Eve Kushner

Eve Kushner is a writer in Berkeley, California. A longtime Japanophile, she started learning Japanese in 2001. After adding kanji to the mix in 2002, she began spending hours in the garden with a pot of green tea. As she pored over Mark Spahn and Wolfgang Hadamitzky's massive Kanji Dictionary, finding wonderful words that don't exist in English, she would laugh out loud and feel a joy unlike any she'd ever known.

She started dreaming about kanji. Whenever she felt upset, she turned to kanji studies, which made her feel better in no time. She named her dog Kanji. Before long, kanji completely took over her life, even interfering with work.

Photo Credit: Christina Coto

Kanji (the other kind).

There was no choice but to center her life around kanji. Now she writes about kanji full-time, trying to show that these characters can be fascinating, poetic, and witty, not the source of fear and loathing people often make them out to be. 

From 2007 through 2010, Eve wrote weekly blog posts for her "Kanji Curiosity" column on JapanesePod101.com, and the Japan Times praised them as "informative and entertaining." In 2009, Stone Bridge Press published her Crazy for Kanji: A Student's Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters, prompting a flurry of positive reviews and some radio interviews. She also published an essay in the East Bay Monthly about kanji as her form of spirituality.

Her favorite kanji is 意 (イ), which looks to her like a cute long-tailed weasel. She also loves its meanings (will, heart, mind, thought, meaning, sense) and the way it pops up in words about consciousness. If there's anything as complex and as infinitely fascinating as kanji, it's the workings of the mind, so what's more perfect than a kanji for the mind?!