Japan’s Literary Treasures

Genji’s People: Customs of the Heian Nobility (3)

29 March 2019 

One of the pleasures of reading Japanese books is the chance to learn about local culture and customs. Usually there are enough points of similarity between the reader’s milieu and the scenes depicted in the story to ease the process along. With a work like The Tale of Genji, however, written over 1,000 years ago about and for the aristocrats of the Heian period (794–1185), there is even more distance from the modern non-Japanese reader. A basic idea of customs among the nobility of the time helps in understanding the story.

 

Japan’s Literary Treasures

Murasaki Shikibu: A Thousand Years of Anonymous Fame (4)

Richard Medhurst

7 November 2018

A millennium ago, Murasaki Shikibu’s keen observations of the Japanese aristocracy and court bore fruit in her literary works, including the masterpiece The Tale of Genji.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

 Joker: Folie à Deux

Quentin Tarantino praises flop Joker sequel: ‘I really, really liked it’

Writer-director shows support for critically maligned and commercially disastrous musical follow-up to 2019 hit

Benjamin Lee

Tuesday 29 October 2024

“Murasaki Shikibu and Fujiwara no Michinaga”: Literature and Power in the Heian Court (5)

Takino Yūsaku

9 February 2024

Fictional portrayals of author Murasaki Shikibu and statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga often depict the two as intimates or even lovers. A new book seeks out the truth about these major historical figures from Japan’s Heian period.

Japan’s Literary Treasures

The Evolution of “The Tale of Genji” (1)

 Shimauchi Keiji 

20 SEPTEMBER 2019

Over the centuries since it was written, The Tale of Genji has found ongoing relevance through the new interpretations of critics reacting to the spirit of the age.

 

Medical workers at the entrance to the Lebanese People's Aid hospital in Nabatieh, October 17.DANIEL CARDE

CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel replicates Gaza model in Lebanon: Ambulances and hospitals are legitimate targets

Six percent of those killed in the country by Israeli fire in the last year are emergency personnel. The number has now reached 168, mainly medical workers and firefighters

 

Voting count in the primary elections in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas (Venezuela) on October 22, 2023.MATIAS DELACROIX (AP)

A milestone that changed the history of Venezuela

María Corina Machado recalls the primary elections that a year ago made her the leader of the opposition to the government of Nicolás Maduro

MARÍA CORINA MACHADO

OCT 22, 2024 - 05:36 

 

Nicolás Maduro arrives at the BRICS summit at Kazan airport, Russia, on October 22.ALEXANDER VILF/BRICS-RUSSIA2024. (VIA REUTERS)

VENEZUELA

The solitude of Nicolás Maduro

Venezuela’s president traveled to Kazan in search of legitimacy, but returns without joining the bloc of countries aligned against the West and amid a diplomatic war with Brazil that further complicates his role in the international community

Jane Rosenberg / Sketch artist of the condemned: ‘We love to see the rich and famous fall’

 

Jane Rosenberg, courtroom artist.© JEFFERSON SIEGEL

Jane Rosenberg, sketch artist of the condemned: ‘We love to see the rich and famous fall’ 

With more than four decades of experience, she has published a retrospective of the legal cases that have marked American society: from Donald Trump to ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán

 

One of the letters written by El Chapo and a court illustration during his trial.REUTERS

JOAQUIN 'EL CHAPO' GUZMAN

El Chapo plays his last cards from prison: ‘The inefficiency of my lawyers cost me my freedom’

Since January, the notorious drug trafficker has taken on his own defense, despite not speaking or writing in English, as he navigates his new life behind bars. He has requested more visits with his wife, Emma Coronel, and demanded a retrial

Quotes / My Life

 

MY LIFE

“My life before was full of happiness. I would give anything — money, property, job — to have my family safe and alive. I lost my very dearest ones, and nothing can ever bring them back again.”
— Wael Ayesh, 50, who before the war ran a Gaza City beach cafe. His wife and three of his sons, aged 2 to 14, were killed in a bombing in January, after which, their bodies lay under rubble for 35 days

