About Ganshisha

Geese are birds of passage. They cross great distances in formation, and when the season turns they come back. The ideas we have published travel in much the same way — carried across generations, and sometimes left behind.

Modern Japanese intellectual history; French social thought and literature; the religious and local records of central Japan. The subjects look scattered, but each is an attempt to question an era from outside its mainstream. We have chosen books by whether they ought to last, not by whether they will sell.

A book reaches one pair of hands, and ten or thirty years later moves somebody else. A seed dropped in flight comes up in distant ground. That is the sense of time we work with, and it is how we intend to keep making books.