Sei Shonagon News Today

Combining 11th Century Japanese intrigue with 21st Century sass, SIS Productions and Seattle Public Theater will team up to present the Pacific Northwest premiere of Unrivaled, a tale of two best frenemies, written by Rosie Narasaki, directed by Mimi Katano.

Sosei (844-910), a “waka” poet and Buddhist priest who was one of the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry (Sanju-roku Kasen) of the Asuka, Nara and Heian periods (from 592 to 1185), penned a piece that may be paraphrased as: “The warbling of a nightingale is what I await most eagerly from the morning of New Year’s Day.”

Traditional Japanese handmade paper, or washi, has long been used for everything from writing to decorating homes. A look at its fascinating history, how and where you can make it, and why it’s so expensive.

Egret white coats the pond, the next one too--Helga Stania (Ettiswil, Switzerland)

In 1968, Margaret Ackerman of the University of Arizona authored a paper for The English Journal in which she included a summary of what poetry meant to most of her students: “sentimentality, effeminacy, pretentious diction, circumlocution, and obscurity.” Fifty-five years later, I feel poetry gets the same bad rap.  That’s a shame because, as Ackerman...

Irresistible, a new study by Joshua Paul Dale, is a zanily fascinating, if patchy, exploration of everything from kawaii to Mickey Mouse

  Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere. A lifetime could be spent browsing through the books on art and architecture, the...

Born in the bygone days of the Heian Period (794 to 1185), a time in Japanese history known for developments in arts and culture, shukubo (temple lodging)

Bringing Taiwan to the World and the World to Taiwan

Taipei, May 27 (CNA) Renowned Taiwanese author, scholar and translator Lin Wen-yue (林文月) passed away at the age of 89 in the United States on Friday morning (U.S. time), according to a statement issued by the Taipei Chinese Center of PEN International on Facebook on Saturday.