My rating: 4 of 5 stars Classic McCarthy: people on the road, lawless expanses, sparse dialogue, meaningless cruelty. This is McCarthy before he became famous, this novel dating from 1968. I can understand why you would be drawn to the worlds of darkness he creates. But if you are, like me, drawn to his minor…

On a pleasant Sunday morning in late April, I stopped for a quick bite of onigiri rice cakes at a small urban park in Yokohama, Japan’s second most populous city. That Sunday was only the second day of renkyū, Japan’s season of “consecutive holidays,” which this spring extended to a full ten days due to…