Tokyo Blog

Last week I picked up a copy of Web Designing Magazine from Parco Ikebukuro. Actually, I’ve seen it in the magazine section of other book stores since, so I think it’s got pretty good circulation. Certainly better than Monocle, which is extremely hard to find in Japan, although it is all in English which might have a lot to do with it.

Web Designing is all in Japanese, but you can certainly get the jist of it, and it unearths some great new websites and profiles some great producers. It even deconstructs several websites in this issue, offering an insight into other designers’ creative use of CSS, XHTML and images. It’s a little bit expensive at ¥1280, but if you’re in the industry, you should grab yourself a copy.

Front cover is by Prismgirl.

TIME magazine’s blog has a post right now, that allows you to submit questions for a forthcoming Haruki Murakami interview. Readers send in their questions, and Murakami will pick 10 from the list to answer. This is part of TIME.com’s famous “10 Questions” feature. The problem is thinking of a question good enough to put to the man himself. If I can come up with one, I’ll do it myself too.

I finally found an English version of a Haruki Murakami book here in Tokyo. I was meaning to read this back when I was in the UK, but I’m glad I’ve only started now. It’s set in Tokyo (amongst other locations), so it’s nice to read a little bit about the city. So far, I’m really enjoying it. I like Murakami’s style of writing, but wonder what was lost in the translation. I’m sure Jay Rubin did an awesome job of rendering the book into English text, but an ambition of mine would be to read the original Japanese text one day.