It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words I’d first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexicon—words like fascism, global pandemic, and ecological disaster—then settled, with alarming speed, into the static of how things are, I have often felt dizzy and uncertain of how to live. I have felt, as the writer Eileen Chang once wrote, like my everyday life “is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree.”

Sometimes I have consoled myself with what feels like the exceptionalism of our present instability. Has the pace of change—social, political, ecological, technological—ever moved with such hallucinatory, destructive intensity? But this consolation doesn’t reach the more urgent question: While I am being hurled into the scary future, what am I supposed to do about breakfast, and vacuuming, and laundry? When I feel caught like this, between the tidal tug of the times and the calls of my small but pressing life, reading a writer like Chang is what brings me true comfort.

Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang, became a literary wunderkind in her native Shanghai for her stylish and slyly observant stories of city love affairs and romances—“some of the trivial things that happen between men and women,” as she put it, with characteristic understatement—before falling into obscurity after the 1949 Revolution, when she and her work were no longer welcome in mainland China. She was later rediscovered by Taiwanese and Hong Kong readers.

The facts of her historical era serve a healthy dose of humility to my own sense of contemporary tumult: As Chang was coming of age, competing warlords were still trampling the grave of the Qing dynasty. China was fighting the invading Japanese while also embroiled in a civil war. Mao’s Communist rebels were marching steadily in the provinces, preparing to overturn everything. Elsewhere, World War II was raging. All of this historical noise flickers in the background of Chang’s writing—and if you look closely, informs its very core—but somehow, her eye remains determinedly trained on the individual human life, catching and examining those fluttering bits of reality that the tides of history threaten to wash away. A new edition of her early essays, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (and edited by Jones and Nicole Huang), captures Chang’s irreverent voice and her stubborn everyday sensibility. This sensibility, powered by a modest humanism and formed by a subtle and heartbreaking discipline, has become my manual for surviving history.

In 1944, when Written on Water was first published, Shanghai was a city of commerce and fashion and unwilling political entanglement. China’s most cosmopolitan city because it was chopped up for foreign concessions after the first Opium War, Shanghai to this day has a reputation for “mean” and savvy people who know “how to fish in troubled waters,” as Chang wrote. Like many Shanghainese, Chang herself was a “traditional Chinese [person] tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” one of many “misshapen products” of a place where so many ideologies, cultures, and trends met and clashed and melded.

Her life, too, was misshapen by the wild instability of her time. In “Whispers,” Chang divulges that her father, once a favored aristocrat in the Qing dynasty court, was an opium addict who ruled dictatorially over his wife, concubines, and children. Once, he punished Chang by locking her in a room for months, refusing her medical treatment even when she got dysentery; only with the help of a servant did she escape that room, and that household, one “cold bitter” night. Her mother, a bourgeois woman who preferred all things European, left Chang with her father for years at a time while she traveled. Later, when Chang was a student at the University of Hong Kong, the arrival of Japanese bombers cut her studies short, forcing her to return to Shanghai. She was only in Hong Kong at all because the world war had made university in London an impossibility.

But what is captured in these essays is not Chang’s life so much as her way of living and seeing. These are dashes of vivid observation, sketches of whatever Chang happens to want to write about: movies, money, her friends’ favorite sayings. Take “On Carrots,” a two-paragraph transcription of a memory her aunt once recounted over a meal of turnip soup, about Granny feeding carrots to the pet cricket, which Chang thought a “stylish little essay.” Or “Under an Umbrella,” a bite-size riff on a rainy day that doubles as a parable about class. “Those who don’t have an umbrella press against those who do, squeezing beneath the edges of passing umbrellas to avoid the rain,” she writes. “But the water cascading from the umbrellas turns out to be worse than the rain itself and the people squeezed between umbrellas are soaked to the skin.” Her crisp moral? “When poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

Then there is the structurally fascinating “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” which follows the writer step by step on a walk to the vegetable market. Chang describes in fastidious detail the interesting people she passes on her way, as if transcribing one of the lively character drawings interspersed throughout the book (“a tangerine seller,” “a Taoist monk,” “a servant woman”). Then she goes home, writes a poem, and the essay—and the book—ends.

Written on Water evokes a lyric Chinese conception of ephemerality while also alluding to Keats (his gravestone reads “Whose name was writ in water”). As Huang writes in an afterword, the title came to Chang in English first. But for me, it can’t capture the barbed playfulness of the Chinese, 流言 (Liu Yan), which translates to “flowing words” but also means “gossip.” Indeed, Chang relished any occasion to take a “stealthy glance at one another’s private lives.” She declared, “The secrets of everyday life must be made public at least once a year.” She thought literature should “plainly sing in praise of the placid.” She preferred the “noise and clatter” of city streets to “rousing” symphonies. She wished historians would write more about “irrelevant trivialities.”

With this assertion, she opens “From the Ashes,” her account of the Battle of Hong Kong, Japan’s December 1941 attack on the then–British colony. In the essay, Chang recalls surviving weeks of shelling and unhappily volunteering as a makeshift nurse. But what she foregrounds is a string of almost devastatingly flippant observations: the “wealthy overseas Chinese” dorm mate who’d packed clothes for dances and dinner parties but didn’t know what to wear for a war; “hardy” Evelyn who stuffed herself with more rice than ever while rations ran out, and then got constipated; defiant Yanying—“the only one of my classmates who had any guts”—who left the basement to take a bath, singing even as a stray bullet shattered the window. These anecdotes are told with amusement and some gentle mocking, but also with admiration: Here are people who, in a literal war zone, insisted on the small pleasures of living.

Chang defended her trivial stories against those who might wish them more heroic. Ordinary people going about their lives, falling in love, and acting on petty fancies might not make a “monument to an era,” but, she wrote, “people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution.” Chang had no desire to write about “supermen,” who “are born of specific epochs.” Why, when the “eternal”—the grist of daily life that is the only true stability—was right there? She understood the contradiction in her belief: that although everyday life is fundamentally “precarious,” “subject at regular intervals to destruction,” it is also the material from which springs the truly human, and the divine. (Also: “Chest-pounding, wildly gesticulating heroes are annoying.”)

[Read: Great sex in the time of war]

I read in Chang’s determined apolitical gaze a transgressive, feminine ethos. For a great deal of history—and still, amazingly, today—men have shaped epochs, with their empires and conquests. Meanwhile, women have sustained the reality that is accrued in days: going to the market, mending garments, cooking and cleaning, carrying and caring for the people who are coming next. In “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” Chang documents the passing fashion fads—collars rising then disappearing, necklines going from square to round to heart-shaped—as “warlords came and went.” Chang loved clothes and designed many of her own. Fashion is decidedly trivial, and Chang’s interest in it is a powerful aspect of her “misshapen” morality, one way of insisting on something minorly meaningful in a world of constantly shifting values. Buffeted from place to place by war, Chang could control little of her external circumstances, but she could decide, every day, what to wear.

“Each of us lives inside our own clothes,” she writes. We live inside our clothes; we live inside our days. Imagined as a container for life itself, the vanities of fashion gain urgent moral significance. In this light, the dullness of menswear can be seen as a form of depravity: “If men were more interested in clothing,” Chang writes, they might be “a bit less inclined to use various schemes and stratagems to attract the attention and admiration of society and sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the people in the process of securing their own prestige.” Think of the uniforms of men like Steve Jobs or Mao Zedong, who preferred to preserve the energy it took to dress for accomplishing what Chang called “earth-shattering deeds.” Chang was already famous when she published this book, but she distances her writing from this epic realm, comparing herself instead to a child running home from school, eager to gab about everything she’s seen to any available adult.

Can seeing be an ethic, a way we choose to live? For Chang, it was also a way to continue living. To fix a gaze is also to find something—anything—to hold on to amid terror and chaos. In “Seeing With the Streets,” Chang teaches us how to see the reality that can be irrevocably disrupted by history. She walks through the city, observing the displays of shop windows, passing through the smoke and scents of street vendors, and noticing the usual people and things, before a military blockade brings her walk and day to a halt. Everyday life is eternal; in war, the eternal is in grave danger.

Behind Chang’s knowing irony, I hear a desperate urgency. I hear the rapt attention of someone who loves her world and sees that it is disappearing. I hear: What you treasure, however silly, might not be here tomorrow. Chang wrote like the devil was chasing her. It is as if she knew that when the era she lived in reached its culmination, there might no longer be a place for someone like her—a writer between nations, epochs, and ideologies—“in the barren wastes of the future.” “Hurry! Hurry!” she wrote. Hurry to capture reality, as closely as possible; hurry, hold on to it and keep it. Then you might have it for tomorrow, to turn over in your hand, for just a little pleasure, a little amusement, a little laugh, even after it is no longer real.

Freelance journalist Yoshiaki Ogawa, known for his Hong Kong coverage, had attempted to enter the city on Thursday evening.

Yamashita voiced unease regarding Sapporo's bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics.

Cost-conscious Japanese shoppers know various tricks to try and save money. By beefing up on your economic terms, maybe you can get in on the ...

Izumi Yoshida takes the George Lucas Award for her short based on the so-called Siberian Children who were rescued by the Japanese Red Cross Society ...

Kyiv contacted the Japanese Embassy in Ukraine asking for professionals to share their expertise in identifying massive numbers of bodies.

At first glance, the premise of Love Village (or Ai no Sato in Japanese) is standard reality-TV fodder: Four women and four men inhabit a house together, hoping to find love among their cohort. A pair of hosts comment on the goings-on from a separate studio, as on Terrace House, a Japanese reality show that followed six young strangers living together, and Single’s Inferno, a Korean dating show set on an island. But Love Village, the Japanese show that was released on Netflix last month, tacks a caveat on to its setup: All of its participants are at least 35 years old, and most of them are in their 40s to 60s. This changes the dynamic completely.

