Biographical Notes

AL ALONZO is a native of the American Southwest. He has taught Spanish and Latin American studies at several universities, both in America and Japan. He has also worked as a salaryman in a large Japanese corporation and as an employee of a Japanese government ministry.

KAREN HILL ANTON, born in New York City, has lived in Japan since 1975. Her bimonthly column is a popular feature of the Japan Times, and her collection Crossing Cultures was published in 1993. “Summertime” is excerpted from her unpublished novel, Ava’s Story. She is Director of the Intercultural Communication Center, Temple University Japan. A permanent resident of Japan, she lives with her husband and their four children in Tenryu, Shizuoka Prefecture.

ELIZABETH BALESTRIERI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She came to Japan in 1987 as Foreign Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Toyama University. She is now Professor of English and Woman’s Studies at Josai International University. Her books include The Woman Who Dreamed Japan: Stories & Poems (1994) and Beatitudes/Poems (1997).

PHYLLIS BIRNBAUM is the translator of Rabbits, Crabs, Etc: Stories by Japanese Women and Confessions of Love. She is author of the novel An Eastern Tradition and has written about Japan for the New Yorker and other publications. Her collection of essays about Japanese women will be published in 1998.

CHRISTOPHER BLASDEL is a shakuhachi performer and researcher into Japanese music. He arrived in Japan in 1972 and attended Waseda University. He later returned to Japan on a Monbusho scholarship and finished graduate studies in ethnomusicology at Tokyo Geidai. He presently performs, writes, and teaches in Tokyo.

CATHERINE BROWDER is the author of The Clay That Breathes, a collection of stories and a novella, as well as stories and prize-winning plays. She is the recipient of an NEA Fiction Fellowship and a Writer’s Award from the Missouri Arts Council.

ALAN BROWN first came to Japan as a Fulbright journalist in 1987 and stayed for seven years. His novel Audrey Hepburn’s Neck (Pocket Books/Washington Square Press), which is set in Japan, was the winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize in 1996 and has been translated into seven languages. His forthcoming novel, Landscape with Avocado, will be published by Pocket Books in early 1999. He now lives in New York City, where he is a contributing editor to Travel & Leisure magazine and a cultural correspondent for BBC Radio.

Australian JOHN BRYSON’s first published work was a travel piece about a journey to Japan written while he was a law student. He is the author of Evil Angels, which was made into the film A Cry in the Dark starring Meryl Streep and Sam Neill, and Whoring Around, a short story collection. His most recent novel is To The Death, Amic.

DAVID BURLEIGH was born in 1950 in the North of Ireland. He came to Japan in 1978 and has since then lived in Tokyo. He teaches at a women’s college in Yokohama and also at Waseda University. He has published essays, textbooks, and two books of haiku, Winter Sunlight and A Wandering Fly, and has collaborated on poetry translations.

MEIRA CHAND was born in London to a Swiss-British mother and Indian father. She has lived in Japan since 1962 except for five years in India. She is the author of six novels including The Gossamer Fly, The Bonsai Tree, and House of the Sun. The latter was the first Asian play with an all-Asian cast and production team to be staged in London and was voted Critic’s Choice by Time Out. In 1997 it was adapted for BBC Radio 4. Her most recent novel is A Choice of Evils.

CHERYL CHOW is a naturalized American citizen. She was born in Tokyo to Chinese parents who fled their country just before the Communist takeover. She attended the American School in Japan as a child and returned to Japan as an adult in 1991. She now works as a free-lance writer, translator, and editor.

MICHAEL FESSLER was born in Kansas and brought up in Kentucky. He came to Japan in 1986 and is now living in Kanagawa Prefecture. His work has been published in many magazines and newspapers including Kyoto Journal, Wingspan, Hawaii Review, Ikebana International, Kamakura Monogatari, New Orleans Review, Modern Haiku, and Wheel of Dharma.

MORGAN GIBSON first came to Japan in 1975 to teach at Osaka University and is now a professor at Kanda University of International Studies, where his wife, the poet, translator, and essayist Keiko Matsui Gibson, also teaches. He is author of Among Buddhas in Japan, Tantric Poetry of Kukai (with Hiroshi Murakami), Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom, and several books of poetry. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for Kyoto Journal and Printed Matter (Tokyo) and poetry editor of Japan Environment Monitor.

