• far from failed_haiku

    It has been a couple of months since the one of a kind haikai journal shut its doors. I have noticed it to be the fate of several journals these days, and wonder if it has to do with editor-burnout. One does get exhausted with taking care of life while at the same time running…


  • W: Wang Lung, Madame Wu

    The Good Earth was not my first Pearl Buck novel. That was the Pavilion of Women. And that was another W. Wang Lung is a poor farmer, the protagonist of the Pulitzer prize winning book The Good Earth from Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck. His roots are deep in Chinese traditions and he believes in…


  • V: Vianne Rocher

    Its the period of Lent. A period of penance. Of contemplation. Of self flagellation for the parish members of Fr. Francis Reynaud in the little town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. Into this little town arrives a Chocolatier with her little daughter and slowly turns the town around, one chocolate at a time. Vianne Rocher. The one with…


  • U: Uchida Kosaburo

    Uchida Kosaburo is an artist to whom Mameha, introduces her protégé Sayuri. Memoirs of a Geisha. An extremely well written book by Arthur Golden, you’ll never guess that the author of the work is not a Japanese Geisha from the early twentieth century. Uchida-san is an angry artist, patron of geishas, with a mole on the corner…


  • T: Tara

    Tara, the O’Haras’ plantation in Margaret Mitchell’s epic Gone with the Wind. The main reason for the protagonist being who she was and what she did. The thing that she cherished most, the thing that mattered most was Tara. Scarlett was loyal to the land, and the land, in turn, to her. She was not…