35 isn’t old. But when I was growing up in Japan in the ’90s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to refer to unmarried 26-year-old women as “Christmas cakes.” The phrase meant that single women over 25 were like seasonal baked goods at the store on December 26: beyond their sell-by date. Today, Japan wrestles with a declining birth rate and an aging society, where almost a third of the population is 65 or older.  Many of these adults now choose to be single and unmarried. The U.S. is on a similar path: By 2030, “older Americans” will make up more than 20 percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau, and the number of unpartnered adults is growing. Through this lens, Love Village’s decision to focus on people who are mostly in the latter half of their life reflects a truth that’s already around us. It’s also one we don’t often see on TV. This will not be yet another show about taut, hormone-addled young adults falling for one another. Instead, Love Village asks us to witness and admire the less commonly shown search for a partner by a 50-something actor or a 60-year-old landlord. And one of the most significant differences between this show and others like it is how its participants talk about sex.

Twelve minutes into the first episode, the Love Village cohort sits around a dining table and plays a game where they have to answer anonymous questions submitted by their fellow housemates. After a first question asking what people’s highest level of education is, the second query asks about people’s most exciting sexual encounter. On other reality shows, this scene might be full of posturing, of participants trying to appear sexier than everyone else. But on Love Village, the crew answers with impressive candor. Some say their most thrilling encounter was with the person they loved the most; another cast member reminisces about losing his virginity to an older woman. One of the oldest in the group, a 60-year-old children’s-book author, proudly talks about the sex she had on the night her first husband proposed to her. She says she felt, for the first time, like she could get pregnant and it would be okay. Though there’s an expected amount of tittering and flushed faces, no one dodges the question. Sex is an artifact of life, their answers say. It was important in previous courtships, marriages, and divorces. It isn’t scandalous or taboo, but rather a part of living well.

[Read: Where sex positivity falls short]

Yet sex isn’t just remembered; it also plays into the dynamics among castmates on Love Village. In a memorable if disconcerting moment, a 50-year-old actor who goes by Hollywood (the cast members use nicknames, not their real names) rants about how attire in historic Japan offered people easier access to one another’s bodies. To illustrate his point, he opens his kimono—under which he is wearing underwear—in front of the object of his affection, a 45-year-old barista named Yukiemon. She calls Hollywood out for being inappropriate—another example of a cast member tackling a potentially awkward situation head-on. But then the scene cuts to a confessional with Yukiemon, who says that although the event was uncomfortable, she feels that, having seen something of Hollywood’s body, he is still the person in the house she is most interested in having sex with.

This moment is a far cry from the euphemistic ways of dealing with sex on a show such as Terrace House, where, when cast members successfully coupled off, their other housemates prepared a room where the couple could “sleep together.” This approach is also different from U.S. reality shows, which can be more salacious while dancing around the practical calculations that people make about intimacy and partnership. On The Bachelor, for instance, sex frequently has a hazy mystique: It’s idealized and implied, but rarely spoken about with Love Village’s kind of nuanced, no-nonsense language. On Love Village, the cast’s age and experience allow for a more unadorned and rational perspective on sex. Yukiemon is honest about her interest in a short-term physical encounter, while also being clear about what behavior she finds acceptable.

Frankness isn’t reserved exclusively on Love Village to conversations about sex. Cast members are just as forthright about other topics that are often glossed over in reality-TV courtships. Take, for example, a moment in the sixth episode when participants discuss how much they have in their savings accounts. As a result of this conversation, Anchovy, a 45-year-old chef, ends his crush on a house member, because he can’t respect the way she handles money. In another scene, a 36-year-old yoga instructor named Yukorin asks the men if they want children. They all answer with vague niceties about wanting to support their partners’ choices, which frustrates Yukorin, who points out that childbirth later in life can be a precarious health decision. She doesn’t just want a yes or no answer; she wants evidence of serious thought to the ways women put their body on the line when they have kids. Just as a successful relationship requires communication about sex, the show implies, it also requires openness about health-care and medical decisions.  

Reality TV is seldom totally unscripted, so its characters’ candidness should generally be taken with a grain of salt. Yet Love Village’s sincere way of handling sex—as well as other aspects of building a relationship—ultimately offers a view of romantic life that is hopeful in its sustainability. Too often, TV depictions of aging go hand in hand with a sort of nihilism, as if once people have exited the age where they could conceivably appear on The Bachelor or Single’s Inferno, a sensual life becomes a far-off prospect. Instead, Love Village reinforces the way experience, pragmatism, and honesty can also lead to romance, which changes over time, shaped by likes, dislikes, and all of the experiences that life throws at us. And then it comes into clearer view: a coherent, confident thing with borders and, fundamentally, a well-earned sense of delight.

Hakuoho, 19, is just the latest in a long line of young Japanese athletes to receive massive media attention. Can he live up to the ...

Japanese regulators begin final safety inspection before treated Fukushima wastewater is released into sea.

Failure to find a television home for the upcoming FIFA Women's World Cup could all but cripple the sport's hopes of mainstream acceptance in the ...