đ§ This week in Japonisme & more links
Hype sweater brand, new fiction translations, Superflat.
One Thing is arriving in a slightly different format today, catching you up on what weâre observing in culture right now. Quick links from Kyle Chayka then a longer theme explored by Nate Gallant.
đ§ Weâre following:
A hyped sweatshirt: An influencer-ish brand called Parke is taking over college campuses and Gen Z fashion habits, as documented by The Cut. Chelsea (Parke) Kramer built the brand from scratch on TikTok and is now selling to the tune of $16 million annual revenue. So if you see the PARKE logo, thatâs whatâs up. A college student in Pennsylvania pointed these sweaters out to me last year as an indicator of generic algorithmic-feed culture, so the hero item of the brand may have already reached saturation.
One great podcast episode: Sometimes I see an episode title on the London Review of Books podcast and Iâm like âfuck yeah.â âHow They Built the Pyramidsâ is one of those. Itâs an interview with Robert Cioffi, a reviewer for LRB but also a practicing archaeologist in Egypt. Delightfully obscurantist and expert, the podcast is one you have to pay close attention to, and here youâll hear about everything from Egyptian general contractors to high-volume brass smelting.
The cruel art market: Rachel Corbett, a veteran art journalist and author, has lately been doing expert and rare reporting on the art world in her new role at New York magazine. Read her on how collectors embraced and then abandoned Black figurative painters, first driving up prices to extravagant levels then leaving the artists adrift.
đ§ This Week in âJaponismeâ
Nate Gallant: If you enjoyed T magazineâs âJapanâ issue, here are a few nice pieces of media that do not necessarily signify the Japan weâre used to on the stage of fashion, aesthetics, and literature. As much as I enjoyed the profile of Tetsuya Ishida and get excited by Noh theater, Iâve tried to collect here some slice of the current momentâs Japan-oriented media beyond very glossy photos of kimono and the refraction of Scandi-ish minimalism in âJapaneseâ colors and textures.
Ian Hideo Levy, the very publicity-shy but brilliant novelist and translator, was very recently profiled by his cousin, a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal. Levyâs novels are quite special for their potential autobiographical intrigue, which came long before the relatively recent autofictional turn, though his books are infrequently translated from his own second language, Japanese, back into his first, English. The exception is A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot be Heard, which I very much recommend to anyone who has enjoyed Minae Mizumura, Yoko Tawada, or Tomioka Taeko, or the âexophonicâ literary genre, more generally. Levyâs work does many things, but arguably one of the most important is a literary commitment to the stalled but particular in-between-ness of living in the Japanese language, more ambiguous than the many 20th and 21st century Japanese ethnocentrisms that maintain a strict idea of who a âJapanese speakerâ should be.
Are you ready to read a novel about the pandemic yet? Iâm almost there, but still somewhat skeptical. I think The Place of Shells, Mai Ishizawaâs latest novella in translation and Akutagawa Prize winner, is beginning to convince me that such a thing is possible. Following a doctoral student in Germany during the summer of 2020, the book is equally about the memory of the 2011 triple disaster in Japan, which, not insignificantly, was a troubling but effective calling card for Japanese literature in translation for some time, and has been forgotten by the short attention span of the market for literary fiction in translation. The bookâs central figure, the cascading, multi-layered, titular shell, offers a compelling figure by which to follow both the rigidification and recurrence of collective traumas, new, old, and ancient.
Takashi Murakami, the most globally famous Japanese artist outside of Yayoi Kusama, is returning with a new show at the Cleveland Museum. The âSuperflatâ stalwart takes a very different approach to the singularization of imagining Japan in the contemporary moment. The show appears to include very familiar, brightly colored, manga-ish pop art staples, but this piece in the NYT is mostly a profile of the artistâs quirkiness. Stay tuned for more thoughts on this one, Iâm very curious but admittedly skeptical of his recreation of âYumedonoâ from the Horyuji in Nara, however the piece is unfinished as of both the profileâs writing, and I have not gotten a chance to see the thing in person.
Did Akira Kurosawaâs High and Low need a remake? Based on the general bent of film production from the past ten years, this doesnât seem to be a relevant question. I would personally say firmly that the answer is no, but obviously Spike Lee, who knows a lot more about making a film than me, would disagree. Lee, now comfortably in his blank check era, has partnered (apparently for the last time) with Denzel Washington to make Highest 2 Lowest, which I think has been described at best as âenjoyableâ by Cannes reviewers. Thereâs an argument that, perhaps, Kurosawaâs signature remediation of Hollywood film grammar into the daring visual spectacle of the original High and Low could be ripe for retelling by someone with a similar eye for repurposing Americaâs filmmaking cultures, but weâll see how it turns out.
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