by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
In a recent installment of Sinica’s “Phrase of the Week,” Andrew Methven wrote about an expression that has gone viral on the Chinese internet: the “Odyssey Years”—奥德赛时期— a phrase that caught fire well before Christopher Nolan’s new movie started making headlines.
According to Methven, the phrase is used by young people to describe the unmoored decade of their twenties: the job-hopping, the city-switching, the marriages and mortgages deferred. Borrowed from a 2007 David Brooks column in the NYT, it dignifies aimlessness by reaching for Homer. You are not lost, it whispers; you are Odysseus, and somewhere out there an Ithaca awaits.
I love the phrase. Trying to think of a Japanese equivalent, even after two decades in Japan, I came up strangely empty. And the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt.
Start with Homer’s epic itself, which never quite landed in Japan the way Shakespeare did. Japanese readers encountered summaries and adaptations of the Odyssey in the early twentieth century, but the first complete translation from Greek appeared only in 1939.
The Meiji man of letters Tsubouchi Shōyō, by contrast, completed his forty-volume translation of Shakespeare in 1928. Kurosawa later remade Macbeth as Throne of Blood, King Lear as Ran, and Hamlet as the corporate revenge drama The Bad Sleep Well. Shakespeare was adopted. Homer remained a classic admired from a polite distance.
But as I was poking around, I found a story that I had not heard of before: Tsubouchi himself believed the Odyssey had actually reached Japan centuries before the Meiji era, carried perhaps by Portuguese missionaries and absorbed into the folk tale of Yuriwaka, which tells of a warrior stranded on an island who returns home to find his place usurped and his faithful wife holding out against the very man who betrayed him. The Penelope echo is unmistakable. Yuriwaka, unrecognized on his return, proves his identity by drawing the great iron bow that no other man can bend — just as Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is the only man who can string his own bow. And so, scholars continue to argue: was this an early borrowing of the epic poem? Or was there a common root to both stories to be found somewhere perhaps on the Central Asian grasslands? Read more »
Lea Ypi’s first memoir, Free, began with a scene of her hugging a headless statue of Stalin in Durrës, Albania as a child. The image was effective in showing the young Ypi’s devotion to communism, which was important as the book dealt with her disorientation upon its fall and the realization that much of what she believed about her life had been a lie. Some readers, however, took issue with what they considered Ypi’s excessive use of artistic license: there was no statue of Stalin in Durrës, just a small bust with its head intact.
Just came back from a trip to China, my first in a decade and my first focused specifically on AI risk. Covering Beijing as well as Shanghai, conferences as well as university events, this was a highly illuminating trip from several perspectives. China has continued to develop extremely quickly since my last visit and has grown even more fascinatingly different from Western countries.
About thirty years ago my wife and I rented a car in London. The experience is seared into my memory forever. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and I was expected to drive on the wrong side of the road. It took all my concentration, but I was able to manage, more or less, until we came to a roundabout. I had never seen a roundabout before. Didn’t know what it was.
I was going to write about a recent study [1] on raccoons, where the adaptable little critters were given puzzle boxes to solve in order to access food rewards. On each box there were three small doors with their own distinct mechanisms, each requiring a different kind of manipulation to open. What made this study notable was that, unlike previous experiments where solved puzzles were locked out or removed to focus on new puzzles, the experimenters left the previously solved puzzles accessible to the raccoons in subsequent challenges. The raccoons were able to manipulate mechanisms that they had previously figured out, in addition to the new challenges, although they received no additional food rewards for their extra work. The upshot of the results is that the raccoons displayed an intrinsic motivation to mess around with latches, locks and doors, even when no obvious extrinsic reward was to be had. This will surprise nobody who has tried to prevent raccoons from getting into their property. There is a straightforward adaptationist explanation for this: if the animals find it psychologically rewarding to muck about with things for the fun of it, they are more likely to acquire new information and behaviours that could be useful later. Much like how the intrinsically rewarding experience of sex makes reproduction more likely.
Sughra Raza. Sunset. Vermont, July 15, 2026.
What makes a city? What gives a place its distinct character? I think of the slogan ‘dilwalon ki dilli’ – the supremely banal play on words. It works in the context of Delhi only because of a happy conjunction of the word dil, or heart, with the Hindi word for the city – ‘Dilli’. It works also because it simultaneously tells us everything and nothing. Okay, people in Delhi have hearts; though this might be disputed by many who live precarious lives in this city, the marginalized, the victims of the violence the state and citizens alike often perpetrate on them. In any event, do people in other cities not have large hearts? Still, it is a catchphrase that makes those of us who live in the city feel good about ourselves. As Delhi’s most famous poet would have said, “dil ke khush rakhne ko Ghalib yeh khayal achchha hai” – it is a thought that keeps us happy.