including To Japan with Love, a graceful guide that can help you order anything from a bento box to the kaiseki served in elegant Kyoto teahouses. With this book in your pack you can attend a sumo match, sing karoke, spin some pottery, or go on a spiritual pilgrimage to a sacred site. And you’ll even know when to take off your shoes.

Whether you are a lover of manga, anime, or zen, fans of Japanese culture can feed their obsession with Hector Garcia’s A Geek in Japan. This cultural guide can show you the historical roots of all things Japanese. Filled with loud graphics and images of Japanese pop culture, A Geek in Japan is perfect for both children and adults who want to better acquaint themselves with a fascinating foreign culture.

Speaking of graphics, check out the graphic novel Tokyo on Foot. Rather than exploring Tokyo through a traditional guide, Florent Chavouet presents this city through beautiful sketches and hand drawn maps. The life of Tokyo leaps of the page in colorful, idiosyncratic images of its landscape and people.

If you want to have a companion for your initial explorations in Japanese culture, Karen Pond is the perfect friend to take along. Pond’s memoir Getting Genki in Japan is an illustrated narrative of an American family’s misadventures as they create a life for themselves in Tokyo. She’ll even help you figure out how to flush a Japanese toilet.

And finally: SAMURAI!!! We’ve got temporary tattoos. Don’t go to Japan without one.

I was surprised to learn that a young Western woman with little to no knowledge of the language and no special skills can find a well-paying job in Tokyo. No, it’s not in the industry you might have just thought of. It requires the looks of a model, the personality of a friendly bartender, the ambition to earn money of a Vegas cocktail waitress and the level of nonsense-resistance of a mental ward nurse. Add some babysitting skills, a good liver and an ability to keep very late hours, and you’ve got it. This kind of a job may never get a name in English, but in Japanese it is called geisha.

Of course Japan has drastically changed since the Edo era and a geisha’s job requirements have changed too, but the essence stayed the same. You entertain and pamper your guests, and you get rewarded according to your level of professionalism. A fashion model and a true journalist at heart, Chelsea Haywood decided to try the job first-hand and document her experience in a book 90-Day Geisha.

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Real World - by Natsuo Kirino

Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.” Continue Reading »

The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie -- by Malu Halasa & Rana Salam

It is sunny and almost warm outside, and I have decided that it is time to come out of winter hibernation mode.  I am also adjusting to a new pair of glasses and here all the far-sighted readers out there will feel for me, because the world became so wobbly and curvy that I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I cannot even read anything while my brain is learning to automatically turn curves into straight lines. But even this temporary impairment cannot dim my curiosity, so here I come with a list of hidden eye candy.

These are books that are not meant to be read, they are meant to be adored and looked through many times. I am writing about alternative, strange and very curious fashion photography book gems packed between our guides and maps. Tweaking a well-known expression, I would say that nothing tells you more about a country than it’s street food and street fashion.

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Let's Go Thailand

This is my first contribution to the Globe Corner blog — unfortunately grad school usually leaves little time for reflections on travel (I should really find a dissertation topic that will allow me to collect data in some exciting locale…), but today I’m finally done with work for the summer, and in about seven hours, I hope to be completely packed and on a plane from JFK to Tokyo. Tokyo will be my first stop on a three week trip, which also includes Hong Kong and a beach in Thailand (TBD: I have a flight into Krabi and some vague desires of white sand and warm water.)

This whirlwind tour of half the continent will be the exact opposite of my last (and first) trip to Asia, as a researcher-writer for Let’s Go Thailand. I spent two months in the north of the country, combing the region for guesthouses, bus schedules, and cooking classes. I was traveling alone, moving every other day, and visiting every last wat (monastery) in each town on my route. I got to know the region extremely well, and in fact, the north is synonymous with all of Thailand for me, since I had to return to the States almost immediately at the end of my route, and never got to see the rest of the country.

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Haruki Murakami‘s After Dark is definitely one of the most curious novels I’ve read in a long time. His way of writing is effortless, and his topics could not be more appealing to the reader. He sums up the essence of many of his own previous works, revealing what it means to feel true affection, to fear loneliness and to be lost in a technologicaly overdeveloped world- the perfect representation of modern Tokyo. Continue Reading »