By Edward Levinson (aka Edo 恵道) hot water bottlememories of motherwarm me 湯たんぽや母の思い出暖めるyutanpo ya, haha no omoide, atatameru My earliest months living in Japan were in Kyoto. It was late fall and getting colder every day. Slowly I got used to the chilly (soon to be frigid) old wooden Japanese houses. One winter morning I …Read More
Category: WiK members (Page 9 of 25)
Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto
An appreciation by Yuki Yamauchi On the afternoon of January 7th, many news outlets such as Gigazine and Oricon News reported the death of Hajime Fukuma, a 51-year-old electronic musician and composer. This followed the official announcement on his website that he had died, aged 51, of an aortic aneurysm on the first day of …Read More
By Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi From New York City, the ink barely dry on a master’s degree in arts administration, I’d come to Tokyo to try my luck as an arts writer. My self-assigned beat became the top floor art galleries of Tokyo department stores, purveyors of some of the finest nihonga paintings in the nation. …Read More
by Robert Weis The most pleasant surprise when I moved to the city from the countryside was to discover that, just five minutes’ walk from my home, there is a wood, hidden and nestled in a small stream valley, miraculously escaped from the frenetic urbanisation that is rampant in these parts. I had often wondered …Read More
Edward Bramwell Clarke in Kyoto
By Yuki Yamauchi Edward Bramwell Clarke (1874-1934), a Briton born in Yokohama, is remembered as one of the people who introduced rugby to Japan, and his name was often seen in news articles related to the 2019 Rugby World Cup. A graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, Clarke was also an intellectual giant. Having …Read More
By Lisa Twaronite Sone I had expected her. I knew exactly who she was, when she came wandering into the old school one day. She saw my janitor’s uniform and realized I belonged there, but she wasn’t quite sure what to say to me. They never are. “Can I help you?” I asked as kindly …Read More
by Stephen Mansfield Once you introduce a concept, aesthetic ingredient, or color palette into Nature in the form of a garden, you stir the wilderness, the primal pot. A space probe does something like that with the universe. It likely never occurred to eighteenth century European collectors and literati, entitled beneficiaries of a meticulous, favorably …Read More
by Stephen Benfey “Last night,” he said, “was fun.” “It was spooky,” she said. “How do you know such spooky places?” “Serendipity. Just walking around and there it was.” “What does ‘serendipity’ mean?” He cocked his head. “Like how we met. Serendipity is when something good happens by chance.” She frowned. “We call that en.” …Read More
by Nicholas Teele The last two or three years, I’ve been experiencing what I call visual flashes. They come on without warning, first with an intensity that nearly blocks everything else out, then stay a few minutes, or a day, or a week, but eventually fade away. These are not hallucinations in the sense that …Read More
THE SHORT STORY COLLECTIVE: 13 TALES FROM JAPAN by Andrew Innes Available from Amazon in paperback and ebook formats Review by Rebecca Otowa This collection of 13 short stories invites the reader to join the author in a challenging navigation of the seas of reality and fantasy. There are twists, turns and illusions galore, and …Read More
WiK 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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