Special Features – Online

While Kyoto Journal is basically a print magazine, some specially featured material appears only on the website....

The Man Who Believed in Fairy Tales
by Ho Anh Thai
trans. Ho Anh Thai & Wayne Karlin

That morning, waking up in the United States, I was frightened to find that I had turned into an American. Both the bathroom and the bedroom mirrors—two severely realistic rectangles that refused to flatter anyone facing them—assaulted my eyes with the face of a guy with blue eyes and an aquiline nose. The image I saw, if decked out with a wide-brimmed hat and frayed leather vest, could pass anywhere for a genuine cowboy.

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Alone With Your Self: The Hermit Experience
An Interview with Edward (Ted) A. Burger, director of Amongst White Clouds
by Lauren Deutsch

Looking Back at the Tet Offensive
Donald Kirk

The lunar new year conjures memories of a lunar new year 40 years ago in February 1968 when some of us were covering the Tet offensive as it raged across the land we knew as “South” Vietnam. I was in a bunk in the U.S. Marine Press Center in Danang the day before Tet, when we heard rockets exploding and small arms fire crackling down the street. The rockets were all “incoming.”

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Donald Kirk, KJ contributing editor, covered Vietnam first for the old Washington (D.C.) Star and then for the Chicago Tribune. He also wrote numerous articles for The New Leader, The New York Times Magazine and others as well as two books on the war, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, 1971, and Tell it to the Dead: Memories of a War, 1975, republished in expanded form in 1996 as Tell it to the Dead: Stories of a War.

Peace Hotel
Wayne Karlin
(an extract from forthcoming novel, Marble Mountain)

Kiet walked out of the terminal. The heat slapped her, the sun blinding her, so that the people milling if front of the exit doors were at first a blurry, shifting mass that slowly distilled into individual faces: cone-hatted, baseball-capped, bare-headed, her own mirrored face breaking into a thousand reflecting shards. A taxi-driver reached for her bag, and she showed him the address of the mini-hotel she had booked, the Hoa Binh.

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"Peace Hotel" and “The Stone Carver” (published in KJ #68) are extracts from the novel Marble Mountain, to be published in 2008. In 1973, author Wayne Karlin contributed to and co-edited the first anthology of fiction by U.S. Vietnam veterans, Free Fire Zone. In 1995 he co-edited and contributed to The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, with Le Minh Khue & Truong Vu, an anthology covering all sides of the war.

Supplication

For freedom, make me an albatross
Wings embracing the wind
Curving between the waves and sky

For constraint, make me a tree
A juniper, rooted in stone
Ancient upon the mountainside

For ignorance, make me a person
Such as I am
Lifelong student of the wrong things

For wisdom, make me a person
Again, a person
Lifelong student of the wrong things

–Pepper Trail
(See also website and Earth Precepts)

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Online Special: Profile

Pico Iyer is Lost
by Mark Mordue

Photo by Derek Shapton ©

Pico Iyer is lost. It’s a condition he uses to great effect in his increasingly internalised travel books as we find him on the road to somewhere he’s not sure of. Wandering through dark and foreign backstreets or along paths tinged with feral emptiness, sensitised to a world in which he almost always appears to be, even in the company of such luminary figures as Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama, somewhat alone in spirit.“For me,” Iyer says, “being a traveller means setting yourself new challenges even when you are sitting at your desk.”

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Mark Mordue is the author of Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Hawthorne Books; Portland USA). He contributed "Lightning Storm Over Calcutta" to KJ#61, and "Roadkill" to KJ#65. This article first appeared in Planet magazine.