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 […]

When I walk out of the little apartment where I live, for much of the year, in Japan, I have to shake myself and tell myself I’m not in southern California. The little lanes are straight, and run between two-storey Western houses with two-car garages and name-plates on their front walls to commemorate their owners. […]