Word: meiji
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...American masters, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. So vast is Murakami's fame that nearly as many books have been written about him as by him. A Taiwan newspaper has even suggested that his visage may one day grace a Japanese banknote, as does that of Meiji-era novelist Soseki Natsume, a Murakami influence. Others he admires, Murakami has admitted, include Fitzgerald, Carver, David Foster Wallace and Tim O'Brien, all of them Americans. Indeed, Murakami's fondness for U.S. pop-cultural references has moved local critics to complain that he worships the West at the expense...
...floating world" remained buoyant until the early 20th century, when the pleasure districts were undermined by the forces of modernization and Meiji-era reforms. The Grand Palais show's principal organizer, Guimet curator H?l?ne Bayou, sensibly stops at the late 19th century, when Japanese artists began to look beyond scenes of city life and toward the countryside. Thus, you won't find any works here by Katsushika Hokusai or Ando Hiroshige, two giants of Japanese landscape prints. Less defensibly, you also won't find much about the enormous impact ukiyo-e had on Western artists, especially France's own Impressionists...
...sounds of a steam whistle and a puffing train can evoke another era. At Museum Meiji-Mura, tel: (81-568) 670 314, they take you to one. Set outside Inayuma, near Nagoya in central Japan, the open-air museum park comprises a collection of splendid, century-old buildings rescued from demolition, linked by historic train and trolley cars...
...movie-set atmosphere of Museum Meiji-Mura is accented by its eclectic mix of 67 buildings that were reprieved from razing as postwar Japan was being rebuilt. You can stroll from the Imperial Hotel over an iron-lattice bridge and through the former gate of Kanazawa Prison to the cathedral of St. Francis Xavier, where couples can still get married. Every building, from old post offices to police posts, butcher shops to banks, is fronted with an English-language plaque explaining its history. Within, dioramas depict life in the Meiji era (1867-1912). Many displays are interactive: a Kabuki troupe...
...Museum Meiji-Mura makes for both a relaxing day away from Nagoya's industrial homogeneity and a history lesson for other Asian cities repainting their faces for the world. The park is the brainchild of Yoshiro Taniguchi and Moto-o Tsuchikawa, a Tokyoite who lamented the relentless modernization of his native city as it prepared to host the 1964 Olympics. Here's hoping a baron in Beijing feels the same about the Chinese capital's fast-disappearing architectural gems...