Category: Featured Writings (Page 13 of 14)

Matsuo Basho (1644-94) is hardly associated with Kyoto. With the Deep North, of course. And with Edo too, where he had his home. Indeed, he took his pen-name from the plantain-tree (basho) which stood outside his hut there. Yet the poet-wanderer had close connections with the ancient capital. He was born not far away, in …Read More

Margaret Chula’s Grinding My Ink (1993) is a collection of haiku mostly written while living in Kyoto in the 1980s and 1990s.  It won the Haiku Society of America Book Award.  ‘Nearly all my memories of Japan center around a ramshackle wooden house on the northern edge of Kyoto,’ she writes.  She lived in the house …Read More

David Zoppetti’s novel Ichigensan was first published in Japanese and won the Subaru Prize for Literature in 1996.  Later it was made into a film starring Edward Atterton, and in 2011 the English translation by Takuma Sminkey was published.  Set in Kyoto, it concerns an affair between a foreign student of Japanese literature and a …Read More

  Here is an update on Kyoto Journal’s next offering, from Writers in Kyoto member Ken Rodgers, one of the founders of KJ and managing editor since 1993. FOOD! Food pervades every area of our existence. It sustains us. It inspires us. It enslaves us. It educates us. It may kill us. It allows us …Read More

Suzanne Kamata has written a paper ‘Sister Cities: Border Crossings and Barriers’, comparing David Zoppetti’s Kyoto-based Ichigensan with John Warley’s A Southern Girl set in Charleston, South Carolina.  In the extracts below, which appear with her permission, she outlines Kyoto’s literary tradition before considering the border-crossing implications in the romance between a Japanese-speaking foreigner and …Read More

The Back Country (1968) by Gary Snyder is an autobiographical collection of poems, covering his youth when he worked as a logger and forest ranger, followed by poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan and India, then a section on his return to the USA where he considers the West through Asian eyes.  The …Read More

The following extracts are taken from Kyoto Journal No. 24, ‘Of All the Wild Sakura’.  They comprise notes from Gary Snyder’s Kyoto journals between March and June 1959. (With thanks to Ken Rodgers.)  Click here for the full Gary Snyder article, which is much longer and has non-Kyoto entries too. ************************* Monday Rinko-in Preparing to …Read More