Yuri Chekalin

Yuri Chekalin03.11.2026

The CommentaTHOR celebrates a milestone as diplomat and political commentator Michael Demurin becomes its 100th author. One hundred authors. One hundred distinct voices. And one magazine bringing them together. The CommentaTHOR has reached a milestone worth celebrating: our community of contributors has grown to 100 authors. By the way, the 99th name added to our […]

Yuri Chekalin31.10.2026

Morita-san first appeared near Yoyogi Park in late April. He wore yellow pants, a green jacket, enormous red shoes, and a round nose that, for some reason, kept falling off. Apparently, the nose was the only part of his costume with a mind of its own. Morita would try to put it back on. The […]

Yuri Chekalin24.10.2026

Time moved differently here than in Shinjuku, where it raced along on roller skates, or in quiet Nakano, which always seemed to have been pressed flat with an iron. Ikebukuro was like the worn pocket of a fall coat, where you might find someone else’s fifty-yen coin, a movie ticket from five days ago, and […]

Yuri Chekalin23.10.2026

That November in Tokyo was unusually cold and rainy. Every morning I got up at six, made coffee in an old Italian moka pot, and watched the gray Tokyo sky grow lighter beyond the window of my rented apartment in Gotanda. My contract was ending in December. Soon I’d have to pack my things, say […]

Yuri Chekalin14.10.2026

That winter I turned fifty-four, and I’d just about stopped expecting anything to happen to me. It wasn’t despair. It was more like the way you stop hearing your refrigerator. It hums somewhere in the background. You know it’s humming, but after a while you no longer notice. I translated articles from Russian into English […]

Yuri Chekalin30.09.2026

Whenever I came home, Rei was waiting for me in the entryway. No one else was. I would barely have the key in the lock when I heard a short sound from the other side. “Meow.” Then I would open the door and find Rei sitting on the wooden floor about three feet from the […]

Yuri Chekalin25.09.2026

A smartphone battery drops to 5 percent, and suddenly the search for a charger feels urgent. You leave home without your phone and experience the peculiar sensation that something important is missing. A subway enters a dead zone, messages stop arriving, and you reach for the device anyway. For some people, these moments are merely […]

Yuri Chekalin19.09.2026

At 1:40 in the morning, the March rain turned the neon of Kabukicho outside my window into smeared, dirty streaks of color. She came in barefoot. I noticed her feet before I noticed her face. The soles were scraped raw. Her right knee was streaked with soot and dried blood. A wet trail followed her […]

Yuri Chekalin19.09.2026

Japanese schoolchildren are spending more time with screens than ever before. But the tablet is only one piece of a much larger story—a story about how modern childhood may be changing the human eye. When Digital Childhood Changes the Eye Imagine an ordinary Japanese schoolchild. A smartphone on the way to school. Several hours of […]

Yuri Chekalin13.09.2026

I met her in a laundromat in Nakano at half past midnight. Not the most promising place to meet someone. But then, if you think about it, there really aren’t any promising places. People meet wherever they happen to be when they least want to meet anyone. I was fifty-four, and I’d been living alone […]

100 Authors, One Magazine

The Clown at Meiji Shrine

The Narrow Door

A Confession of Love

A Minor Breakdown

Tokyo of Solitude

Nomophobia And How to Help Yourself

It’s Cold There

Japan’s Myopia Epidemic

The Last Train

100 Authors, One Magazine

A Message to You as We Await Today’s Results

Stalin’s Second Burial

The Clown at Meiji Shrine