A wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.
An enticing memoir of a young Western artist in 1970s Japan.
Now a veteran author and editor of the New York Review of Books, Buruma (Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War, 2016, etc.) was a restless youth anxious to escape his middle-class life. He was a devotee of the local art theater, especially a bizarre performance by a Japanese theater group (“like squinting through the keyhole of a grotesque peep show full of extraordinary goings on….It brought back old memories of magic boxes, lit from the inside, full of strange objects I had concocted with a child’s morbid imagination”). Following college (major: Chinese), the author obtained a scholarship to a Japanese film school and set off, arriving in 1975. Film school proved a disappointment, but Buruma had come to experience Japan and perhaps explore his own budding sexuality. Readers familiar with the tea ceremony, martial arts, and ancient temples will receive a jolt as the author immerses himself in the art scene of a nation with a tolerance for grotesquery, including depictions of violence and sex, that puts America’s to shame. “I had never lived in a country where the culture of advertising, popular media, and entertainment was as drenched in erotic fantasies as Japan,” writes the author. “The pornographic imagination was not furtive and marginal, as in many countries, but entirely upfront.” While some autobiographies pay close attention to the facts, this isn’t necessarily the case here, but most readers will accept that what Buruma chooses to remember takes priority over what actually happened. He vividly describes a naïve youth plunging into a fantastical foreign culture, taking readers along on an entertaining journey of self- and cultural discovery.
A wild ride through the late-20th-century Japanese avant-garde scene through the eyes of an innocent from across the sea.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98141-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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