I lived in Japan twice. The first time was a yearlong stay from 1997-1998 in Tokyo, teaching conversational English. The second time was when Heather and I lived in Nara Prefecture for two years, from 2004-2006, on the JET Programme. This summer we returned to our old stomping grounds for two weeks, with Lucy and Ingrid in tow!

Above is me posing in front of the “saru-ishi” (monkey stone) near the ruins of Takatori castle, which is near where we used to live. Have I changed much? I’m certainly much sweatier in the second picture . . .

Instead of zipping all over Japan for our two-week trip, we settled in to a traditional-feeling house (tatami mats! shoji screens!) in Kashihara City, which is where we used to live, and is within striking distance of Kyoto, Nara City, Yoshino, Asuka, and other great places in Nara . . . and many of our friends are still around, and we got to hang out with them and catch up with them! Lucy and Ingrid even did a presentation at an elementary school.

I kept my family and friends abreast of our Japanese adventures through short videos I shared out on Instagram and Facebook. Here they are below!

The first video is something I put together after our first full day. It’s our visit to Nara City, with its famous deer who come right up to you and you can feed (and they sometimes fight each other!), and the huge and gorgeous temple Todaiji with its giant Buddha and various other temples and shrines such as Nigatsudou and Kasuga Taisha, finished off with a splendid bowl of ramen at Susuru Susuran. It was way too hot, though—as it was almost every other day of the trip!

In this next video, we go up Yoshino mountain to visit the off-the-beaten-path Kimpusen-ji temple (home of the ascetic wilderness Buddhism sect of Shugendo) and the nearby Shinto shrine Yoshinomizu, followed by delicious noodles overlooking the valley. We show the house we’re staying at in Kashihara City, and visit a nearby bamboo grove with the mysterious carved megalith of unknown origin “Masada Iwafune”!

In this third video, we explore the mountain vermilion gate maze of Fushimi Inari, hang out with Japanese friends old and new, and hike up to a mountaintop castle ruin (and the statues and temples beyond).

And finally, our friend Fumie takes us to a matsuri and to her house for dinner, we explore Asuka by bicycle (and go in an old tomb!), we tour temples and shrines in Kyoto, Murou, and Kashihara, and have parties with friends old and new!

It was so wonderful to see old friends and visit our old haunts. I will return to Japan again someday!

I occasionally review books for the Wall Street Journal, and I’ve been doing more of it lately. In this weekend’s edition, I review Jayson Greene’s new AI-themed novel UnWorld, a satisfyingly weird and emotionally resonant novel about AI. I write “This is less I, Robot and more Ordinary People . . . humane and refreshingly idiosyncratic.” You can read the review above, or online here.

. . . And I also had an article in last week’s issue, too! They have a regular “Five Best” column in which a writer chooses five books that exemplify some theme or idea of their choice. For me, I chose five books that aren’t technically horror novels, but for me are actually more horrifying than many horror novels. Behold my “Five Best Tales of Unexpected Terror” (online version here).

(I gotta say, that classic WSJ-style hedcut portrait of me has a peculiar horror of its own. Uncanny valley vibes.)

Again, you can read my official article online, but here are some additional musings of a more personal nature about each of these books. They weren’t appropriate for the short form of the article, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

The first book I chose was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in The Door, the even stranger sequel to her deeply strange 1962 Newbery winner A Wrinkle in Time. This shaggy 1970s mix of witchiness, religiosity, and sci-fi was first truly unsettling book I read. The demonic “Echthroi” are “X-ing” all of creation into void, whether tearing holes in starscapes or giving teenaged Meg Murry’s beloved little brother Charles Wallace a mysterious disease in his mitochondria. This sends Meg and her new allies into Charles Wallace’s body—not in a miniaturized vessel a la Fantastic Voyage, but by a mystic journey that collapses size differences between human cells and galaxies. Recounting these trippy scenes, you risk sounding like Bill Hader’s SNL character Stefon (“New York’s hottest nightclub ‘Charles Wallace’s mitochondrion’ has it all: A murky underwater world of mouse-shrimp critters, mystical hymn-singing trees, and cloned school principals whirling in demonic circles”). Trippy and disquieting, you wonder how L’Engle got away with all this stuff in a kids’ book.

I also chose Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which is gorgeously written but deeply perverse. I gave it to my sister Kara for her birthday, and after she read it, she threw it in the trash and told me “I don’t want something this evil in my house.” The editor cut out my mention of the scene where a gang of nihilistic boys get naked together to kill stray cats and ritualistically remove their organs (you know, boy stuff). Maybe that’s for the best.

The third book I chose was C.S. Lewis’ The Dark Tower, which is not the 4000-page Stephen King series of the same name, but rather an unfinished novel discovered after Lewis’ death. There’s a vibe of sexual darkness and grotesque body horror that you wouldn’t expect from the hearty author of the Narnia books—some parts feel like stumbling upon a beloved uncle’s freaky browser history. It’s also been claimed that the manuscript is a forgery, which adds to its illicit vibe.

