#kyoto literary magazine

[stefaniewhat]

Popping in to share our most recent publication over at Kyoto Cryptids 👀If you'd like a little Kyoto-based whimsical horror in your life, please consider giving our literary magazine a peek!

[kyotocryptids]

Rejection sensitivity is real TT_TT

[ripe-lily]

CHAPT. I: Oh, Marianne Ja… What Was It Again?

Marianne Janina Schäfer—or MJ, as she decided to call herself one random afternoon after binge-watching Spider-Man as a kid—loves joking about how her life literally feels like A24 movies. You’ll figure out why, eventually.

The girl grew up in Berlin with a family where she is a sibling to two big brothers and one little sister. Moving to Manhattan for college was supposed to be her cinematic coming-of-age moment like every other teen who’s severely obsessed with the show Friends or has listened to Empire State Of Mind on loop. Strutting through the city that never sleeps while caffeinating herself with overpriced coffee was high schooler MJ’s constant pre-bed scenario. The reality is a bit heartbreaking, though: the cumbersome healthcare system, crappy subways, but somehow falling begrudgingly in love with the city anyway. Nero (Brother the Second™), who’s been a senior Manhattanite for college too, has been her guide during the stay. Or, major revision: her go-to emergency ATM when she’s broke and too scared to ask their Papa for more money.

Now in her fourth semester at university (Class of 2026), MJ is majoring in English & History, which is a combination she swears makes perfect sense because understanding history helps you write better stories, duh. Her love for what she fondly calls “writing gibberish” earned her the position as an editor-in-chief of AXIS—her university writing dept’s official literary magazine—which she celebrates with a literal scream of joy. She loves the job most of the time, especially the perk of tossing out comments like this imagery is FIRE omgggg.

She somehow manages to have business with just about everyone on campus. Between her classes, her AX duties, and the various student orgs she’s loosely involved in, there’s always someone who owes her an email or the other way around. Need advice on your creative writing piece? Ask MJ. Trying to organize a campus-wide fundraiser? MJ’s name is somehow on the committee list. The taurean claims to love being busy, but the occasional passive-aggressive tweets (e.g. I WANNA GO BACK TO BERLIN) prove otherwise. It’d be morally wrong to blame her dorm roommate for nagging “TURN OFF YOUR LAPTOP AND GO TO SLEEP” every 1 AM.

For MJ, life is one messy Notes app entry at a time. In a TikTok video she once watched, someone declared that a girl’s notes are the equivalent of a zoo. Hers is no different. Here’s a few excerpts from MJ’s, even:

March 25, 2024 | A list of my all-time favorite films, ranked by how much they made me cry

1. Dead Poets Societyyyy omfg he was good he was really good

2. Chat is it socially acceptable to sob during In the Heights or am I just mentally unwell

April 29, 2024 | Miss Kyoto as hell. I’d sell my soul to Satan to go back to 11th grade and relive my exchange semester in Japan bc WHY is the U.S. like this

September 15, 2024 | AX-Specific Brain Dumps

• Niel suggested experimenting with multi-format submissions (e.g. text, photography, audio? Could be cool thank God he’s my co-EIC)

• Shalom proposed a collab with the theater dept. for a lit showcase (YEEEES)

• Email Prof. Garcia about the creative nonfiction workshop (don't chicken out, MJ) (and DON’T accidentally send a meme this time)

• Proofread submissions. Specifically: that one about time travel (needs better pacing but WOW), Cal’s poetry (needs zero edits, must hype her up), the allegorical vampirism piece (genius or confusing? Idk but art is up to interpretation is it nooooot)

• REMINDER!!!!!: Lit Mag Social next month (organize icebreakers that aren’t cringe)

September 17, 2024 | Reminder: breathe. It’s fine. I’m fine. (??? Am I?)

September 21, 2024 | TO-DO LIST (MUST DO FOR REAL)

• Meal prep something that isn’t instant noodles (unlikely but aspirational)

• Read up on 20th-century political movements for Monday’s history seminar

• Finally do laundry please MJ don’t rewear the same shirt to class again tmr

• Look up exactly how to file taxes in the U.S. (??? still confused)

• Start outlining for next week’s debate bc somehow I’m on the committee again

• Create playlist for AXIS writing night.. maybe add more Phoebe Bridgers?

October 1, 2024 | Went to Nero’s band’s gig last night and a random stranger said my boots were bangers omg thank you thrift gods they were only like $10

October 12, 2024 | URGENT COLLEGE TASKS

1. Finish research for my essay on post-war European reconstruction

2. Finish the said goddamn essay before Saturday (or make peace with failing)

3. Prepare presentation for Modern Lit class on the role of existentialism in contemporary writing (oh God I’ll have to read so much Kafka won’t I)

4. Read for upcoming seminar on the French Revolution. But actually just watch documentaries lol

October 15, 2024 | Learned a bit of French instead of working on my assignments but at least I’ve found new favorite words of wisdom and that is je ne sais pas

December 31, 2024 | New Year’s Resolutions (pls manifest this):

• Write at least one short story that doesn’t feel like garbage

• Keep AX running without losing my sanity (amen)

• Actually set a budget and stick to it

• Survive whatever this semester is

• Call family more often bc Mama has started quoting Gloria saying “I’m losing my children to America!” and she might be right bc I fear I’m forgetting my Deutsch now

• Sleep before midnight at least once a week (lol good luck)

[reading-while-queer]

Less, Andrew Sean Greer

Rating: Great Read Genre: Realism, Comedy Representation: -Gay main character -Gay and lesbian supporting cast Trigger warnings: Anti-Asian racism, Medical emergency (Stroke), Age gaps in romantic relationships  Note: Less is not YA, and contains depictions of sex

Less is a comedy about a hapless gay author rapidly approaching 50, who, when he is invited to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding, decides to accept every invitation to speak, teach, and attend writer conferences and retreats on his desk.  While Freddy gets married, Arthur Less is on a tour around the world - it’s not that he’s scared to attend, it’s that he’s much, much too busy.