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Quotes / Lord Byron / Hatred

 

Lord Byron by George Henry Harlow

Lord Byron

«Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste, but they detest at leisure»

Isabelle Huppert

Interview

Isabelle Huppert: ‘I was never the woman behind the man… the only place I could take was the main place’

This article is more than 7 months old

As brings to London a 90-minute monologue about Mary, Queen of Scots, the celebrated French actor talks about her extraordinary career, and why she’d love to make a film in the UK – or play a Marvel villain. Below, Guy Lodge chooses her finest screen appearances


Sarah Crompton
Sun 24 Mar 2024 07.00 GMT

‘I never really learned anything from anybody’: Isabelle Huppert on 50 years in film

Isabelle Huppert
Photo by Peter Lindberg

THE READER INTERVIEW

‘I never really learned anything from anybody’: Isabelle Huppert on 50 years in film

As told to Andrew Pulver

Thursday 24 October 2024

François Ozon is a great director and 8 Women was a fantastic film. What brought you to work with him again for The Crime Is Mine? BenderRodriguez

I loved doing 8 Women and I just saw his last film in San Sebastián, When Fall Is Coming, and it’s really great. He’s very versatile. He goes from one style to the other, like a French Stephen Frears. The Crime Is Mine is more in the line of 8 Women. It’s a comedy, an adaptation of an old play that he turned into more contemporary material; something more feminist and more updated. He’s very vivid and he’s very, very, very fast, so when you work with him he gives you a certain kind of energy.

Isabelle Huppert’s Art of Expression

 

Isabelle Huppert’s Art 

of Expression

The French movie star, who plays a French movie star in “Frankie,” likes to parse paintings and words with the help of Google Translate.

Michael Schulman
November 4, 2019

Isabelle Huppert, the French movie star, marched across the little bridge from Madison Avenue into the Met Breuer, opened and shut her handbag for a security guard, and disappeared into a stairwell. The filmmaker Ira Sachs tried to keep up. “The stairwells here are famous,” he called out. Up a few flights, Huppert frowned at a taped-off door. “This floor is closed,” she said, then continued upward.

Kafka by Luis Scafatti

Review

What we learn about Kafka from his uncensored diaries

This article is more than 5 months old

On the centenary of his death, a new English translation of the great writer’s journals reveals some surprising details

Stuart Jeffries

Wednesday 1 May 2024

A

fter his death on 3 June 1924, a letter was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Dear Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.”

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

Franz Kafka

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

This article is more than 5 months old

His uncensored journals disclose a messier, more sexual, complex figure – and reveal much about the process of writing

Chris Power

Wednesday 24 April 2024

 

In the late summer of 1917, following the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within a decade, Franz Kafka went to stay with his sister in the Bohemian countryside. During this unexpectedly calm period in an otherwise perennially besieged life, he wrote a series of aphorisms. One of them runs: “The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.”

 

Franz Kafka letter shows author’s anguished struggle with writer’s block

This article is more than 3 months old

Letter to friend and publisher Albert Ehrenstein, to be auctioned in June, details struggle to write at time of tuberculosis diagnosis

Kate Connolly in Berlin

Monday 3 June 2024

A rare letter written by Franz Kafka to his publisher shows just how anguished a struggle it was for the Bohemian writer to put pen to paper, especially as his health deteriorated.

 

Gary Oldman

Review

Bram Stoker’s Dracula review – Gary Oldman is Pierrot from hell in blood-red 90s take

This article is more than 2 years old

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 all-star retelling features an outstanding performance from Oldman as the tormented count

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 5 October 2024

Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire tale is now revived in cinemas for its 30th anniversary, with Gary Oldman the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess (played by Winona Ryder). Dressed like the Pierrot from hell in his vast Transylvanian castle, Dracula then buys property in Victorian London, and appears there in the style of a sinister young dandy, on the scent of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: the winsome Mina (Ryder again), fiancee to the equally demure young lawyer who journeyed to Romania to draw up Dracula’s contracts: Jonathan, played by Keanu Reeves.