The fourth book is My Idea of Fun by Will Self, which I picked up on a whim at a used bookstore in Tokyo in the nineties. I was stunned at how ickily compelling it was. Every few years, I reread it—always with enjoyment at first, and baffled nausea by the end. I didn’t have space in the WSJ review to explain how the book gets more exasperating as it goes on, with digressions into a hallucinatory Land Of Children’s Jokes, the launch of an incoherent “edible financial product,” and the ramblings of a therapy session of junkies. Like the journey from adolescence to adulthood that it traces, it starts focused and riveting, and dissolves into something frustrating, chaotic, and morally fraught as you realize the story isn’t what you signed up for.

The last book is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Somehow both addictive and a slog, a page-turner that does everything possible to not be, it gets under your skin and just might obsess you. It’s a haunted house story, but manifested in a maddeningly complicated way, presented as a story-within-a-story-within-a-story based on a lost manuscript complete with appendices, metafictional commentary, footnotes spawning more footnotes, and typographical stunts—complications that imitate the convoluted structure of the cursed house itself. It’s a dizzying and exhausting experience. At the beginning of the book, the narrator promises that after reading it, “a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years . . . Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were.”

Actually, that’s the inevitable fate for every one of us. And what’s scarier than that?

It’s a summer tradition! For the fifth year, I taught a weeklong 90-Second Newbery moviemaking camp at the Treehouse Children’s Museum in Ogden, Utah. Once again I worked with co-teachers Caden and Will (pictured above) to make movies with a full class of fifteen participants, most of whom had done this camp before. By the end of the week we had finished three new 90-Second Newbery movies, plus a bunch of other videos. I’m proud of the work they did.

Thanks to Caden, Will, and all the young filmmakers for a marvelous week of creativity. Special thanks to Lynne, Rob, Wes, Courtnee, Mike, and everyone at the Treehouse who make it so fun to teach this camp every year. (Curious about movies we made in previous years? Check out my reports from our previous camps in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2019.)

Mark your calendars now! The 15th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival will return to the Treehouse on Saturday, February 21, 2026, in which we’ll feature the movies we made this week along with the best movies I received from around the country.

So let’s watch the movies we made this week! This first one is based on William Steig’s 1983 Newbery Honor Book Doctor DeSoto, a picture book about a mouse dentist and his wife who do dentistry on other animals, with one rule: no dangerous patients. When a fox shows up on their door with a toothache, they bend the rules to treat the fox, even though the fox might eat them. But the mice outwit the fox in the end.

This movie retells the story in the style of an intense medical drama like “ER” or “The Pitt.” Instead of a mouse dentist, Doctor Desoto is a human, and the fox is replaced by a dangerous criminal attacker known only as “The Horsehead Chomper”:

Great performances! The actors nailed the hard-driving rhythm of a medical drama, rapidly barking data and instructions at each other during the surgery scenes. And every scene with the “Horsehead Chomper” is an absurd delight. Impressive work all around!

The next movie is based on Robert C. O’Brien’s 1972 Newbery Medal Winner Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and it’s done in the style of a trailer for an action movie:

Brilliant! I love the premise of the rats of NIMH being a Dirty Dozen-style group of battle-hardened warriors. The performances really sold this one, as well as the flashy action-movie-trailer tropes, complete with stock combat footage, quick cuts, and snappy dialogue. Super original and enjoyable!

Another group did a movie based on the vignette “The List” from Arnold Lobel’s 1973 Newbery Honor Book Frog and Toad Together. Their twist? Retell the story in the style of a cheesy Hallmark Channel Christmas movie:

Do Hallmark Channel Christmas movies have hilarious chase scenes? This one does! I loved the daffy, anarchic spiritedness of this movie, and the tongue-in-cheek but oddly appreciative send-up of cheesy Christmas movies.

But that’s not all! The participants also made some fun extra videos that weren’t based on Newbery-winning books. For instance, Beau and Georgia made a stop-motion movie with the medieval-style action figures at the museum:

That’s over 400 individual pictures in that video—a lot of hard work! Inventive and entertaining to watch.

We spent the first day of camp making practice movies as a kind of warm-up. Each movie had to be about a hunt for a specific goal. So these three “practice” movies are about a scarecrow looking for a sheep; a presidential candidate hunting for a cheetah that makes Cheetos; and granddaughters following their grandmother’s clues to find a treasure. These movies made resourceful use of the many sets and environments at the Treehouse Museum, and have an irrepressible comic energy:

Just as last year, at the end of the week we found strange extras and outtakes on the iPads used to film the movies. Caden again took the opportunity to edit it all together into somthing entertaining:

And that’s it for this year’s 90-Second Newbery Filmmaking Camp at the Treehouse! Inspired to make your own movie for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival? It’s open to anyone around the world, parental help is okay, and the deadline is January 16, 2026, though you can turn the movies in anytime before that. And remember, the 2026 screening at the Treehouse will be on February 21, 2026. You can find complete details at the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival website. See you again soon!