I heard about this Korean mystery/thriller from a book podcast that I listen to and since it combined a murder mystery with books, I really, really wanted to read it. The only catch is that the book has not been translated into English – as far as I can find, it’s been translated into Japanese,… Read More Reading in Japanese: The Memory Bookstore by Chung Myung Seob
When I was in university, I read a lot of Japanese books – after all, it was mandatory since I was studying in Japanese. But after I graduated and moved back to Singapore, my exposure to the Japanese language dropped dramatically; I went back to reading and speaking and thinking in English. But sometime last… Read More My Happy Marriage: The Light Novels That Resparked Reading in Japanese
While I was looking up Japanese history quite a while back, I came across the Shimane Kodai Bunka centre and its small online library. Apparently, the prefecture of Shimane provides a free PDF ebook (link to download page) called いずも神話/Izumo Shinwa and it’s perfect for people who are learning Japanese and/or who know Japanese and… Read More Reading in Japanese: いずも神話 Izumo Shinwa
I’m here with a little review of a really cute book that I’ve owned for a while but never talked about! ベルの読書日記, which the book writes as “Belle’s Library” but I feel is better translated as “Belle’s Reading Diary” is a collection of quotes from various classics alongside Belle’s commentary. It doesn’t make sense to… Read More Reading in Japanese: ベルの読書日記 (Belle’s Library)
I bought a new Japanese book! Way back when I was living in Japan, I went for lessons with Morita-sensei. As part of my lessons, I bought a book on how to put on kimono correctly but I didn’t have anything more general about kimono. So I figured it was time to get another one… Read More Reading in Japanese: Formal and Casual Kimono
Good news: I thought I procrastinated on this for a year, but I only took half a year to read this! Honestly, it should have taken much less time, given that the subject matter is lighter than my other Japanese books, but I pretty much just left the book alone until quarantine, where I finished… Read More Reading in Japanese: The History of England’s Teacups by Cha Tea (英国ティーカップの歴史)
Yesterday, my friends and I attended an online geisha event. I thought it was very interesting, but while I write my recap of it, I thought I’d share a bit from this book that I’ve almost finished. It’s called 中世の遊女 (Courtesans in the Middle Ages) by 辻浩和 Three Myths about Courtesans In this case, the… Read More Reading in Japanese: 3 Myths about Japanese Courtesans (From 中世の遊女 by 辻浩和)
This will be, I hope, the start of a new series. One of the things I planned to do more of this year was to read in Japanese, and I had the perfect opportunity when I was given a stack of books for the World of Genji project. It was pretty hard to decide what… Read More Reading in Japanese: Family and Sex in the Middle Ages by Takahashi Hideki (中世の家と性）