Theology: Theology of the Pain of God by Kazoh Kitamori.

This little book never ceases to astonish me. The only work of the prolific Japanese Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori to be translated into English, it has enjoyed episodic vogues before vanishing into obscurity again. To my mind, it should be a standard in every seminary curriculum. Kitamori argues for the “pain of God” as the cost of being truly righteous and truly merciful, the inmost reality of the holy Trinity in the work of creation, salvation, and new creation. Drawing on prophetic literature of the Old Testament, classical Lutheran christology, and Japanese traditions from kabuki to Pure Land Buddhism, Kitamori argues the case of divine enemy love against the stalemate between the “banal universalism” of liberal Protestantism and a hardcore Barthianism that loses the gospel in the law. I love this book so much that it was the topic of the eighth episode ever that Dad and I did for Queen of the Sciences.

Cookbook: Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh.

I knew about and pined for this cookbook long before I moved to Japan. The problem was, I never lived anywhere that even the pantry basics of Japanese cooking were anything but prohibitive in cost. Needless to say, this was my first purchase once we decided to move to Tokyo. Andoh brings a lifetime of experience in Japanese home cooking, formal culinary training, and extensive teaching to translate traditional Japanese cuisine to a Western audience. The introductory material on ingredients and techniques alone is worth the price of the book! The recipes are extremely detailed to a degree I haven’t seen in any other Japanese cookbook. And that is no small thing: I have taught myself lots of other cuisines with little guidance, but Japanese cooking isn’t one I could figure out how to achieve or even understand what I was aiming for without Andoh’s guidance. While I’m at it, full disclosure: not long after moving here I signed up for one of her workshops and have since served as her assistant in others! She’s a great teacher and has a wealth more material on her website.

Novel: The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi.

I know, I know, you were expecting Silence by Shusaku Endo, right? But see, you already knew about it, so you don’t need my recommendation. (Though if you’d like to know what I think about it, have a look here.) The fact is, my light-reading genre of choice is the good ol’ murder mystery, as my most recent issue of Theology & a Recipe on Miss Marple’s Low Anthropology attests. I have made no headway whatsoever with the literary fiction of Japan, which strikes me as unbearably bleak, but I have come to love Japan’s appropriation of the detective novel. Seishi Yokomizo writes the Japanese equivalent of Golden Era mysteries, complete with rural estates and locked rooms, but here I’m giving special kudos to Akimitsu Takagi’s The Tattoo Murder. It’s built around the Japanese subculture of the full-body tattoo and is set just after the war, in a Tokyo that both is and is not familiar to me. Creepy, unsettling, evocative, and a great read. If you find yourself craving more Japanese crime after this, both Pushkin Vertigo and Soho Crime have a good catalogue of translations.