‘Death in the monastery’ refers to liminal and temporal themes of dying in the poetry of an anonymous Carthusian monk-poet in the period 1964–2024. This article explores these topics in three subsections. The first section deals with texts where the monk-poet reflects on moments when he has witnessed the dying of a fellow monk. The second set of texts focuses on memories written about recently deceased members of the Carthusian monastic community. The third section consists of the Carthusian author’s reflections that arise from the physical proximity of the graveyard at the centre square of the monastery. The article concludes with some remarks on the liminal and temporal perspectives on dying in a monastery. Time spent with God in a cloister, while frequently witnessing the deaths of other members of the monastic community, prepares for a transition where death is followed by resurrection.

In December 2023, the authors screened the film Plan 75, a dystopic meditation on Japan's future as an aging society, with a public audience at Princeton University. The essay offers reflections on the experience of watching the film, the nature of Hayakawa Chie's social commentary and the visual way in which she realizes it, and the present social context for the film's futuristic meditation. The film won the Caméra d'Or Special Mention Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and after screenings at global film festivals and the Japan Society of New York, was made available for streaming in the U.S. in late 2023. The film offers contributions to curricula that deal with issues of aging, global capitalism and degrowth, the anthropology and sociology of care, demographic transitions, neoliberal capitalism, and the emergence of a language of individual responsibility in social welfare.

In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and post-growth economic shifts, sociality is downsizing in Japan away from the family to more single lifestyles. The effects of this on the necro-landscape are examined here in terms of what happens to those who die all alone, untended by others (“lonely death”) as well as new practices emerging to replace the family grave and family caregivers with an alternative social model (what is called “promiscuous care”). The essay argues that, at both ends of this spectrum, smell can be used to register both the unsociality of a bad death, as well as the shifting sociality of new ways of handling the dead. (This short article is based on Being Dead Otherwise, recently published by Duke University Press).

Muslim migrants in Japan suffer from the lack of access to burial grounds when 99.9% of the nation is cremated. Muslims are usually met with opposition from the local community where cemetery construction is planned. Using ethnographic data, the study shows how Muslim associations inadvertently fail to respect the codes of Japanese rurality when seeking a cemetery in a community to which they do not have membership, leading to a conflict. This paper closes with policy prescriptions for the central government in ensuring the cultural rights of immigrant minorities in Japan.

The drinking party at Medius’ in Babylon on 31 May 323 b.c., marking the onset of Alexander’s terminal illness, is explored from contemporary and later texts. Close reading of fragments by Nicobule and Aristobulus, set beside the reticence of the court daybooks (Ephemerides) and the studied vagueness of secondary sources, clarifies in detail the sequence of events. Justin, Plutarch and the author of the Liber de morte Alexandri cast light on the silence imposed by the King’s successors. A narrative emerges of the day itself, the spread of rumour, the two false explanations for Alexander’s death that were successively propagated, and the third explanation, most probably correct, that Aristobulus was first to publish.

Friendship occupies the last place in the five social relations in the Confucian tradition, yet it plays an important role in Confucian writings. In this article, I discuss the notion of friendship that lasts beyond death from ancient China. I examine how the friendship between Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi finds its continuation in that of Fan Shi and Zhang Shao, insofar as one of the two friends dies in both cases. These friendly bonds are tinged with a tragic tone and have fueled the imagination of the Chinese who sublimate or amplify them in all kinds of literary genres – poetry, theater, and novel – dating back to the pre-imperial period and to the Han Dynasty. All the authors underscore the faithfulness of these characters, which they consider to be the characters’ virtue. They also emphasize the spiritual link that transcends life and death. Based on the translation of these well-known and celebrated narratives, I intend to show how the exemplary nature of friendship is enhanced or mythologized, and how intertextuality has shaped the Chinese vocabulary itself in this regard.

We aimed to identify risk factors related to COVID-19 reinfection in Hong Kong. We performed a population-based retrospective cohort study and reviewed case-based data on COVID-19 infections reported to the Centre for Health Protection from 8 January 2020 to 29 January 2023. We analyzed the epidemiology of COVID-19 infections and performed a Cox regression analysis. In this period, 3.32% (103,065/3,106,579) of COVID-19 infections recorded were classified as reinfection. Compared with primarily infected cases, a higher proportion of re-infected cases had chronic diseases (33.54% vs. 27.27%) and were residents of residential care homes (RCH) (10.99% vs. 1.41%). The time interval between the two episodes ranged from 31 to 1,050 days (median 282 days). Cox regression analysis of Omicron cases with the adjustment of covariates showed that being female (Hazard Ratio [HR] 1.12, 95% CI 1.11–1.13), chronic diseases (HR 1.18, 95% CI 1.16–1.20) and RCH residents (HR 6.78, 95% CI 6.61–6.95) were associated with reinfection, while additional vaccination after primary infection was protective (HR 0.80, 95% CI 0.79–0.81). Further analytical studies on the risk factors and protectors of COVID-19 reinfection are needed to guide targeted interventions.