SANFORD GOLDSTEIN is an American poet, writer and translator. He first taught at Niigata University from 1953 to 1955, and often returned while on sabbaticals from Purdue University. He is now Professor of American Literature at Keiwa College in Shibata. He has published many short stories on Japan-related themes, as well as four books of tanka and translations of novels by Soseki Natsume, Yasushi Inoue, Harumi Setouchi, and others. Works on the Zen poet Ryokan and Shiki Masaoka are forthcoming.

JOHN HAYLOCK was educated at Aldenham School in France and at Cambridge University. In the periods 1958–60 and 1962–65 he taught at Waseda University, Tokyo, and from 1975 to 1984 he was visiting professor of English Literature at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. His publications include See You Again, One Hot Summer in Kyoto (Stone Bridge Press, 1993), Tokyo Sketchbook, Japanese Excursions, Japanese Memories, A Touch of the Orient, Uneasy Relations, and Eastern Exchange. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and regularly reviews books for the Japan Times and London Magazine. He visits Japan annually.

SUZANNE KAMATA was born in Michigan and is most recently from South Carolina. She now lives with her husband in Matsushige on the island of Shikoku. Her fiction has appeared in International Quarterly, Wingspan, Japanophile, Mississippi Review Web, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Yomimono, an English-language literary magazine.

ALEX KERR first came to Japan with his family in 1964. He studied Japanese at Yale and Chinese at Oxford, returning to Japan in 1977, where he lives in Kameoka, near Kyoto. In 1994 he became the first foreigner to win the Shincho Literary Award for his book, written in Japanese and published in English in 1996 as Lost Japan.

Novelist and critic FRANCIS KING lived for four and a half years in Japan, where he was Regional Director of the British Council in Kyoto. He is the author of three works of fiction about the country--The Custom House, The Waves Behind the Boat and The Japanese Umbrella--and of the non-fiction Japan. He also edited and introduced Writings from Japan by Lafcadio Hearn.

JAMES KIRKUP has written many books about Japan. His most recent are Gaijin on the Ginza (a novel), Burning Giraffes (an anthology of contemporary Japanese poetry), and several volumes of haiku and tanka, including A Book of Tanka, which was awarded the 1997 Japan Festival Foundation Prize. He wrote the libretto for the first Kabuki opera, An Actor’s Revenge, based on Kon Ichikawa’s film, with music by Minoru Miki, performed in Britain, Japan, and Germany. His translations are from a variety of European languages and from Japanese and Chinese. He lives in Andorra but returns to Japan for a few months every year.

JOSEPH LAPENTA, born in New York, has lived in Japan since 1974, where he has worked as a teacher, writer, editor, and translator. His articles, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in major English-language publications in Japan. He is a First Rank Master of the Ohara School of Ikebana and works for the school’s International Division where, among other things, he teaches Japanese teachers of ikebana how to teach the art in English.

DAVID LAZARUS, who has lived in Tokyo since 1989, has written for Time, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, The International Herald Tribune, and National Geographic News Service, and he has worked as a columnist for the Japan Times. He is a two-time winner of the annual ANA Wingspan Fiction Contest and the author of Japan, Seriously, a collection of columns and essays, and of The Secret Sushi Society, a book of short stories.

Writer, poet, and illustrator MICHELLE LEIGH was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and is an American citizen. She has lived in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, with nearly a decade in Japan. She is the author of two non-fiction books, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Asia. She is currently living in England, where she is working on her third book.

LEZA LOWITZ is coeditor of the anthologies A Long Rainy Season and Other Side River (Stone Bridge Press, 1994/95), author of the poetry collection Old Ways to Fold New Paper (Wandering Mind, 1996), and coauthor of the film Milk (Fischer Film, Vienna, 1997). She has received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry Translation, a California Arts Council poetry grant, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and an NEH Fellowship. In 1990–94 she lived in Japan, where she was a freelance writer and taught at Tokyo University. She now lives in a small coastal village in northern California.

American ERIC MADEEN first visited Japan in 1983 on his way home from a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Gabon. He has lived in Japan off and on since 1985. An assistant professor of English at a small private college in Tokyo, he resides on the bluff in Yokohama, where he is at work on his fourth novel. His advertising copy has appeared in the Economist, Time, and Asia Week, and his journalism has appeared in The Pretentious Idea, Tokyo Journal, The Daily Yomiuri, and The East.

