Hiroshi Okuhara’s ‘Hotel Iris’ is a house of mirrors
The director's film adaptation of Yoko Ogawa's novel, in which Masatoshi Nagase plays a dangerously seductive translator, blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
Culture
City pop: The soundtrack to Japan’s boom years goes viral
A genre of Japanese pop music conjures nostalgia at home and new inspiration for artists overseas.
Sky-Hi: Taking up the fight for artistic freedom
The artist-turned-talent agency CEO says Japan’s music industry needs a major modern makeover.
Theater Commons Tokyo rethinks the ‘voices’ of performing arts in the COVID era
The festival examines radically different ways of creating and experiencing theater in the context of the pandemic, while also challenging the very idea of what ...
Tsukioka Kogyo: The man who dedicated his art to saving noh
The ukiyo-e artist's extensive body of work devoted to Japan's oldest form of live theater has gone largely overlooked — until now.
‘The Takatsu River’: A homey hometown drama
Yoshinari Nishikori offers a relatively upbeat take on a well-worn story of a rural Japanese community in decline.
‘Ribbon’: Non unmasks pandemic frustrations in her first feature
The former “Amachan” actor’s film was inspired by the frustration and anger of young people whose lives have come to a standstill because of the ...
‘Woman Running in the Mountains’ carries on the literary legacy of Yuko Tsushima
Geraldine Harcourt’s road to translating Yuko Tsushima’s stories parallels the writer’s artistic conceits: a fiercely independent woman determined to construct her own path.
Rap takes over Super Bowl halftime, balancing celebration and protest
At Super Bowl LVI, rap finally got the spotlight . . . in perhaps the 20-somethingth year of hip-hop occupying the center of American pop ...
‘Of Arcs and Circles’: Step into the fertile imagination of a garden expert
Landscape artist Marc Peter Keane’s collection of essays experiments with form and offers practical observations as well as metaphysical musings.