Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leanne Ogasawara studied philosophy with the great Hubert Dreyfus at U.C Berkeley and Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Where has the time gone? She spent most of the past twenty years in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan where she worked as a freelance Japanese translator and sometimes writer and student of Tea. Now, back in LA, she still loves traveling –though mostly in her imagination via books, art and music. Her creative writing has appeared in the Millions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, aPleiades Magazine and Gulf Coast Journal. Her short “Bare Bones” was the winner of the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates. > Email: leanneogasawara [at] icloud.edu
Website: http://www.leanneogasawara.com
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. A man sits unsettled on a wintry Paris afternoon, when his mother offers him some tea—along with a small little cake, shaped like a shell. Perhaps it is the most famous cake in literary history, for the moment he tastes the madeleine, softened in the tea, he is, in that instant,…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Maybe this is something that happens when you reach a certain age? But lately, I’ve found myself yearning to revisit things like paintings and books. Ones I loved when I was young. Like standing before Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino in the Uffizi again. I was nineteen when I first saw the…
by Leanne Ogasawara Which do you think is worse: a scenario in which every single email you ever wrote, (including all the drafts) and every last photo and video you ever took, are stored on the cloud for eternity. This is made publicly available, and is used to construct a book about your life. OR…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Standing before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado is an act of surrender. Eyes are consumed by details: naked bodies cavorting in crystalline ponds, human-sized strawberries and a multitude of dripping cherries. There are birds devouring humans, whilst cities are collapsing into flames at the far edge of vision.…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction this year, Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians is a multi-generational novel about a wealthy Persian family, told from the points-of-view of five of the family’s women. Starting the novel, I was expecting a fun romp with a group of extremely glamorous Persian ladies. You know,…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. “You can’t fall that far in Japan.” Writer and photographer Craig Mod arrived in Tokyo when he was only nineteen. In many ways, he was already running. Running from a challenging childhood, running from bullies. And running from that feeling like he was always just one step away from disaster because…
by Leanne Ogasawara SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. It happened so fast: winds whipping up to 80 mph in Pasadena. And then within hours, Altadena was burning. Thankfully, we were not in the evacuation zone. But we were close enough to be scared. Our immediate problem—beyond the heartbreak of hearing of friends who had lost their homes—was the thick…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In the high desert of Nevada, a little wildflower is seen clinging precariously to barren rock. We learn that this is the only place in the world where you can find Tiehm’s buckwheat. And like all rare and understated things, it can pull at a person’s heart strings. Like buttercups or…
by Leanne Ogasawara Idray Novey Ways to Disappear Jennifer Croft The Extinction of Irena Rey Haruki Murakami on The Great Gatsby 1. A translator living in Pennsylvania is worried, because her favorite client is missing. And it’s not just any client but the Brazilian cult novelist Beatriz Yagoda whose work the translator has labored on…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. All I wanted, I told him, was “the perfect teapot.” Just one would be enough, I said, but it had to be perfect (1) — as if a teapot could make everything else in the world okay. A seemingly simple task, and yet finding it was elusive as any great chase.…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. An avid walker, I like making great rambling loops around my neighborhood. Along the way, I’ve noticed four Little Free Libraries that I must have probably strolled past, oblivious, a thousand times… each is cute in its own way; one built surrounded by bird feeders, another positioned at the perfect height…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. It was the first US lunar landing since 1972, when last Thursday a private Houston-based company successfully touched down in the lunar highlands 185 miles north of the moon’s south pole. We are told again and again: space is hard. I was born around the time of the first Apollo mission,…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. From the very beginning of our marriage, my husband and I have spent an enormous amount of time side-by-side, silently looking at paintings. Mainly the Old Masters. We have many shared hobbies —and the older we get, the more these shared interests and passions tie us together. Even after ten years,…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In C. Pam Zhang’s new novel Land of Milk and Honey, an agricultural disaster in the Midwest sends clouds of particulates into the atmosphere. Like nuclear winter, the toxic smog suffocates 95% of the plant and animal species on the planet. Famine and societal collapse soon follow~~ and not surprisingly, the…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. I walked through woods muddy and wet, feet sinking down into the boggy earth. With each step, mosquitoes rose up in clouds. It felt more like I was forging a river than walking a path through woods. I was told that it was less than two miles to Robert Frost’s writing…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. Does the title of the novel make you cringe or what? In RF Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface, the setup is simple: within pages of the book’s opening, two frenemies –who met at an elite university–are having dinner together. Athena, who is Asian-American, has seen tremendous success in her work. The other…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. In Arkady Martine’s 2019 debut novel A Memory called Empire, newly-appointed Ambassador Mahit Dzmare travels via jumpgate from her home planet at the edge of the Teixcalaani empire to the capital. Teixcalaan is like the sun around which all the other planets in the empire revolve. The city of cities, it…
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. I was nineteen when I first saw Venice. My college boyfriend and I had taken an overnight train from Vienna and arrived in the mist of early morning. It was late summer. This was at the tail end of almost three months in India, where I saw my fill of glorious…