This tour is not a glamorous one, and not even a tour that Arthur Less finds himself qualified to go on.  Arthur was the much younger paramour of the famous poet Robert Brownburn; as his paramour, Arthur grew up on the periphery of historic literary achievement - the poet, and his friends, are a winking reference to the Black Mountain school.  Arthur Less himself, however, was never one of them - at those parties of literary greats, he always found himself in the kitchen with the wives.

Even after making a name for himself on his own merit as a novelist, Arthur Less is best remembered for his long ago connection to Robert - or that’s how Arthur would tell it.  As he progresses on his odyssey around the world, however, his own work precedes him.  Everywhere he lands, someone has read his novel.  He is well-renowned in Germany (he blames the translation into German for unjustly elevating his work).  He wins an award in Italy.  Travelling companions on a vacation in Morocco are familiar with his work.

His work, as it turns out, is a prophecy for his life.  Arthur’s best-known novel is a gay rendition of The Odyssey - and now, Arthur Less finds himself on his own odyssey, always uncomfortable wherever his plane lands, always unlucky, but always learning about himself, too.  The comparison is subtle, never acknowledged, which I found very clever.  The ancient Greek tradition of dramatic irony plays a role: the “news about Freddy” haunts Arthur, and while connoisseurs of romantic comedy can easily guess what that news might be, Arthur always stops his friends right before they tell him anything about his ex’s wedding.  He doesn’t want to know.

Less managed to surprise more than one laugh out of me; the novel is a comedy first, an examination of the writing world second, and an examination of the self third.  Far be it from me to recommend a novel where a middle-aged White man goes on a privileged birthday vacation to Morocco to find himself - yet, hear me out.  The point of Less isn’t that Arthur is owed an explanation for his life and gleefully finds it through White American excess.  Instead, when Arthur complains of his White middle-aged woes to a stranger he meets, she tells him exactly why no one is interested in his new book.  There is something very cathartic in reading about a middle-aged White author learning that his oeuvre of depressing, masturbatory novels that center middle-aged White authors is stale.

Less was almost one of those novels - Less is set up to be one of those novels, and would have been, except that it twists towards self-deprecating comedy (that, in a way, is more honest self-love than any masturbatory novel about and by a White male author).  The scales fall away from Arthur’s eyes.  He learns of his reputation in the writing world as a “Bad Gay” and grapples with what that even means.   He is not glamorous; his struggles with social anxiety, his embarrassing choices in boutique fashion, and his God-given bad luck put a stop to any chance of Arthur having an obnoxious self-importance, that’s for sure. But rather than wallow in self-pitying privilege, Less turns it around on him: Arthur learns something.  He realizes that he can choose to see his life as a slapstick comedy instead of a tragedy.

However, Less is a comedy with something to say, underneath the goofy, over-the-top slapstick.  Aging, especially, is at the forefront, as Arthur’s 50th birthday looms nearer.  Arthur has been the 20-year-old lover to a man twice his age, and the inverse, the 40-year-old who took Freddy as a lover when he was fresh out of school.  Depicting relationships with a large age gap from both sides, Less has something interesting and funny to say about White male privilege, aging as a gay man, and love, and I recommend it on those grounds.

Now, the racism.  Part of the trouble with a highly symbolic novel, especially if that novel is a comedy, is that anyone and everything in the path of the protagonist is the set-up for a joke.  Which becomes complicated when your character is travelling from Mexico to Germany to Italy to France to Morocco to India to Japan.  Not every joke is a good joke; even jokes that are purportedly at Arthur’s expense drag the cultures of people of color into the mix.  Much more-so than in Germany, Italy, or France, Arthur becomes the hapless victim of non-white culture in Morocco, India, and Japan.  Perhaps it is meant to be a clever comment on how much of a fool Arthur is, that he can’t adapt to anything other than the Western cultures he’s been exposed to, but the joke just doesn’t quite come off.

In Morocco, a hostile desert sojourn on camel-back defeats all Arthur’s White travelling companions one by one, first by hangover, then food-sickness, then migraine.  This section of the book was probably the least racist of Arthur’s slow trek east.  The fact that Arthur’s travelling companions drop like flies, though suspicious, can be interpreted as a criticism of White fragility.  For example, Arthur notes the finery set up in a large, luxurious tent for him and his travelling companions. There are little mirrors sewn into the bedspread, and he wonders whether that is a performance of Otherness for the White American tourists who delight in such novelty.  Yet, even as Morocco bows and scrapes to accommodate (seen also in Mohammed’s mastery of English, French, Arabic, and German) the fragility of the tourists is too great, even to be catered to.  They drop like flies.

In India and Japan, it’s harder to spin the depictions of these countries so charitably.  In India, Arthur complains incessantly of his own cultural illiteracy - blaming India, of course.  India is portrayed as dangerously overrun with wild animals that might attack you in the night, feral dogs, and vermin that are exterminated via snake.  Arthur learns some humility, talking to the woman who runs a Christian retreat there - and Arthur’s thoughts on Christianity in India versus his own American experience are interesting - but the authorial impulse to criticize ends up swerving from slapstick comedy into mean-spiritedness when it comes to portraying daily life in India.  Arthur’s misfortunes there, while intended to comment on his bad luck, end up commenting on Indian culture instead.

This is true for the depiction of Japan as well.  Arthur goes to Kyoto to review several kaiseki dining experiences for a magazine.  When he is served something unfamiliar, it’s a roll of the eyes - “just my luck.”  Yet the joke doesn’t land as it would have if Arthur was served something unfamiliar in an American restaurant - in Japan, eating traditional fare with traditional ceremony, his dislike comes off as bratty Americanism.  When a 400 year old sliding wood door gets stuck, trapping Arthur in his room unless he breaks through the paper wall and ruins a centuries-old piece of art in the process, the symbolic meaning is clear; Arthur needs to escape the rut of The American Novelist, no matter how old, storied, and beloved the tradition he is breaking.  Yet by using Japan as the backdrop of this revelation, Less (accidentally?) sets up Japan’s cultural legacy as a parallel to his own issues; a 400 hundred year door that jams on unlucky Arthur calls Japan foolish and old-fashioned in the same breath as it ridicules our protagonist.  But then again...isn’t that the perfect meta-narrative for a book by a White male American novelist criticizing White male American novelists?  Parsing what is accidental versus what is satirical - and whether Greer has any right to be satirical about how White authors use race as set pieces for stories about White characters... That’s a complicated question.

My read of the above is perhaps the least charitable interpretation, and I feel compelled to say that despite it all, I don’t regret reading Less - I enjoyed it, and I think a lot of readers, especially those who write themselves, will find a lot to think about.  I will also recommend against the audio-book for this one; absolutely anything sounds one hundred times more insidious when the Asian characters are read in a voice that sounds like it was plucked from the lips of a yellow-face wearing “comedian” from the 1970s - think Peter Sellers in Murder By Death.  It’s hard to differentiate how much racism is inflection or text.

It isn’t really my place to recommend a book with a little (or a lot, depending on your read) of anti-Asian racism.  I was able to read through it with a wince, blame most of it on the atrocious audio-book, and enjoy the merits that Less has to bring to the table.  But that begs the question: if a book is definitively less racist than, say, Harry Potter, but doesn’t have the (rapidly deteriorating, mind) cultural goodwill of a beloved multi-billion dollar children’s series...is it okay to promote it as a problematic but enjoyable piece of writing? It’s not my place to answer that question, but I would enjoy hearing from others about their take on Less.

For more from Andrew Sean Greer, check out his website here.

[wildcat2030]

"the sun is a beautiful thing in silence is drawn between the trees only the beginning of light"

Was that poem written by an angsty middle schooler or an artificially intelligent algorithm? Is it easy to tell?

Yeah, it's not easy for us, either. Or for poetry experts, for that matter.

A team of researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University developed a poet AI good enough to fool online judges, according to a paper published Thursday on the preprint site arXiv.

It's the latest step towards artificial intelligence that can create believable, human-passing language, and, man, it seems like a big one.

In order to generate something as esoteric as a poem, the AI was fed thousands of images paired with human-written descriptions and poems. This taught the algorithm associations between images and text.

It also learned the patterns of imagery, rhymes, and other language that might make up a believable poem, as well as how certain colors or images relate to emotions and metaphors.

Once the AI was trained, it was then given an image and tasked with writing a poem that was not only relevant to the picture but also, you know, read like a poem instead of algorithmic nonsense.

And to be fair, some of the results were pretty nonsensical, even beyond the sorts of nonsense you'd find in a college literary magazine.

this realm of rain grey sky and cloud it's quite and peaceful safe allowed

And, arguably, worse:

I am a coal-truck by a broken heart I have no sound the sound of my heart I am not

You could probably (we hope) pick those out of the crowd as machine-written. But while the AI is no Kendrick Lamar, many of the resulting poems actually did look like poems.

Next, the researchers had to see if the average person could tell the difference. That means: a Turing test of sorts.

[recentanimenews]

"Fate/Apocrypha" And "Bungo Stray Dogs" Clean Up At Newtype Awards

This weekend, at the 19th edition of the Machi ★ Asobi cultural festival, anime magazine Newtype announced the winners of their 2016-2017 Anime Awards, for work  broadcast or screened between October 2016 and September 2017.  Fate/Apocrypha, the TV anime based on an abandoned Type-Moon MMO, did remarkably well. As did the anime adaptation of Kafka Asagiri and Harukawa 35's literary-named  super-powered detectives and super-powered criminals series Bungo Stray Dogs. Attack on Titan season 2, not so much. 

  ■ TV Anime Award  1. Fate/Apocrypha 2. Bungo Stray Dogs  3. Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu 4. Kemono Friends 5. Konosuba 6. Yuri!!! on Ice 7. Kakegurui - Compulsive Gambler 8. Attack on Titan Season 2 9. Re:CREATORS 10 Restaurant to Another World

  ■ Theatrical Anime Award 1. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 2. A Silent Voice 3. In This Corner Of the World 4. Kizumonogatari III 5. Kuroko's Basketball LAST GAME 6. The Black Butler The Movie Book of the Atlantic 7. Space Battleship Yamato 2202  8. Free! - Timeless Medley- 9. No Game No Life Zero 10. Fate / kaleid liner Prisma ☆ Ilya Vow under the snow

  ■ Character Design Award 1. Bungo Stray Dogs 2. Fate / Apocrypha 3. Kemono Friends 4. Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu 5. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 6. Yuri !!! on ICE 7. Kakegurui - Compulsive Gambler 8. Re: CREATORS 9. Restaurant to Another World 10. NEWGAME !!

  ■ Mechanical Design Award 1. Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans 2. Re: CREATORS 3. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 4. Knight's & Magic 5. Made In Abyss 6. Space Battleship Yamato 2202 7. No Game No Life Zero 8. Fate / Apocrypha 9. Atom the Beginning 10. Mobile Suit Gundam THE ORIGIN

  ■ Soundtrack Award 1. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 2. Kemono Friends 3. Bungo Stray Dogs 4. Yuri !!! on ICE 5. Attack on Titan Season 2 6. Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu 7. Fate / Apocrypha 8. No Game No Life Zero 9. A Silent Voice 10. Mobile Suit Gundam THE ORIGIN

  ■ Screenplay Award 1. Fate / Apocrypha 2. Bungo writer Stray Dogs

3. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale

4. Kemono Friends 5. Kakegurui - Compulsive Gambler 6. Yuri !!! on ICE 7. Re: CREATORS 8.  Restaurant to Another World 9.  Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu 10. NEW GAME !!

  ■ Director Award 1.  Bungo writer Stray Dogs 2. Fate / Apocrypha 3. Kemono Friends 4. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 5. Kakegurui - Compulsive Gambler 6. Yuri !!! on ICE 7. Re: CREATORS 8. Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu 9.  Restaurant to Another World 10. NEW GAME !!

