The Past is a Foreign Country: And the New Ian McEwen Novel

by Leanne Ogasawara Which do you think is worse: a scenario in which every single email you ever wrote, (including all the drafts) and every last photo and video you ever took, are stored on the cloud for eternity. This is made publicly available, and is used to construct a book about your life. OR…

Garden of Earthly Delights: And Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Standing before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado is an act of surrender. Eyes are consumed by details: naked bodies cavorting in crystalline ponds, human-sized strawberries and a multitude of dripping cherries. There are birds devouring humans, whilst cities are collapsing into flames at the far edge of vision.…

Other Selves

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction this year, Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians is a multi-generational novel about a wealthy Persian family, told from the points-of-view of five of the family’s women.  Starting the novel, I was expecting a fun romp with a group of extremely glamorous Persian ladies. You know,…

Beyond Words: Surrealism in Japan

by Leanne Ogasawara SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral…

Fire Weather: The Wild Fires in California

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. It happened so fast: winds whipping up to 80 mph in Pasadena. And then within hours, Altadena was burning. Thankfully, we were not in the evacuation zone. But we were close enough to be scared. Our immediate problem—beyond the heartbreak of hearing of friends who had lost their homes—was the thick…

In the Footsteps of Du Fu

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book…

Lithium Mines and Flowers

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In the high desert of Nevada, a little wildflower is seen clinging precariously to barren rock. We learn that this is the only place in the world where you can find Tiehm’s buckwheat. And like all rare and understated things, it can pull at a person’s heart strings. Like buttercups or…

A Tale of Three Translators

by Leanne Ogasawara Idray Novey Ways to Disappear Jennifer Croft The Extinction of Irena Rey Haruki Murakami on The Great Gatsby 1. A translator living in Pennsylvania is worried, because her favorite client is missing. And it’s not just any client but the Brazilian cult novelist Beatriz Yagoda whose work the translator has labored on…

Taking a Good Hard Look: Teapots and Bronzes

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. All I wanted, I told him, was “the perfect teapot.” Just one would be enough, I said, but it had to be perfect (1) — as if a teapot could make everything else in the world okay. A seemingly simple task, and yet finding it was elusive as any great chase.…

A Mystery: What the Dead Can Say (And the Little Free Libraries)

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. An avid walker, I like making great rambling loops around my neighborhood. Along the way, I’ve noticed four Little Free Libraries that I must have probably strolled past, oblivious, a thousand times… each is cute in its own way; one built surrounded by bird feeders, another positioned at the perfect height…

A Soft Landing on the Moon and Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. It was the first US lunar landing since 1972, when last Thursday a private Houston-based company successfully touched down in the lunar highlands 185 miles north of the moon’s south pole. We are told again and again: space is hard. I was born around the time of the first Apollo mission,…

Six Persimmons and the Heart of Zen

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. From the very beginning of our marriage, my husband and I have spent an enormous amount of time side-by-side, silently looking at paintings. Mainly the Old Masters. We have many shared hobbies —and the older we get, the more these shared interests and passions tie us together. Even after ten years,…

Terra di latte e miele: Food, Fat Cats, and the End of the World

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In C. Pam Zhang’s new novel Land of Milk and Honey, an agricultural disaster in the Midwest sends clouds of particulates into the atmosphere. Like nuclear winter, the toxic smog suffocates 95% of the plant and animal species on the planet. Famine and societal collapse soon follow~~ and not surprisingly, the…

Robert Frost’s Ghost: The Bread Loaf Writers Conference

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. I walked through woods muddy and wet, feet sinking down into the boggy earth. With each step, mosquitoes rose up in clouds. It felt more like I was forging a river than walking a path through woods. I was told that it was less than two miles to Robert Frost’s writing…

RF Kuang’s Novel Yellowface and Diversity in US Publishing

by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Does the title of the novel make you cringe or what? In RF Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface, the setup is simple: within pages of the book’s opening, two frenemies –who met at an elite university–are having dinner together. Athena, who is Asian-American, has seen tremendous success in her work. The other…

Lost in Translation: In Praise of Learning Languages

by Leanne Ogasawara  1. In Arkady Martine’s 2019 debut novel A Memory called Empire, newly-appointed Ambassador Mahit Dzmare travels via jumpgate from her home planet at the edge of the Teixcalaani empire to the capital. Teixcalaan is like the sun around which all the other planets in the empire revolve. The city of cities, it…

Translating Plum Blossoms 宋徽宗〈蠟梅山禽〉 

by Leanne Ogasawara 山禽矜逸態 梅紛弄輕柔  已有丹青約 千秋猜白頭 Mountain birds, proud and unfettered Plum blossoms, pollen scattering softly This painting but a promise Of a thousand autumns to come The Painting Nine-hundred years ago, a Chinese emperor painted a picture of a pair of birds in a plum tree –to which he then inscribed a poem…