The weekly grief is a literary letter from Tokyo, written by me, Thu-Huong Ha. I write essays, criticism, features, and fiction, and I am currently the culture critic for The Japan Times. Here I am on instagram.
Despite the title, this newsletter is not sent weekly. (In 2022, it was sent biweekly; in 2023, once per season; in 2024, on every new moon.) Themes have included: mountains and weather; language learning; expatriation; seasons and change; locating the normal in cultural oddities and finding the odd in cultural norms; moving, seeking, losing; real and imaginary places.
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“And yet that night we walked nonstop, at top speed…our pace never slackening, while in occasionally unintelligible English the Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines and works no one ever had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that might have been California or Arizona or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place, bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten, or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the 1970s. A story from the edge of civilization, I said. And he said yes, yes, I guess so, yes.” — Roberto Bolaño, Savage Detectives
“My current concerns were, needless to say, all about cracker packets.” — Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job
