Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leanne Ogasawara studied philosophy with the great Hubert Dreyfus at U.C Berkeley and Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Where has the time gone? She spent most of the past twenty years in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan where she worked as a freelance Japanese translator and sometimes writer and student of Tea. Now, back in LA, she still loves traveling –though mostly in her imagination via books, art and music. Her creative writing has appeared in the Millions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, aPleiades Magazine and Gulf Coast Journal. Her short “Bare Bones” was the winner of the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates. > Email: leanneogasawara [at] icloud.edu
Website: http://www.leanneogasawara.com
by Leanne Ogasawara For whatever reason, all of our conversations ultimately ended with him explaining why some aspect of Japanese culture was somehow extraordinary. And this time was no different. After thanking me for the pictures I had sent of our son, he said (apropos of nothing whatsoever): 日本文化の根底に、草木国土悉皆成仏があります。人間だけでなくすべてに心があるということ。これが大切やね。(At the root of Japanese culture is…
by Leanne Ogasawara A city of heavenly gates, Jerusalem is also a city of ill-fated walls. There are the multiple lives of the glorious city walls, finally re-built by the Sultan of Magnificence in the 16th century; and there is the wailing wall (in my opinion the most beautiful wall on earth) where the Jews…
by Leanne Ogasawara “”If you want to to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and…
by Leanne Ogasawara Ending her dance naked at his feet, the king tells her she can have anything her heart desires. Salome doesn't even need to think about it–for she already knows what she wants. King Herod, mad with love for her, asks if she wouldn't prefer jewels and half his kingdom instead. But Salome…
by Leanne Ogasawara For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. Vincent Van Gogh It is my second favorite essay of all time: C.S Lewis' Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages. First delivered as a lecture in 1956, the piece was later published posthumuously…
by Leanne Ogasawara The ancients told us that it was the heart that mattered. Thinking too much, they warned, will only give you a headache. And this fact was backed up by the finest research of Medieval physicians and theologians. Aristotelian philosophy had imparted to the Medievals that the heart was hot and dry– often…
by Leanne Ogasawara The other day, my beloved and I were wandering around Best Buy looking for refill cartridges for his scanner pen. Walking in vain up and down the aisles, I thought how we are indeed living in an age when consumerism has replaced citizenship. It was somehow really disheartening seeing all the “stuff.”…
by Leanne Ogasawara Not unlike the stories surrounding my favorite Carpaccio painting, my beloved bronze is surrounded in mystery and romance. Utterly compelling, whenever I used to come home to LA, one of the first things I would long to do was to pay him a visit. He is so breath-takingly handsome –that truly a…
by Leanne Ogasawara Premise #1: Not since the Beijing Olympics has a media -generated spectacle so thoroughly taken hold of and twisted the liberal imagination as what we are seeing now concerning Syria. ++ I almost hate to bring it up but does anyone recall the media spectacle when China hosted the olympic games in…
by Leanne Ogasawara According to my Japanese almanacs, of the four seasons, it is autumn alone which is heard before it is seen. This can happen after a windless, blisteringly hot Japanese summer, when autumn arrives around the end of August. Ever so slight, it makes itself known by the sound of the stirring of…
by Leanne Ogasawara From Xia to Shang And from Shang to Zhou…. You know the story: Nine bronze tripods– cast back in the mists of great antiquity– were treasured by ancient Chinese Kings as a symbol of their right to rule. Passed down from dynasty to dynasty– for nearly 2,000 years (or so the story…
by Leanne Ogasawara My old friend C. laments the way “play” is diminished in the West. He says: Western culture belittles play since it represents something very powerful to be controlled. Play represents quite fully: a journey, education, exploration to discover our full nature. To live is to play… and as a adult “play” is…
by Leanne Ogasawara In the wake of the bombings in Boston, Katie Roiphe's post at slate caught my attention. She says: Those obsessively poring over emerging news about the Boston bombers should take a break from their iPhones and laptops and newspapers and read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (and see Mira Nair’s film version…
by Leanne Ogasawara “If God allowed you to go back in time to spend the day with one famous historical person, who would you choose?” He pondered this question in a rose garden. And as he happily ran through his various candidates– “Plato or Socrates in downtown Athens; or how about Nietzsche or the young…
by Leanne Ogasawara Last month here, my illustrious 3QD associate Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) asked the following question: Can America survive what our 1% and their useful idiots and the dems have done to us? His answer, in short, is no. He says: We used to be a Ford economy: at the outset Ford…
by Leanne Ogasawara Cities are smells, said the great Mahmoud Darwish: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons.…
by Leanne Ogasawara Talking about sacred music the other day, the Rabbi quite unexpectedly said, the name Bethlehem means the “house of bread,” or “the house of lambs for sacrifice.” Just think about *that* for a minute. Sacrifice. Whether understood in the traditional ritual do ut des terms familiar throughout much of Asia; or in…
by Leanne Ogasawara There was recently mention in the media of a religious extremist in Egypt calling for the destruction of the pyramids. I first heard talk of this last summer– around the time that the shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed. Holy hoax or not, I could not help but think of Bamiyan. I can…
by Leanne Ogasawara The other day on Facebook, I posted an article from the Atlantic, A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths. In the wake of Aurora, I thought there was a lot that was of interest in the article. But almost immediately the first comment I got was the old…