March/April News & Reviews

In the Spring issue of Film Quarterly, Stephen Prince reviews Teruyo Nogami's Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa. Prince writes:

"This exemplary memoir showcasing Nogami's devotion to Kurosawa and to the art of cinema is a treasure trove filled with passionate, funny, wry, and incisive portraits of a golden age in Japanese film."

Waiting on the Weather was also reviewed in The Asian Reporter, where Mike Street wrote that "Weather is both enjoyable and essential...film students as well as Kurosawa fans will find it revealing and engaging."

Josephine Yun, author of jrock, ink., contributed a four-page feature on the current state of J-Rock to the April issue of Otaku USA.

The new Stone Bridge Classics edition of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Isabella L. Bird's intrepid 1880 travelogue, was excerpted in the Asia Weekly and reviewed in the April issue of Metropolis, where C.B. Liddell writes:

"The fact that it doesn't try to please a modern audience is one of the book's charms, but its main virtue is that it provides us with a vivid and unforgettable picture of Meiji Japan..."

In the April 27 Japan Times, Gregory Clark reviewed veteran Japanese journalist Fumio Matsuo's Democracy with a Gun: America and the Policy of Force, writing:

"Matsuo is...meticulous in trying to find how the initially democratic and humane aspirations of the early Americans could evolve into the cruelty of today's military interventions around the globe."

Harvard University Press released Eve Zimmerman's new book, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. Great timing, as Stone Bridge concurrently released a Stone Bridge Fiction edition of Zimmerman's award-winning translation of The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto.

In The Asian Reporter, Josephine Bridges complimented Fumio Shiozawa's "lovely and surreal illustrations" in Divining the Asian Zodiac: Anient Guide to Life and Love.