RALPH MCCARTHY was born in San Mateo, California in 1950 and has lived in Japan since 1981. He is the translator of two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai, Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo, and Ryu Murakami’s novel 69. He has also translated ten children’s books and written song lyrics for Pat Benatar, Rita Coolidge, and Celine Dion among others. One Hundred Views of Raoul is a series of 100 stories, 51 of which were originally published in Japan.

LAUREL OSTROW is a teacher, nurse, and writer. She lived in Kobe until her family was forced to return to the United States by the Great Hanshin Earthquake. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sunday Afternoon, the journal of the Kansai Writer’s Association.

HAL PORTER (1911-1984) was born in Melbourne. His first novel, A Handful of Pennies, is based on his experiences teaching the children of the Australian Occupation Forces. He later served as a Lecturer for the Australian Department of External Affairs in Japan. His other Japan-related writings include a collection of short fiction, Mr. Butterfry and Other Tales of New Japan; The Professor, a play; and a work of non-fiction, The Actors: An Image of the New Japan.

VIKI RADDEN, an American, was born in Germany. She has worked as an assistant English teacher in Japan. Her fiction has been anthologized in SISTERFIRE: A Black Womanist Anthology and Catholic Girls and Boys. Other essays and stories have appeared in the Abiko Literary Rag, Off Our Backs, and Women Travel. She is the recipient of a Hawthornden International Fellowship for Writers and currently resides in California.

DONALD RICHIE is known internationally as the foremost Western authority on Japanese films. He has also written widely on other aspects of Japan, which has been his home since 1947. Other works include The Inland Sea, Different People, A Lateral View, and Companion of the Holiday.

DANIEL ROSENBLUM has lived a total of thirteen years in Japan—first as the child of American diplomats and more recently as a financial journalist. He attended Oberlin College, where he majored in Japanese language and literature. He currently lives in Hong Kong with his wife Tamima and daughter Hannah, where he holds down his day job and continues to write fiction.

EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER is one of the finest translators of Japanese literature. His other works include Very Few People Come This Way: Lyrical Episodes from the Year of the Rabbit, Low City High City: Tokyo From Edo to the Earthquake, This Country, Japan, and Genji Days, a diary kept while at work on his translation of The Tale of Genji.

ALEX SHISHIN is Associate Professor at Kobe Women’s University. He has published fiction, non-fiction, and photography in a variety of journals, including Prairie Schooner, Kyoto Journal, Edge, Struggle, Abiko Quarterly, Asahi Evening News, Printed Matter, the Mainichi Daily News, and the Japan Times.

KATE THE SLOPS is the pseudonym of a Canadian-American writer who has lived in Japan for fourteen years. Formerly a rewriter for the Mainichi Daily News, she is now living in Abiko where she works as an Assistant Language Teacher at the Abiko Board of Education. Her work appears frequently in literary journals in Japan.

HOLLY THOMPSON lived in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, from 1983 to 1986 and has made several trips to Japan since then for research on her fiction and nonfiction works. She received an M.A. in fiction writing from New York University. Her fiction has appeared in Wingspan, Potato Eyes, Printed Matter, and other publications.

FRANK TUOHY was born in England in 1925. He has written three novels, three books of stories, and a biography of Yeats. His first book of stories, The Admiral and the Nun, was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize in 1960. His novel The Ice Saints won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award of the American Institute of Arts and Letters and The Bennet Award. He currently resides in Somerset.

WILLIAM WETHERALL was born in San Francisco in 1941, settled in Japan in 1975, and became a permanent resident in 1983. Since then he has been active as a free-lance researcher, journalist, and writer, specializing in mental health, ethnic minorities, and popular culture. He has translated short stories by Seicho Matsumoto, Kenzaburo Oe, and Nobuko Takagi and is a cotranslator of Oe’s A Quiet Life (Grove Press, 1996). Two of his own short stories appear in Prizewinning Asian Fiction (Hong Kong University Press, 1991). He is currently working on a novel.

PHILIP WHALEN first moved to Japan in 1965 after receiving a grant from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Although best known for his poetry, he wrote the novel Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head in 1966-67 while living in Kyoto. In 1972 he moved to the Zen Center, San Francisco, and in 1973 was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk.