An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.

A dazzling cycle of short stories by one of China’s most revered contemporary writers and one of the world’s leading artist-intellectuals. An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway’s In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.

The younger sister of a boy who died in his teens of a rare autoimmune disease describes the loving bond they shared and draws on interviews with more than two hundred sibling survivors to consider the complex emotional impact of losing a brother or sister. 35,000 first printing.

Part aphorism and part manifesto, this book by Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD) references his ideas and thoughts about space. He suggests ‘the empty room’ as the very essence of architecture, and ‘the spatial experience’ as its highest mandate. Reza revisits architecture – not as the walls that enclose the space – rather the space in-between the walls. What he calls an “anti-architecture” of invisible voids. Today architecture has fallen short as a discipline and has instead converted into an industry, part of commercial establishment. Accordingly it has given up its capacity to offer contributions and has been reduced to being a service. It has become all about a form-making exercise and dressing it up with a fashionable skin. Now, it is necessary or rather urgent to pause, take a moment, go inward, search for the essentials, and hope to rediscover a principle which is at once basic and timeless.

"In 1960s Karachi, a place of ever increasing violence and political and social uncertainty, a beautiful and talented artist, Tahira, tries to hold her life together as it shatters around her. Her marriage is quickly revealed to be a sham, a trap from which there is no escape. In a world of stifling conformity, Tahira must fight for her very identity: as a woman, and as a painter. Tragedy strikes when her family and friends are caught up in the brutally repressive regime. Faced with horror and loss, she embarks upon a series of paintings entitled 'The Empty Room', filling the blank canvases with vivid colour and light."--Publisher's description.

The younger sister of a boy who died in his teens of a rare autoimmune disease describes the loving bond they shared and draws on interviews with more than two hundred sibling survivors to consider the complex emotional impact of losing a brother or sister. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Inspired by her own experience of growing up too fast among families affected by divorce, Stevenson's debut questions perceptions of sexual intimacy as an endlessly renewable resource and asks if it is possible to simply use it up.