Internationally best-selling author, translated into 30 languages

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Why ‘Across a Bridge of Dreams’?

6 October 2011

Today when the summer thrush Came to sing at Heron’s Nest I crossed the Bridge of Dreams. Have decided on the title for my new book: Across a Bridge of Dreams. The ‘bridge of dreams’ is an incredibly resonant concept in Japanese culture – it’s our short human lives, a bit like the Anglo-Saxon concept [...]

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World’s greatest grilled eel

14 April 2011

Heading for home after 3 weeks in Japan, just as the cherry blossom starting to fall. Chickened out and didn’t go north – though many friends have. It’s long exposure one needs to worry about. A short trip is fine. Instead went south twice – to hotsprings of Beppu, temples of Kyoto, and south again [...]

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Under the volcano; hot is better

9 April 2011

In Kagoshima you can’t escape the enormous looming presence of Sakurajima, the craggy volcano which dominates Kinko Bay. It spews out black ash which hangs in the air above it; when the wind blows west it blows it over the city, when it blows east it blows it away from the city. There’s ash heaped [...]

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In Japan post earthquake to research my next book

8 April 2011

Back in Japan at last to research my next book – but what a time to be here! All the newspapers back home were writing of radiation risks, of water with radiation levels millions of times higher than they should be, and when I e mailed Tokyo friends one at least declared he was on [...]

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

4 May 2010

Have just finished David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I reviewed for the Literary Review. Total fabulous (unsurprisingly), a firework of a book that sparks and crackles along. You’re totally gripped from the very first page! Something that other readers might not know is that it’s also based very firmly in [...]

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Sadayakko, Debussy and the BBC Proms of July 24 2009

30 October 2009

Even before Japan opened to the west in 1853, westerners were beginning to discover Japan’s extraordinary culture. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth Japonisme was hugely in vogue. Across Europe and the United States, people filled their houses with fans, screens, blue and white porcelain, netsuke and samurai swords [...]

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Concubines, courtesans and geishas

9 November 2008

A reviewer of The Last Concubine in the highly respected Literary Review wrote: ‘The author, who lived in Japan for many years, has published non-fiction accounts of the lives of the geishas, and capitalises on recent Western interest in their esoteric, vanished world with her detailed depiction of Sachi’s life in the rarefied harem.’ I’m [...]

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Why are people so fascinated by geisha?

6 March 2008

The word geisha means ‘arts person’ – gei is ‘art or arts’, sha is ‘person’. Geisha are performers who spend five years – as long as a university course – learning to sing, dance, play musical instruments, act and make charming conversation. They are as strictly trained as ballerinas in the west. But they are [...]

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How do you fall in love when your society has no word for it?

15 February 2008

Various journalists have been phoning me up and asking me how it’s possible that in Japan up until the late nineteenth century there was no word for ‘love’. ‘Can that be true?’ they ask. One of the most fascinating things about Japan is the way in which it makes you question everything you’ve taken for [...]

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The Shogun’s Harem

28 January 2008

Not many people know that the fifteen shoguns had a harem much like a middle eastern seraglio (and, if truth be told, so did the emperors up until Hirohito).  The words every young woman in the shogun’s harem hoped to hear were ‘What is her name?’ – the code to indicate that the shogun wanted [...]

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