The Staggered Shelf
from Stone Bridge Press
The Staggered Shelf is a weekly newsletter from SBP where we collect important and exciting news related to Japan, publishing, and anything else that catches our eye.
Cherry blossom forecast 2025
Tokyo will see blossoms before much of the rest of Japan, with flowers expected on 3/23 and full bloom on 3/31. Unusually cold weather has delayed the buds in western Japan, which would typically lead Kanto. Here’s a useful tool from Weathernews to find the best time and place to view flowers.
Japan Meteorological Corporation
AAS 2025
The annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies will be held next week in Columbus, Ohio, March 13–16. You can find Stone Bridge Press books in the exhibit hall with Ingram Academic and Professional, booth 218.
Association for Asian Studies
A forgotten 20th-century surrealist
Built from the glimmering elements of his own personalized library of phantasmagoria—ships, mirrors, wind, sky, rainbows, eyes, stars—he generates fresh connotations with each reprise and restatement in successive poems, perpetually encouraging inward reflection akin to Zen koans . . .
Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979) was pioneering artist of the surrealist tradition in Japan. Despite a lifetime of engagement with western art—and direct correspondence with André Breton, the movements founder—his work has only just now appeared in English translation, in A Kiss for the Absolute, translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka.
Reviewed in the Asian Review of Books
Manga or manhua in Taiwan
Japanese manga is global. Its Chinese-language equivalent, manhua, aspires to the same heights. Books from Taiwan is an initiative by the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture that brings Taiwanese literature to foreign readers and publishers.
All told, the 21st century’s manhua boom — some even call it the beginning of a third golden age — has been decades in the making. And Taiwan’s colonial history and complex cultural lineage are an integral part of the stories that many local writers and illustrators are excavating in today’s comics.
To wit, some of the most celebrated recent comics (Wu Shih-Hung’s Oken, Ruan Guang-Min’s A Lever Scale) chronicle figures and events from Taiwan’s modern history.