Visual artist Kaori Kasai’s world is populated with whimsical creatures, large-eyed children, and androgynous characters. Her paintings and drawings create short vignettes dealing with friendship, alienation, emotional boundaries and our interactions with our physical environment.
As her own website says, “She creates her own world of eccentric creatures and personalities which bloom into the void: gigantic space dotted with tiny, intimate kinships and spirits bumping into one another, narrating signs of life across a dreamt universe.”
Born in Japan, she graduated from art school in Tokyo before leaving to explore the world. …

When we examine the arts, we generally talk in terms of vision, of creativity, even entertainment value. Sometimes the arts thrill us. Sometimes they infuriate us. Hopefully they make us feel. What we don’t often talk about, or even think about, is arts and culture as a component of the business sector and the economy. If we do stop to think in terms of dollars and cents, the image of the starving artist comes readily to mind. Indeed, many artists live close to the bone, often supplementing their art-derived income …

Cy Hisao Saimoto was born in Steveston, BC on April 21, 1928, one of ten children born to Kunimatsu and Kiku Saimoto, who had immigrated to Canada in the early 1900s. The family went to a self-supporting camp in Minto Mines, BC during the Second World War and upon returning to the coast Cy’s father became involved in the re-establishment committee of the Vancouver Japanese Language School—the only building returned to the Nikkei community following the lifting of wartime restrictions in 1949. Cy would accompany his father to meetings and …

As a seven-year-old boy in the Rosebery internment camp, Henry Wakabayashi used to play by the shores of Slocan Lake, which lay just outside the small home that he shared with his family. At seven, Wakabayashi had little concept of the stresses put on his family and thousands of other Japanese Canadians by the expulsion from the coast brought on by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he remembers an idyllic childhood exploring the woods, filled with deer and moose, and making driftwood rafts on the shore of the …

During the writing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japan was shaken by the twin traumas of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack. In the aftermath of these events, he returned to Japan and published his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection after the quake.

This month, Pi Theatre and Rumble Productions team up to present after the quake at Studio 16. Running November 19 to December 5, after the quake is an adaptation of two stories from the book of short stories by the same name . . .