In his great book of changes and home-made koans, Silence, John Cage defines the purpose of music. “Music is edifying,” the devoted student of D.T. Suzuki wrote, “for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements (Meister Eckhart), and its work fills one with […]

I wake up in my bed at home and know the time without looking at my watch. Thick fog is blanketing the city below, which seems a potent metaphor. I walk in my sleep up the stairs to the kitchen and almost reflexively get out some tea bags, heat some water. I shower and shave […]

Japanese literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” […]

Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, fifty years on, to look back at the work of Mailer and others in the 1960s—from The Presidential Papers to The Armies of the Night—and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the republic from itself and […]

I step into the great vaulted space, and very soon I am greeted by a voice, which lifts and penetrates me all at once. It issues from a tiny figure at the far end of the candled building—Vietnamese, I suspect, of indeterminate age, and singing in a language I can barely follow. She is dressed […]

It is the light, on summer evenings, drifting on till 9:00 p.m. or later, and slanting above the elms, the musky river; it is the scratchy small of grass, the thunk of bat on cricket ball. It is the flow of a brackish stream, the twittery, gnattish nothingness that is a drowsy English town on […]

“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy-editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes onscreen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up […]

Last year, I flew to Singapore to join Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising folks on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived at the Crowne Plaza next to Changi Airport’s Terminal 3—some of the conference’s guests had flown in that morning, […]

One Japanese individual commits suicide every fifteen minutes. More than a million Japanese people are hikikomori, meaning that they almost never leave the house. Even as the country is suffering through one recession after another—shuttered stores seem to be as common as departing prime ministers—the social fabric of my adopted home, sustained and refined over […]

“What am I afraid of ?” I asked myself not long ago. Not many things. A traveller can’t afford to carry fears with him, leaping into the unknown on every trip. The only things I could think of were snakes, which sometimes fill my dreams–and heights, which induce in me a mad impulse to take […]