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Like the Bechdel Test, these ten rules should be treated as the first critical lens that APIA readers (can) use to call out and contest orientalism in publishing while also serving as a mandatory metric by which all readers (can) hold APIA writing accountable as well as the presses that publish those works by and about us.
Men Without Women is a familiar, easily identifiable, and oddly comforting book for the Murakami reader, privileging the emotional landscape of lonely Japanese men through scaffolding characterization, personal idiosyncrasy, and monkey-wrench narratives.
Much like its predecessor, Dishonored 2 is a steampunk revenge story painted in vintage graphic design tones combining genre conventions of sci-fi, supernatural fantasy, historical fiction, and action RPG into a stunning nine-chapter video game novella that is as gory and interactive as it is inventive and derivative.
The Western canon has no objective nomination process, which is why it is both axiomatic and controversial. But why have APIA voices been erased from the so-called “Great Books” for so long, and how should APIA writers respond to this longstanding erasure?
Inside the craft-obsessed, time-warped fiction workshop where literary realism has reigned supreme forever, the Show-Don’t-Tell maxim serves an important function in critique.
Out is an exhausting but indispensable blood-and-guts novel that constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes.
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