On Loving “Terrace House” Now More Than Ever
The premise of “Terrace House” is brazenly simple: three men and three women live unsupervised in an immaculately stocked house. (“That’s all they do?” a new viewer asks in a satirical video abo…
The archive
Articles from newyorker.com
Browse articles from newyorker.com in the Akihabara archive.
Watching Tokyo Through the Eyes of Outsiders
I grew up watching foreigners film Tokyo. Three modes seemed to emerge onscreen: the foreign filmmaker who goes to Japan as a tourist; the foreign filmmaker who resists being a tourist…
The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami
I’m a writer, and I’m writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book. When I’m writing a novel, I wake up around four in the morning and go to my d…
Hiroshima: The Aftermath
His grandfather having deposited large sums in the Bank of Hiroshima, Dr. Sasaki went to it confidently expecting a big loan to help him get started. As chief of surgery at the Hiroshima hospita…
Hiroshima
Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, northeast of Hiroshima, as a rendezvous point, and no matter what city the…
WeWork’s Downfall and a Reckoning for SoftBank
What would normally have been a dry, corporate affair was being watched more closely than usual: SoftBank’s technology-investing arm, the Vision Fund, had recently seen some of its investments t…
The Japanese Fried-Rice Omelette That Rewired My Brain
I’d told my people back in Texas that I had flown out to finish a novel. Omurice is a cross between an omelette and Japanese fried rice. Worcestershire sauce (preferably a Japanese brand)2 …
Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry
The rental wife called him Kazu, just as his real wife had, and tossed her head to shake back her hair. “She was acting as a rental daughter, but at the same time she was telling me how she felt…
Why Lafcadio Hearn’s Ghost Stories Still Haunt Us
As lasting as the resulting blindness in that eye was Hearn’s terrible self-consciousness about his disfigured appearance. Somehow, Hearn reached this stranger’s door, where he was handed a…
How Gyo Fujikawa Drew Freedom in Children’s Books
One of the first images in “A Child’s Book of Poems,” a 1969 collection illustrated by the American artist Gyo Fujikawa, shows a boy on a hill, heading to a village under an enormous sun. Text a…