Considering Sōseki’s「京に着ける夕」”Kyō ni tsukeru yūbe” as a haibunBy Richard Donovan In the first part of Natsume Sōseki’s account of a visit to Kyoto in the spring of 1907, the author and his hosts run their rickshaws ever further north. At the same time, Sōseki and his thoughts rush onwards across the psychological terrain of memory and …Read More
Category: Featured Writings (Page 3 of 14)
Featured writing
by Preston Keido Houser There once was a monk from Tangier Whose prayers left him nothing to hear But by embracing the violence Of interminable silence Did a mantra appear to his ear There once was a monk from Bayonne Who was blind to the beam he was shown But by loving his eyes Did …Read More
Meet Your Inner Witch in Just Five Easy Stepsby Marianne Kimura Introduction: I’ve had to find out a lot about witches in the course of writing academic pieces about Shakespeare’s plays with witches, such as Macbeth, or in which some sort of magic occurs, like The Winter’s Tale. From my gleanings, I wrote this brief …Read More
A SINGLE THREADJames Woodham a single threadthe spider’s leaving light travelling along it breeze sliding it back a whiteness of wings –from the shore a heron liftsaway on water *********** egret takes to airwingtips grazing the lakegliding on shadow *********** a piece of the dusk breaks off and takes to the airbecoming heron leaves hardly movingfrom the depths of the blue …Read More
Here Comes Kenji by Kevin Ramsden It was late on a weekday afternoon, and James was nearly two-thirds into his second beer of the day. Raising his head from the reading of his newspaper, he gazed absently around the barely populated bar he was sat in, properly taking in his surroundings for the first time. …Read More
Western Writers in/on Kyoto[A highly subjective and selective account…]By Ken Rodgers The first Europeans to set foot in Kyoto, in 1551, were the missionaries Francis Xavier and Juan Fernandez, seeking selfies with the Emperor Go-Nara, during the later throes of the Sengoku period of warring states. Not a good time in the old capital. Xavier …Read More
Book Review of Tokyo: A Biography by Stephen Mansfield (208 pages) Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City Reviewer: Ian Yates Tokyo, the city, the metropolis, the legend, has always been overpowering to me. It has intimidated and frightened me by its vastness. This fear morphed into disdain and a belief that …Read More
A small group of us met at Keage Station and began the walk up to Agon-shu’s huge Hoshi Matsuri event in the hills above Kiyomizu-dera. I’d been wanting to go for years, but always seemed to hear about it afterward, usually in that half-page ad in the Japan Times that the sect shells out big …Read More
a year in review — a haphazard collection of unruly short verse by Lisa Wilcut SPRING blossoms assembling to view springtime crowds below–– beckoned by sake, smoke and laughter the whole body of the bird on the ledge vibrating with the effort of each note down to its last …Read More
The following poem, a contemporary take on the Californian Dream, was delivered at the 2019 bonenkai by Preston Keido Houser, who followed it up with a shakuhachi piece in lighter vein. A villanelle is a fixed-form poem consisting of five tercets and a quatrain and follows a specific rhyme scheme using only two different sounds. …Read More
Kyoto Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
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