News & Views

Features, Analysis and Special Reports on Japanese Literature

- Analysis
  
  March 31, 2026
- Mishima’s Last Supper
  
  by Richard Nathan
  A sk any Japanese publishing executives or well-known contemporary Japanese author to guess what Yukio Mishima’s favourite food was, and you will invariably receive the… Read more »
  - TOPICS:
  - Richard Nathan
  - History
  - Yukio Mishima
- Feature
  
  January 5, 2024
- Mishima’s Horoscope: A Death foretold?
  
  by Richard Nathan
  In 1968 two years before Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) killed himself astrological predictions about the fate of five popular Japanese writers, Shintaro Ishihara (1932-2022), Kenzaburo Oe… Read more »
  - TOPICS:
  - History
  - Publishing
  - Yukio Mishima
- Feature
  
  September 10, 2021
- Soseki’s Cat: A Quantum Leap for Japanese Literature
  
  by Richard Nathan
  The mysterious and magical effect of cats is widely celebrated. Cats entertain, evoke stress-reducing emotional responses, constantly and often counter-intuitively amuse, and cats – of… Read more »
  - TOPICS:
  - Fuminori Nakamura
  - Cats
  - Culture
  - Publishing
- Analysis
  
  August 6, 2021
- Literary Fallout: The legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  
  by Richard Nathan
  The narrative of nuclear war began on 6 August 1945 and the term Atomic Bomb Literature, Genbaku Bungaku, started being used widely from the 1960s… Read more »
  - TOPICS:
  - Soji Shimada
  - Atomic Bomb Literature
  - Culture
  - History