  ■ Theatrical Anime Award 1. Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale 2. A Silent Voice 3. In Thjis Corner Of the World 4. Kizumonogatari III 5. Kuroko's Basketball LAST GAME 6. The Black Butler The Movie Book of the Atlantic 7. Space Battleship Yamato 2202  8. Free! - Timeless Medley- 9. No Game No Life Zero 10. Fate / kaleid liner Prisma ☆ Ilya Vow under the snow

  ■ Male Voice Actor

1. Yūichirō Umehara

2. Miyu Irino

3. Yoshitsugu Matsuoka

4. Soma Saito

5. Hiroshi Kamiya

6. Mamoru Miyano

7. Yūki Kaji

8. Jun Fukuyama

9. Junichi Suwabe

10. Takuya Eguchi

  ■ Female voice actor award 1. Miyuki Sawashiro 2. Kana Hanazawa 3. Saori Hayami 5. Haruka Tomatsu 6. Yuka Ozaki 7. Maaya Uchida 8. Inori Minase 9. Maaya Sakamoto 10. Sumire Morohoshi

  ■ Character award (male) 1. Kirito

2. Osamu Dazai 3. Chūya Nakahara 4. Victor Nikiforov 5. Levi 6. Yuri Katsuki 7. Shiba Tatsuya 8. Izuminokami Kanesada 9. Koyomi Araragi 10. Sakunosuke Oda

  ■ Character award (female) 1. Asuna 2. Serval 3. Kyōka Izumi 4. Mikasa Ackerman 5. Tsubasa Hanekawa  6. Shinobu Oshino 7. Shōko Nishimiya 8. Akiko Yosano 9.Selesia Upitiria 10. Ruler / Jeanne d'Arc

  ■ Mascot Character Award 1. Konnosuke (Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu)

2. Lucky Beast (Kemono Friends) 3. Makkachin (Yuri !!! on ICE) 4. Nyanko-sensei (Natsume Yujincho) 5. Elizabeth (Gintama)

6. Yui (Sword Art Online) 7. Iwatobi chan (Free! - Timeless Medley) 9, Bennipo (Tsuki ga Kirei) 9. Chomusuke(bless this wonderful world! 2) 10. Dog (Ahogirl)

  ■ Theme Song Award 1. "Yōkoso Japari Park e" (Kemono Friends) 2. "Catch the Moment" ( Sword Art Online - Ordinal Scale -) 3. "History Maker" (Yuri !!! on ICE) 4. "TRASH CANDY" (Bungo stray dogs) 5. "Kaze ga Fuku Machi" (Bunraku Stray Dogs) 6. "Eiyū Unmei no Uta" (Fate / Apocrypha) 7. "Hikari Dantsu Ame" (Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu) 8. "Shinzō o Sasage yo!" (Attack on Titan Season 2)

9. "Reason Living"(Bungo Stray Dogs)

10. "THERE IS A REASON" (No Game No Life Zero)

  ￭ studio Award 1. Bones 2. A-1 Pictures  3. MAPPA  4.YAOYOROZU  5.  ufotable  6. Kyoto Animation  7. WIT STUDIO  8. MADHOUSE  9. SILVER LINK.  10. Shaft

【速報】ニュータイプアニメアワードにて作品賞をはじめ多くの賞を受賞させて頂きました！応援して頂いたみなさまMultumescです！この後眉山山頂にて13,14話の上映も行います！山頂は冷えますが、是非ご覧頂けますと幸いです！2ndクール引き続きよろしくお願いします#アポクリファ http://pic.twitter.com/syvPJDhVpu

— Fate/Apocrypha (@FateApocryphaTV) October 7, 2017

via Yaraon

------ Follow on Twitter at @aicnanime

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[rikka-zine]

Interview with PhD Candidate Brian White (Part 1)

I saw Brian White’s name for the first time on a tweet by critic Kotani Mari in September 2018. According to the tweet, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago who conducted an academic presentation about Tobi Hirotaka at a conference titled “The Nonhuman in Japanese Culture and Society: Spirits, Animals, Technology," which was held at the University of Victoria, Canada. 

I wondered at the time what it must be like to study Japanese SF outside Japan. I assumed most of the old books and magazines in the genre are not digitized nor easy to access from outside Japan. Fortunately, I got a chance to ask Brian directly what brought him to Japanese culture and science fiction. (I am deeply grateful to Dr. Pau Pitarch Fernandez for introducing him.)

This interview was recorded in Shinjuku, Tokyo in November 2018 during his one-year stay for archival research. The interviewer is me: Terrie Hashimoto. You can read the Japanese translation here.

Note: Throughout this interview, Japanese names are given in the Japanese order, family name first, then given name.

Brian White (BW): I grew up on the east coast of the United States. I was born in New York, but my parents divorced after I was born. My mom went to Pennsylvania and my dad went to New Jersey. I spent most of the time with my mom in Pennsylvania but regularly visited my dad as well. So where I grew up is a little bit complicated but it was basically back and forth between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Both of my parents are very intellectual and academic-minded. My dad has a PhD in Molecular Biology and spent some time working at a university before transferring to private industry. My mom, though she never finished college, majored in English Literature and always had a strong commitment to ideas about what it meant to be literary and well-read. She was always pushing me to read books.

I was born in 1988, so I was growing up during the boom of YA literature in the ‘90s. There were a few popular series in the US; one of these was called Goosebumps. And then of course there was Harry Potter, and also Animorphs, so you had Horror, Fantasy, and SF all together [in YA series]. Mystery books were popular as well, like Nancy Drew, though I guess that was from the '60s or '70s. All of those subgenres were present in YA. I really enjoyed Animorphs series. I found it extremely interesting because the main idea of the series is children who can change into animals and go and fight evil aliens. Stylistically I always found it fascinating how the author put you into the story and made you feel what it would be like to be a tiger, an ant, a falcon or whatever through first-person narration. That sense of being completely different creatures was very attractive to me. I read so much SF as a young child. I think that's why anime like Dragon Ball were eventually so interesting to me when I started watching them in middle school. 

I remember when I was in middle school, the only television network that played anime was called Cartoon Network and you could only get it if you had a special kind of cable package. And I just remember seeing advertisements for Cartoon Network on other channels and seeing advertisements specifically for Gundam Wing. I wanted to watch it so badly!  My parents finally did get upgraded to premium cable or whatever it was to have Cartoon Network. Unfortunately, they'd stopped playing Gundam Wing by then. I was very sad about that. But they were playing things like Dragon Ball Z and Gundam 08th MS Team - which was a kind of jungle warfare sort of thing - and things like Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, which my generation considers to be classics. I'm sure that others have other opinions of them, though. They seem to have become much more popular in the United States [than Japan]. It was eye-opening. 

So over the course of middle school and high school, I guess I drifted away from sci-fi literature itself, and more into things like anime and manga. I started reading manga volume after volume. I consumed anime and manga voraciously. I read a lot of Shonen Jump titles. I think the first [manga] I ever bought was Naruto Vol.1, and I really enjoyed that.

I moved into being interested in Japanese popular culture because of a few reasons. Maybe I should have mentioned this before, but I first started getting into Dragon Ball when my cousin came to stay with us for a little while on vacation. He brought a Dragon Ball manga with him, and it was the first time I'd ever seen a manga. I was shocked at how it was read, in my mind, back to front because it was in the Japanese reading order rather than the American order. This was just a “へえええ (Whaaat!)” moment for me when I was 12 or 13.

Shortly after that I found out that Power Rangers was Japanese. I had watched Power Rangers so much as a child.  I forget exactly which series it was, but the one with dinosaurs. That was my favorite television program as a child. And to find out that it was actually Japanese years later really shocked me. There's another, I think I hadn't even thought of it as anime at the time, called Speed Racer in English. I'd watched that and thought of it as just the same as Looney Tunes or Snoopy or something when I was a kid. And so to find out that these two shows that I had really loved were both Japanese, it was really surprising and made me want to learn more. I think that was one of the reasons why I became so interested in anime and manga.

The other reason was just that it felt different or I guess you could say exotic to me, living in a kind of rural town. I had always dreamed of getting out of my hometown, going somewhere larger. [Japanese popular culture gave me] a feeling of being connected to something bigger and maybe more exciting, a world outside that was very alluring to me. 

And then the time came to apply for a college. I really didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had good grades because my parents were very strict about doing schoolwork and getting good grades. [I figured] I could probably get into a pretty good school. I was going to try to get into a school that had a Japanese language and culture program and also a lot of other majors that I could try out. I ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and they had a fairly good Japanese program there. 

I declared my major basically as soon as I walked in the door. I guess the professors didn't quite know what to do with me because most people go to the Wharton [Business] School or go into international relations and then also take some classes in Japanese as a second major or a minor. They were more used to that kind of student, I think. 

But I really wanted to do Japanese, so I took courses in Japanese cultural studies and literary studies and studied in Kyoto for a semester when I was a third-year student. All through that I kept an interest in popular culture. But just because of the way that the classes were structured, doing more mainstream Japanese literary readings, I drifted away from consuming SF very regularly at that time. As I was finishing college, I decided I wanted to do more in-depth research, perhaps involving SF in a broad sense. The thing I liked the best was reading and writing about Japanese culture and the sort of insights that gave me into how culture works more generally and being able to turn that around on American culture, that sort of thing. As I was looking around at what I wanted to do and how I could keep doing that kind of work, academia was the thing that came up. But there are a lot of people working on [popular cultural studies], so I thought I could maybe do literary studies and then also fold in film studies.  I really like working with film, and it was shortly before that time that I took a post-war literature and film class with Kano Ayako sensei (*means teacher or professor in Japanese). She was so inspirational to me in terms of what one can do, and that was where I encountered Abe Kobo for the first time. We read Woman in the Dunes and watched the film adaptation, and I was like … MY LIFE IS CHANGED. I was just so fascinated by his style. I read Woman in the Dunes in English, and I had a chance to read a little bit more of his writings in Japanese at home soon after, and I thought that they were just amazing. So I said, “Okay, I'm going to go to grad school and I'm going to get a PhD and write a dissertation about Abe Kobo and surrealism and politics of the 1960s.” That's what was thinking when I went to grad school. And a few things happened. 

For one thing, I found out that a lot of academics were already working on books about Abe Kobo that would be coming out within the next couple of years. So as for books and dissertations and all that sort of thing, from a business perspective, there wasn't going to be much demand for new professors who specialized in Abe Kobo by the time I finished.

I thought, OK, maybe it's time to rethink this, and I'd had this idea in the back of my head. I'm not sure where it started, but the one thing that I had been interested in talking about with Abe Kobo and the Surrealist movement was its relationship with technology and how technology interacts with the body within Surrealist literature. I was really interested in that relationship and so I started trying to push on that more. Around that time, I was studying at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies which is an intensive language training program in Pacifico Yokohama. I was trying to explain to a sensei there what I was interested in because during the program everyone has the opportunity to do guided research into whatever topic they chose. I was trying to explain my topic to my sensei, and because my Japanese wasn't great at the time, and also because I didn't have a clear idea of [the topic] myself, I was having trouble putting it into words. As I was rambling about technology and the body, he said, “You mean SF?”, and it was another lightbulb moment. What I was trying to talk about, it really was SF literature, or at least I'd have an easier time finding materials and finding [texts] that worked with the body and technology within science fiction. It was really because Abe was a science fiction-esque author that his work interested me.

I changed course in my third year of graduate school [and said], “Okay, actually what I'm going to do is study science fiction and think about how science fiction talks about embodiment and what sorts of bodies are presented within science fiction, whether you see women or racial minorities and so on.�� As I started to slowly develop that thesis, as a result, I felt like I was always kind of behind in trying to catch up to people who have known what they're doing from day 1.

