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 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…