Author Archive

(My) 10 Rules For APIA/Hapa Fiction: A Brief Ars Prosae Asianae

Author: | Categories: Uncategorized No comments
Like the Bechdel Test, these ten rules should be treated as the first critical lens that APIA readers (can) use to call out and contest orientalism in publishing while also serving as a mandatory metric by which all readers (can) hold APIA writing accountable as well as the presses

Stories Without Women

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Men Without Women is a familiar, easily identifiable, and oddly comforting book for the Murakami reader, privileging the emotional landscape of lonely Japanese men through scaffolding characterization, personal idiosyncrasy, and monkey-wrench narratives.

Matriarchy and the Tired Assassin

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Much like its predecessor, Dishonored 2 is a steampunk revenge story painted in vintage graphic design tones combining genre conventions of sci-fi, supernatural fantasy, historical fiction, and action RPG into a stunning nine-chapter video game novella that is as gory and interactive as it is inventive and derivative.

Speaking for Everyone, Speaking for No One: The Question of (APIA) Canonicity

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
The Western canon has no objective nomination process, which is why it is both axiomatic and controversial. But why have APIA voices been erased from the so-called “Great Books” for so long, and how should APIA writers respond to this longstanding erasure?

Killing the Messenger: A Dual Interview with Charles Baxter and Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Importance and the Stigma of Didactic (APIA) Fiction

Author: | Categories: Authors, Interviews No comments
Inside the craft-obsessed, time-warped fiction workshop where literary realism has reigned supreme forever, the Show-Don’t-Tell maxim serves an important function in critique.

The Psychopathic Gaze: Murder, Violence, and Misogyny in Natsuo Kirino’s Out

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Out is an exhausting but indispensable blood-and-guts novel that constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.

Japanese Boy Band Saves the World: Postcolonial Masculinities in Final Fantasy XV

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes.