Oblique — Issue 01

In the summer of 2002, I was a college student in Seoul when the whole country was living the crazy World Cup moment. Millions of us gathered on the streets, in plazas, along the Han River — wearing red, watching giant screens, making sounds that I have never heard a city make before or since. 

While everyone was enjoying and celebrating outside, things were still happening in the cinemas for those who wanted to have their own moments. In the record shops. In the darkrooms. In the quieter, stranger corners of Seoul and Tokyo, where some of the most important cultural work of the decade was being made, largely unnoticed, while the world's cameras pointed elsewhere.

The 2026 World Cup that’s happening in America right now brings me back to that summer. Not just for football. But also for things that we might have missed. 

— Yubin

In May this year, Park Chan-wook presided over the jury at Cannes. The fact that he arrived at this prestigious position from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is either deeply ironic or entirely fitting, depending on how you feel about institutional taste.

In 2002, Park was a promising director coming off Joint Security Area, his first major commercial success. Rather than continue that momentum with something crowd-pleasing, he made this: a film so methodically bleak that Korean audiences largely stayed away. They were busy, in fairness. There was a World Cup happening outside.

The plot is deceptively simple — a deaf factory worker, desperate to save his dying sister, makes a series of decisions that each seem reasonable until they produce catastrophe. What Park is really building, with the patience of someone who doesn't care whether you're comfortable, is a precise argument: good intentions offer no protection from consequences. There are no villains here. There are only people whose entirely understandable choices happen to destroy each other.

Every scene is constructed with the trust that the audience will wait, look, and understand without being told. There is a sequence near the end, by a river, that is one of the most carefully and precisely composed scenes in Korean film. It arrives quietly and stays with you for days.

Park went on to make Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave and many other masterpieces. But Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is where you understand where all of it came from. Not easy watching, but the right kind of difficult.

Stream on AMC+, Prime Video or free on Plex.

Three Korean directors. Three films. All 2002. None of them trying to connect to what their country was feeling that summer — and all three of them now considered among the finest filmmakers working anywhere in the world.

Oasis (오아시스) — Lee Chang-dong (2002)

Released on August 15, 2002 — at the height of the post-World Cup euphoria — Oasis is about two people the Korean society would not naturally embrace: a man just out of prison and a woman with cerebral palsy. Lee Chang-dong does not make their relationship easy to watch, or easy to dismiss. He would go on to make Poetry and Burning; this remains his most emotionally unsparing work. Roger Ebert called it "a brave film." Coming from Ebert, that counts as a standing ovation.

Stream free on Kanopy, or rent on Apple TV and Amazon.

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (생활의 발견) — Hong Sang-soo (2002)

While the nation held its breath over penalty shootouts, Hong Sang-soo made a quiet film about a man who drifts between two women, commits to neither, and understands himself barely at all. Wry, precise, shot with the economy of someone who believes two people talking over soju contains everything cinema needs. A Rosetta Stone for everything Hong has made since — which now includes more Berlinale prizes than almost any director alive. Netflix, in a rare moment of algorithmic self-awareness, lists it under the "Hidden Gem" section. They are not wrong.

Stream on Netflix, Prime Video, or MUBI.

What happens if you take the history of Western pop music, take it apart component by component, and reassemble it as something both completely familiar and completely new? Shibuya-kei was Tokyo's answer to this question. In the early 1990s, Keigo Oyamada — who named himself after a character in Planet of the Apes — helped invent the genre with his band Flipper's Guitar. By 2001, he had outgrown it and gone solo.

Point is where he departed from his previous musical style. The album cover gives you the coordinates: "from Nakameguro to Everywhere / 45'29"." Nakameguro was where Oyamada lived — a quieter, more residential part of Tokyo than the Shibuya of his earlier career — and the album sounds exactly like that address. He had recently married, had a first child, and moved somewhere less cool. The album's introspective mood reflected recent developments in the artist's own private life. Water drips. Birds call. Silence is used as carefully as any instrument.

Both Japan and Korea were genuinely caught up in the World Cup that summer — Japan's streets filled with celebration every time their team played. While the noise lasted, Point was the album being made in the gaps between. Start with "Drop" — a five-minute song built almost entirely around the sound of dripping water and a groove that somehow makes this approach sound perfectly reasonable.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Two more from the same era. One was being made in a record shop basement in Shibuya, unnoticed by most people. The other was heard by everyone in Japan, and almost nobody outside of it.

Luv(sic) Part 1 — Nujabes ft. Shing02 (2003)

Jun Seba spent 2002 running Hyde Out Productions, a small record shop and label in Shibuya, making music at night that he had no particular plan to release. The first installment of his Luv(sic) series — a dedication to the goddess of music as Shing02 later wrote — came out in 2003. Seba died in a car accident in 2010 without knowing that the floating, jazz-inflected beats he made in that basement would become, via YouTube and a generation of bedroom producers, the founding grammar of lo-fi hip hop as a global genre. The "Lo-Fi Girl" channel alone has accumulated billions of streams. It traces a direct line back to Shibuya in 2002. Start here and you will soon find yourself going down the rabbit hole.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Tokyo Classic — Rip Slyme (July 2002)

If Point is the album made in the quiet hours, and Luv(sic) is the album made in secret, Tokyo Classic is the album that was actually playing when people were out. Rip Slyme's second major label release became a million-seller and the defining hip-hop record of that Tokyo summer — joyful, propulsive, and as confident as its title suggests. Almost entirely unknown outside of Japan then and now, but a must-listen if you’re a fan of good old-school hip-hop. The name of the album was either prescient or self-fulfilling. Probably both. 

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is the north star for street photography which I’m passionate about — the person whose eye I measure the art against. So when I tell you that Cartier-Bresson saw an exhibition of Raghu Rai's work in Paris in 1971 and immediately nominated him for Magnum Photos, I am telling you something about the quality of his brilliant work.

Rai died recently on April 26, 2026, in Delhi, aged 83. He had been a photographer for sixty years and in that time he documented India with unmatched patience and precision. Politicians, disasters, spiritual leaders, ordinary streets, the faces of people going about their days without any particular awareness that they were being witnessed. He was not a photographer of spectacle, but of what spectacle left behind.

In 2002, while many of the world's camera lenses were aimed at football stadiums, Rai's work was being shown in London — a retrospective that gathered six decades of India into a single exhibition. The World Cup offered the world a triumphant image of Asia: flags, goals, collective joy, national pride made visible. Rai's photographs offered something harder to summarize — a continent that contained all of that and also its opposite in the same frame. He once said that a photograph picks up a fact of life, and that fact lives forever. Sixty years of work suggests he quite meant it.

Start with his photographs from 1984 documenting the Bhopal gas tragedy — among the most important documentary images of the twentieth century. Then move backwards through his archive and understand what it means to spend a life looking at one place with complete seriousness.

His work is held in the Magnum Photos archive at magnumphotos.com. The Raghu Rai Foundation at raghuraifoundation.org has further information on his books and exhibitions.

Japanese fiction now accounts for 43% of the top translated titles sold in the UK. There was no Nobel Prize. No viral moment. Just a decade of readers finding their way there, one book at a time — beginning with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (コンビニ人間) in 2018, gathering pace through a wave of titles set in cosy bookshops, time-travel cafes, and magical domestic spaces, until last year Asako Yuzuki's Butter (バター) became the first translated book ever to win Waterstones Book of the Year, selling more copies in the UK than it had in its home country.

The books driving those numbers tend to share a particular warmth — emotionally accessible, visually appealing, the kind of fiction that travels well on BookTok and earns its place on a bedside table. There is nothing wrong with this. These are often beautifully crafted novels, and the appetite they have created for Japanese fiction in the West is real and growing.

What's interesting is what that appetite is now making possible. A market large enough to sustain cosy Japanese fiction is also large enough to sustain stranger, more formally ambitious Japanese fiction — work that would have struggled to find a Western publisher a decade ago. The boom created the commercial infrastructure; more challenging writing is now quietly arriving through the door it opened.

Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird (大きな鳥にさらわれないよう) — shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker — is a good example of what that looks like. Speculative, structurally unconventional, and imagining futures for humanity. It has little in common with the titles that built the market for it — except the country of origin and a genuine seriousness about what novels can do. The boom created the opening. Books like this one are now finding their way through.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. Available wherever books are sold.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com