Since I started at the edges [of that topic], it's always felt like I need to read more and study more and do more and try to catch up... in that sense it's been a little bit stressful, especially because I'm now in this program with faculty who were maybe better equipped to help me a couple years ago than now. But luckily my advisors at Chicago are very kind and very knowledgeable about just about everything. Even if they don't know a lot about science fiction, they can help me in other ways.

But yes, it's been challenging to try to study [as a topic]. There aren't a lot of materials translated into English, especially, and there's not as strong a scholarly body of literature, so it's a little bit harder to know where to look. I've been finding my own way. However, I think there are more and more people who are starting to write about [Japanese] science fiction academically in the United States. It's been very helpful to start to talk to them and form that kind of community.  I don't know if you know the Parallel Futures series that's coming out through the University of Minnesota press. It’s a series of translations, and they did Aramaki Yoshio’s The Sacred Era (tr. Baryon Tensor Posadas, 2017). They're coming out with a bunch more, and I've had a chance to meet with the sensei who are behind it. Thomas Lamarre and Tatsumi Takayuki sensei are two of the three main contributors to that. Christopher Bolton might also be working on it. He was one of the people that put out a book about Abe Kobo and specifically looked at his works as science fiction. So that was a kind of the final deciding factor; I can't write that book because someone has already written it!

They're all working on that series and between that and other scholars’ work there's been more materials starting to come out. I know a number of graduate students as well - we're working on similar things. So on the one hand, it feels very exciting because it feels like we're on the crest of something new and exciting. But because it’s this new thing coming into being, you know, it's sometimes hard to find what you need because there just aren't a lot of people who have done that work already. Scholars working on the sixties have mostly focused on “serious” literature. So it's been interesting to try to bring the conversation back around to sci-fi. 

And it's been interesting personally to take a number of years off from sci-fi. It's been about ten to fifteen years since I was consuming a lot of SF literature as a fan. Since the SF I used to read was aimed at young adults, to come back into it as an adult looking at sci-fi aimed at adults in Japanese, it really feels very much like entering a completely new space. It's been fun to put that together and get an idea of what's out there and who's writing what and when, who the major authors are and what their classic works were like. It feels very spread out, and it's true that it was. But it's only unknown to me, right, so whenever I talk to people that have been consuming it, like Tatsumi sensei, for example, who's been reading it since it started back in the 60s, you know it’s very humbling because he just knows everything. I don't have time to read all the things that he has read, and every time I have a meeting with him and talk about what I'm thinking about, he gives me a suggested reading list three pages long. There's no way I could possibly finish all of it, but it's an exciting challenge.

(Continues to Part. 2)

[finishinglinepress]

FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY: Echo in Four Beats by Rita Banerjee $19.99, Full-Length, paper https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/echo-in-four-beats-by-rita-banerjee/ Rita Banerjee is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, March 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, February 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps(Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work appears in Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Hyphen Magazine, Electric Literature, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Scofield, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian literary theory at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. She is currently working on a novel about a Tamil-Jewish American family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime, a documentary film about race and voyeurism in the United States and in France, and a collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool. “Banerjee’s polyglot collection–pushing at the edges of language; abounding with erasure, mistranslation and wit; impossible to contain in a single tongue. From the smallest pieces of our world–the falling snow, cobblestone, a reflection in the water–Banerjee has crafted something astonishing that reaches towards higher truths.” –Stephen Aubrey, author of Daguerreotype and What I Took in My Hand and Co-Artistic Director of The Assembly Theater, NYC “Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a lyric wonder. Wildly intertextual and multilingual, Banerjee mines literatures, histories, and geographies, both eastern and western, to produce an expansive collection of poems. The breadth of her work is staggering and yet utterly approachable, at once intimate and worldly. This may well be the first truly post-national book of poems I’ve ever read. I look forward to reading it again and again.” –Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and CarrierWave “Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a multilingual, intercontinental arpeggio of a journey on which ‘one layer/ of enchantment// dispels another.’ From Ovid to Baudelaire, from Manhattan to Atlantis to the Ganges, these poems conjure shape-shifting and gyroscopic worlds where erasure is sustenance, myth is religion, and home is but a constant state of momentary arrivals. Banerjee’s attentive, precise, incantatory poems reverberate ‘not sound not/ voice” and resound with the “enchantments of art/ and life.’” –Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game and Skurtu, Romania “In our narcissism-addled times, Rita Banerjee awakens Echo out of mythical slumber and accords her center stage, with stirring results. These poems dance nimbly from the playful to the sacred, the pentatonic-ancient to the jazzy-contemporary, the observational to the contemplative, and cross languages and borders with abandon, from trains in India to a Munich museum to the local copy shop. Yet while they may ‘change [their] temperament as quickly as salamanders change skin,’ Echo in Four Beats is constantly returning us to a tonic center and rebuilding its chords and arpeggios anew, offering a music both savory and profound.” –Tim Horvath, author of Understories and Circulation “Echo in Four Beats sounds the singular pulse of Harlem, Kyoto, Nainital and San Francisco to uncover a deeper mystery; what makes a word into a sensation, a sensation into a moment and what, in the swirling constellation of geographies, turns a moment into the sublime. Amidst the kinetic search for buried treasure in everyday encounters with photocopiers and the breathless search for lost objects, there are also unexpected collisions with silence so shocking, they stop us dead in our tracks. We realize the whiteness between words was here all along; its stillness curving the inside of this syncopated journey across time and space.” –Dipika Guha, playwright and author of Mechanics of Love and The Rules, and screenwriter for American Gods RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY PREORDER PURCHASE SHIPS FEBRUARY 2, 2018 https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/echo-in-four-beats-by-rita-banerjee/ #poetry

[kyotocryptids]

Where is he going?

To download Kyoto Cryptids of course!

/Image from the cover of the December 1978 issue of Cycle Sport magazine. For more images like this, try the #cyclesport0252 hashtag on Instagram

[angkritgallery]

อุทิศ เหมะมูล เกิดเมื่อปี 2518 ภูมิลำเนาเดิมเป็นคนแก่งคอย จังหวัดสระบุรี จบการศึกษาระดับปริญญาตรี จากคณะจิตรกรรมประติมากรรมและภาพพิมพ์ มหาวิทยาลัยศิลปากร มีความสนใจในศิลปะหลากหลายแขนงสาขา ทั้งทัศนศิลป์ วรรณกรรม ภาพยนตร์ และดนตรี เคยเป็นดีเจ ทำภาพยนตร์สั้น ผู้กำกับศิลป์หนังไทย สุดท้ายลงเอยด้วยการเขียนหนังสือ

ผลงานสร้างชื่อให้เป็นที่รู้จักในวงกว้างคือนวนิยายลำดับที่สาม ลับแล, แก่งคอย ได้รับรางวัลเซเว่นบุ๊กอวอร์ด ครั้งที่ 6 และรางวัลวรรณกรรมสร้างสรรค์ยอดเยี่ยมแห่งอาเซียน (ซีไรต์) ประจำปี พ.ศ. 2552 ผลงานดังกล่าวได้รับการแปลเป็นภาษาอังกฤษในชื่อ The Brotherhood of Kaeng Khoi และเรื่องสั้นบางเรื่องได้รับการแปลเป็นภาษาญี่ปุ่น อังกฤษ และเกาหลี

อุทิศได้รับเชิญเข้าร่วมงานระดับนานาชาติหลายครั้ง ปี 2553 ได้รับทุนจากมูลนิธิทาเคชิ ไคโกะผ่านทางเจแปนฟาว��์เดชั่นเชิญไปบรรยายที่ประเทศญี่ปุ่น ปี 2555 เป็นหนึ่งในนักเขียนจากต่างประเทศเข้าร่วมงาน 2012 Seoul International Writers’ Festival ประเทศเกาหลี และปี 2556 ร่วมงานศิลปะข้ามสาขากับศิลปินชาวญี่ปุ่น จัดโดย Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery @ KCUA เกียวโต และปี 2557 ได้รับเชิญเข้าร่วมเสวนาในงาน Tokyo International Literary Festival ครั้งที่ 2 ประเทศญี่ปุ่น

ปี 2557-2558 เป็นบรรณาธิการนิตยสารวรรณกรรมไทยสองเล่ม คือ Writer Magazine (ยุคที่ 3) และ ‘ปรากฏ’ วารสารวรรณกรรมไทยร่วมสมัย ของ สำนักงานศิลปวัฒนธรรมร่วมสมัย (สศร.) กระทรวงวัฒนธรรม

ปัจจุบันอุทิศใช้ชีวิตอยู่ในกรุงเทพฯ

Uthis Haemamool, born in 1975 (Saraburi Province, Thailand), received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Silpakorn University. His interest lies in various divisions of arts including visual arts, literatures, movies and music. His previous professions during 2001-2009 were disk jockey, short film director, art director and columnist for MovieTime magazine.

Uthis became widely known for his third novel, Lab Lae, Khaeng Khoi, (The Brotherhood of Kaeng Khoi) which won him the Seven Book Awards and the S.E.A. Write Award in 2009. CNNGo rated him as one of the people who mattered most in Thailand in 2009. Further to the success, Uthis was selected by the Japan Foundation to be granted the 19th Takeshi Kaiko Memorial Asian Writers Lecture Series scholarship to give lectures in four major cities in Japan.

Uthis has written five novels, three collections of short stories and two collections of movies and literary criticisms. He currently lives in Bangkok and has recently become an editor in chief of the two contemporary Thai literary magazines, namely, Writer Magazine and ‘Prakod’. The latter has been funded by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC), Ministry Of Culture, Thailand.

[exxby-blog]

The 20 Greatest Magazine Stories ever!! Plan to read them all this weekend.

Click the link above to read them all

‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ By Gay Talese April 1966, Esquire

This 15,000-word masterpiece ushered in ‘New Journalism’, and is considered one of the best profiles ever written. The fact that Sinatra refused to talk to Talese—every time he called, Sinatra’s minders said he had a cold—was probably the best thing that could have happened. To write it, Talese spoke to “at least a 100 people”, and used tips from them and stories he’d heard.

‘Come What May’ By Arun Shourie & Shekhar Gupta March 1983, India Today

THE first full-length story on the Nellie massacre, in which over 2,000 Muslims were killed during the Assam elections, Come What May came after a dribble of reports, and chronicled the entire tragedy in gory detail. It unravelled the attempts of the powers-that-be to bury the story and showed the negligence of the government. Arun Shourie and Shekhar Gupta reported on the carnage and made the news mainstream.

‘Consider the Lobster’ By David Foster Wallace August 2004, Gourmet

It was to be a fun assignment, to cover the annual Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet. But David Foster Wallace did it the way only he knows. He detailed the cruelty with which lobsters are caught and killed so graphically that many lost their appetite for them. What was to be a PR story turned the world’s attention towards the poor lobsters. It was written with Wallace’s sharp wit and flourishes. Later, his genius was immortalised in Infinite Jest.

‘Hiroshima’ By John Hersey August 1946, New Yorker

Set in the aftermath of the nuclear bomb being dropped over Hiroshima, the article is a cataclysmic narrative of six survivors of the incident. Hersey spent three weeks in Japan interviewing survivors. The article occupied almost the complete issue of the New Yorker when it came out, a first for what is essentially a cultural and literary magazine. 

Hitler Diaries Discovered April 22, 1983, Stern

In the April of 1983, German magazine Stern caught its biggest break. Their star reporter had discovered a trove of Hitler’s personal diaries. The magazine claimed that the diaries, which had no previous records, would change the way one perceived Hitler’s life. Two weeks after the diaries were published, they were exposed as fakes. They’d been written by a small-time crook called Konrad Kujan. The hoax remains one of the biggest scandals in magazine history.

‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ By Hunter S. Thompson June 1970, Scanlan’s Monthly

This landmark story was one of the first of its kind, giving a subjective, first-person account of the Kentucky Derby races. The article focuses on the depravity and celebrations that surround the event, showing the author as one of the protagonists. This was the piece that ushered in Gonzo journalism, later celebrated in Thom­pson’s Love and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Radia Tapes November 2010, Outlook

The release of the 140 tapes of lobbyist Niira Radia led to the uncovering of one of the biggest political scandals, exposing the behind-the-scenes deals between politicians, top journalists and industrialists. It exposed the deep nexus bet­ween the government and ind­ustry lobbyists, showing for the first time how negotiations with the government take place in the country.

‘AIDS: The Agony of Africa’ By Mark Schoofs November1999, The Village Voice

The seven-part article, an analysis of AIDS and its effects in Africa, won the rep­orter a Pulitzer prize. The piece chronicles in harrowing detail the lives of hiv-positive persons in Africa, explaining why the disease has so sev­erely affected the lives of people in Africa and nowhere else.

Bhopal Gas Tragedy Raghu Rai, 1984

Much has been written about the Bhopal gas tragedy, but what helped connect the public to shattering loss of hundreds of lives and families was this photo feature by Raghu Rai. The black-and-white pictures gave a face to the tragedy and became its defining portrayal.

‘Armoire of Shame’ By Franco Giustolisi and Alessandro De Feo 1994, L’Espresso

Several documents exposing war crimes committed in Italy by Nazi fascists were locked for almost 50 years by Italian diplomats fearing that disclosure would damage relations with Germany. When the armoire was finally opened, Giustolisi was the first one to unveil the crimes, calling for a special parliamentary investigation. There was a public outrage but in the end the government squashed the findings. 

‘The History of the Standard Oil Company’ By Ida Tarbell 1908, McClure’s Magazine

Often called one of the most extensive pieces of investigative journalism ever written, this report resulted in  the break-up of the oil giant. Tarbell spent several months collecting evidence about the wrongdoings and fraudulent practices the oil giant had indulged in over the years. This report also inspired many journalists to unhesitatingly write on big industries.

‘The Runaway General’ By Michael Hastings June 2010, Rolling Stone

In 2010, Hastings interviewed Gen Stanley McChrystal, a celebrated tough-guy military leader, in Afghanistan. The interview led to the general being eased out for having made derogatory comments about the Obama administration. The general later said he was quoted out of context.

‘Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the planet’ By Neal Stephenson 1996, Wired

This piece reveals the physical underpinning of the virtual world. It chronicles how the trans-cables, for what we now know as the Internet, were laid. The article reads like a sci-fi thriller and was written at a time when Google and Yahoo were just taking baby steps.

‘Operation Blue Star: Night of Blood’ By Shekhar Gupta  August 1984, India Today

The Golden Temple only saw a handful of journalists on the fateful night of Operation Blue Star.  Shekhar Gupta happened to be there. His account of the events that night are regarded as some of the best pieces of journalism in the country. The story took the reader through all aspects of the military operation, including what happened on the ground as well as what plan and tactics the soldiers followed to clear the Sikh temple of terrorists.

‘Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?’ By Edward J. Epstein 1982, The Atlantic

In this expose, Epstein explains why the diamond is one of the most valuable commodities in the world today. It talks about a market controlled by cartels which artificially control the prices of diamonds sold in most Western countries. It also expl­ains how the Russia has now come to dominate the diamond market and taken over completely.

‘Democracy on the Take’ By Julie Strawn and Charles G. Hogan December 1984, Der Spiegel

The seizure of the files of one of Germany’s biggest companies, Flick Industrial Holdings, in 1981, was not expected to reveal much. Instead, what the police found led to one of the biggest corporate scandals in Germany. The files uncovered the real scope of corporate influence on post-war Germany and told how German corporations secretly bankrolled every major political party in the country to receive benefits such as tax breaks, and favourable appointments and policies.

As the World Burns June 2005, Mother Jones

The world has just recently realised the gigantic problem that is global warming. The Kyoto protocol was one of the first attempts by countries to do something about it, an attempt which can only be des­cribed as a failure. This report speaks of the disastrous effects climate change has, and will have, on the world if something is not done about it.

Coverage of the Veerappan Kidnappings August 2000, Nakkeeran

The series of interviews which journalist R. Gopal did for the Tamil magazine gave the world its first few glimpses into the world that the famous bandit inhabited. After the interview was published, Gopal was jailed by the Jayalalitha government for withholding information about Veer­­­appan, who was still a fugitive in the jungle.

‘I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed’ By Jacques Derogy and Jean-François Kahn January 1966, L’Express

Ben Barka, a major Moroccan figure of the Third World and anti-colonial movement who was collaborating with figures like Che Guevara and Malcom X “disappeared” while on exile in Paris. The two investigative journalists wrote a powerful piece in which they highlighted the contradictions about his disappearance and the possible political motives behind his killing. A scandal erupted and debated investigations followed.

So Why is Narendra Modi Protecting Amit Shah?  By Rana Ayyub July 17, 2010, Tehelka

This report by Rana Ayyub, who has done exemplary journalism in exposing the Gujarat genocide of 2002 and its aftermath, detailed the involvement of Amit Shah, then home minister of the state, in the Ishrat Jahan fake encoun­ter. Her reports led to the Supreme Court agreeing with the CBI to shift Shah’s case out of Gujarat

[kyotocryptids]

MAGAZINE IS LIVE

Say hello to our biggest and creepiest issue yet! Bundle up, get cozy, and download Kyoto Cryptids at our Gumroad store! PDF is available as a pay-what-you-can download!

[kyotocryptids]

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[kyotocryptids]

Teaser for our 4th issue!

Like what you see? Download here!

Kyoto Cryptids is rated PG-13 for whimsical horror and supernatural elements

[kyotocryptids]

Redditor, are you ok?

We’ve all been there TT_TT

[kyotocryptids]

https://x.com/jtommins/status/1737615601135452217?s=46

Evil Buddha says: