Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Donald Keene is moving to Japan and this piece by Slate Magazine is also a moving piece. After teaching for 50 years at Columbia University, he’s packed it up and at 89 is calling Japan his home. If you don’t know him, he’s been a savior, slave, and artist himself to Japanese culture. He’s penned, translated, lectured, and stood for many facets of Japan. Film, poetry, literature, and more. We’d have to guess that he started off as a fan. (Slate – Donald Keene)
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Sometimes, we almost want to say Totoros, but no, it’s just Hayao Miyazaki’s classic Totoro regardless of which form it’s taking. Totoro is a classic, everyone loves to say the name, and we have them in stock.
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Just days ago, we wrote about the world wide stardom of Author Haruki Murakami. The BBC writes their own gushing piece about the author. One book store rep mentions Harry Potter in the same sentence as IQ84 in terms of sales. His book is set to come out next week, and it’s set to be a best seller at 1600 pages. There’s a lot of Murakami factoids and this one should wet your appetite to actually read this behemoth of a novel.
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Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a quiet and disquieting story of the Issei. Written in the first-person plural from the point of view of the picture brides who become wives and then mothers, The Buddha in the Attic begins with the uneasy journey across the ocean. We follow the women and girls (as young as the early teens) as they experience disappointment and heartbreak with only flashes of satisfaction and hope. All the time there is a sense of impending doom that will snatch all of them away — and of course it happens. The narrative structure allows for multiple and sometimes contrary impressions while providing a uniform voice. Consider the experience of the women on their first night with their husbands. The tied us up and took us facedown on threadbare carpets that smelled of mouse droppings and mold. They took us frenziedly, on top of yellow-stained sheets. They took us easily, and with a minimum of fuss, for some of us had been taken many times before. They took us drunkenly. They took us roughly, recklessly, and with no mind for our pain. The voice is most effective when capturing the paranoid time after Pearl Harbor was bombed and men are being rounded up and taken away after possibly having their name on a list. The list was written in indelible red ink. The list was typewritten on index cards. The list did not exist. The list existed, but only in the mind of the director of military intelligence, who was known for his perfect recall. The list was a figment of our imaginations. The Buddha in the Attic is a short book that also happens to be a quick read — Otsuka has chosen her words her words with care and the text is tight enough to repel rain. It is among the best fictional renderings of the stories of early Asian Americans who were allowed to exist in this country but never truly live.
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Junko Mizuno is a manga artist from Japan now living in San Francisco. We interviewed her for Giant Robot magazine years ago at a time when she hardly spoke English. Now, she speaks English without issues and is busy exploring her comics and artwork. For GR2′s Robots exhibition, we have original pages of a special Japanese edition of Pure Trance. They’re all drawn by hand with some Zipatone added for shading. We have some of these pages available here.
