Takashi Asahina Beethove

Takashi Miike is an extraordinary filmmaker, even if he works sometimes in circumstances that other directors might find ordinary, such as all of the genres that Miike tackles… which are, by a mild estimation, almost all of them. Name a kind of movie, Miike's probably done it, from family movie to samurai epic to just totally f***ed up way-past X-rated stuff, not to mention all of the Yakuza crime movies that by this time should be coming out of his nose from going over so often. But with Crows: Episode Zero, he found a way to tell a Yakuza story just a little different, by making it about the teenage kids (some of them, anyway) of the Yakuza who enroll in an "extreme" high school where it's basically not about learning anything but fighting and ascending the ranks to become the head of the school's bad-ass fightin' kids. It's the kind of movie that, if you are fourteen and watching it, it's like a near wet-dream of awesomeness. For the rest of us, the movie serves as lots of good fun.

I always approach Takashi Miike with apprehension. He can be extreme, like Ichi the Killer, and he can also put together a good musical comedy like The Happiness of the Katakuris.
What we have here is a return to his roots with blood and gore and maggots, but we also have a good detective story, and a healthy mix of comedy.

By transcribing its haunting Sinfonia for two pianos, György Kurtág gave the early Actus Tragicus funeral cantata by Bach a second life. He was only following good Bachian practice, which was to make the best of what was available to him. In his sinfonias, Bach often reused movements from previously composed longer instrumental works some of them now lost in their original, others still very much with us, such as the Brandenburg Concertos. When adapting the first movement of the Third as the opening gambit of BWV174, Bach added wind and a pair of virtuoso horn parts with a flair and audacity that would make most modern transcribers quail. The album ends with a much straighter transcription of the exuberant hunt music for the horn-led first movement to Brandenburg No.1 repurposed as the Sinfonia to BWV52.

Matsuoka's ambitious first novel is an epic saga of clashing personalities and ideologies in the tradition of Shogun, yet it distinguishes itself from its wide-eyed predecessor with a grimmer perspective on Japan's military culture. Set in Edo in 1861, the book chronicles the arrival of a group of American missionaries (two men and a woman, each hiding secrets) into a land bristling with feudal clans nursing ancient grudges and a central shogunate trying to maintain control in the face of corrosive Western influences (like Christianity).

The year is 1311, in the highest tower of Cloud of Sparrows Castle, a beautiful woman watches from the window as the city is set alight and a mob runs riot destroying everything they can lay their hands on. She begins to write down the events unfolding around her and the secret history of the Okumichi Clan. Six centuries later the lost scrolls fall into the hands of American missionary Emily Gibson, a new arrival at Edo Harbour and racing from her tragic past.