Is My Hero Academia season 8 coming in June 2025? Everything we know so far
My Hero Academia fans are eagerly awaiting the final chapter of this beloved shonen anime. With Season 7 concluding in October 2024, speculation about Season 8's release date, plot, and more is buzzing. One question on everyone's mind: Is My Hero Academia Season 8 coming in June 2025? Here's everything we know so far about the final season, based on the latest updates. My Hero Academia Season 8 Release Date:
Despite some fan speculation about a June 2025 release, My Hero Academia Season 8, also known as the Final Season , is officially set to premiere in October 2025. Multiple reports, including TOHO Animation and Studio Bones, have confirmed this release window, with new episodes airing every Saturday at 5:30 PM JST on Yomiuri TV and Nippon TV. Crunchyroll will stream the season internationally alongside its Japanese debut. No specific release date within October has been announced yet, but fans can expect more details closer to the premiere. Episode Count and Streaming Details
While the exact number of episodes for Season 8 remains unconfirmed, some sources suggest it may consist of 12 episodes, covering the remaining manga chapters. This is shorter than Season 7's 21 episodes but aligns with the manga's compact final arcs. Crunchyroll will stream the season internationally, with both subbed and dubbed versions available. Fans can access it through Crunchyroll's ad-supported free tier or premium membership starting at $7.99/month.
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Aman Shukla is a post-graduate in mass communication . A media enthusiast who has a strong hold on communication ,content writing and copy writing. Aman is currently working as journalist at BusinessUpturn.com
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There's a Sekiro anime coming to Crunchyroll so I can relive my shame of getting brutalized by Guardian Ape
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. During today's Opening Night Live showcase at Gamescom 2025, Crunchyroll brought a reveal trailer for an exciting first: FromSoft storytelling is getting an anime treatment with an official adaptation of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Titled Sekiro: No Defeat, the anime will follow "the story of a lord and his retainer—and their quest to restore balance to a nation on the edge," featuring Wolf's quest to aid the Divine Heir in ending the threat of the Interior Ministry. If you aren't familiar with the events of the game, I'll just put it briefly: Things get unpleasant! The Sekiro: No Defeat reveal trailer shows the same opening duel with Genichiro Ashina that kicked off the game with Wolf's thorough ass-kicking and limb loss. Based on that, it seems like it'll hew fairly closely to in-game events. "We are taking on the monumental task of animating the breathtakingly beautiful Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. In doing so, we are pouring every ounce of our artistic vision and passion for beauty into its production," director Kenichi Kutsuna said in an accompanying press release. "The final product is being crafted to be a truly memorable experience, one that will leave a lasting impression on both dedicated fans of the game and those who are discovering the world of Sekiro for the very first time. Please look forward to it." On one hand, that's exciting: The animation has some an impressive art style and combat choreography, which should make for some excellent sequences based on Sekiro's boss fights. On the other, it means I'll probably have to relive how my spirit was thoroughly broken by Guardian Ape when I spent two consecutive hours of pain learning how to finally decapitate it... just so I could watch its health bar refill as it picked up its head to keep on fighting. It's fine. I respect an anime that can shame me for watching it. Sekiro: No Defeat will air on Crunchyroll sometime in 2026. Solve the daily Crossword
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The Ghost of Lady Murasaki
In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I'd become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can't help setting our world on fire. I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we'll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It's about people whose lives differ so much—in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics—from the lives of 21st-century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language. Even so, this novel, which I first encountered almost three decades ago, returned insistently. Once again, I was caught up in its radically unfamiliar world and literary form. Unlike most Western books, Lady Murasaki's tale isn't guided by an Aristotelian arc of action that steadily rises to a climax, followed by a denouement. Instead, the novel is episodic and patterned with recurring images and ideas: swiftly fading cherry blossoms, clouds moving through the sky, autumn leaves, the aching transience of life on this planet. The spirits of jealous lovers possess and sicken primary characters; scandals in one generation echo, transformed, in the next. Nine centuries before Gabriel García Márquez was born, Lady Murasaki infused her story with magical realism. Classics resonate through time for a reason, but what The Tale of Genji was saying to me so urgently was far too faint to hear. I wanted to track down the ghost of its author in her own city, now Kyoto, which was then the capital of imperial Japan. I wanted to get her to speak to me a little louder. Medieval women have long fascinated me, particularly artistic medieval women whose work seems to push against the limits of their era and, as a result, show the places they write about in a strange new light. In my 2021 novel, Matrix, I imagined a life of the 12th-century writer Marie de France, the first known female poet in the French language, whose Lais, a series of courtly poems, brims with weird vitality, and about whom only two facts are known: that her name was Marie, and that she came from France but lived in England. I have lived in both of those countries, but the Heian era (794–1185) in Japan is thrillingly distant to my imagination. What we know of the contours of Heian imperial-court culture makes The Tale of Genji 's very existence miraculous. The lives of high-born women within the court were both isolated and political: They were pawns in a clan system by which men acquired social status and power through marriage. Polygamy prevailed in the aristocracy, and a husband's various wives were ranked in importance. Once married, women in the ruling class lived almost entirely in seclusion, and were forced to hide their faces behind screens and fans. Almost no court women were taught to read or write Chinese, the language of the imperial bureaucracy. In response, women in the court developed a written form of Japanese, which was still relatively new when Lady Murasaki, likely born in 973, was growing up. Along with monogatari, fictional tales drawn from the oral tradition, the first fully Japanese prose texts were women's autobiographical writings. The other famous work from the era that remains famous today was a racy diary about the Heian court, The Pillow Book, by a contemporary of Lady Murasaki named Sei Shōnagon. Men in the imperial aristocracy also avidly read texts in Japanese, but nobody, male or female, bothered to retain for the historical record the actual name of The Tale of Genji 's author, even though she was recognized during her lifetime as a supremely skilled writer. She was given her pen name, which means 'purple,' in homage to one of the central female characters in her tale: the child-wife—and dearest beloved—of the eponymous Genji, who is a prince of both imperial and common blood. Shikibu, which means 'ministry of ceremonials,' has nothing to do with the writer, either: It refers to the position of her father at court. On the night I arrived in Kyoto with my husband, I was delighted to bump my suitcase down Teramachi Street, where Lady Murasaki is rumored to have lived with her father at some point in her youth. In the dark, Kyoto is at its most magical. It emanates a deep softness and hush, despite the hordes of tourists eager to touch the layers of history that the city so conscientiously maintains. The buildings are traditionally wood, and so most of Kyoto has been repeatedly subject to fires, razed and rebuilt many times over the past millennium. Still, the streets of the city's old sections, though immaculate and nearly odorless, seem to retain some of their medieval flavor, with small buildings pressed closely together, and tiny storefronts on the bottom floors gently illuminated by round lanterns. Teramachi Street, much of which is now a covered arcade, surely looks nothing like it did in Lady Murasaki's time, yet its refined-but-accessible vibe tracks with the known outlines of the writer's life. She was born into a family waning in power, a minor offshoot of the most prominent clan at the time, the Fujiwaras. Her pedigree was literary: Her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and brother were all celebrated poets. Her diary offers intimate glimpses of her private thoughts. It tells how, as a young girl, she eavesdropped on her father as he taught her brother Chinese, and proved herself the far better student. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' she describes her father saying. To be a woman fluent in Chinese was so freakish that she 'pretended to be incapable of reading even the inscriptions on the screens' that divided rooms and shielded women's bodies from view. She 'worried what people would think if they heard such rumors' of her abilities. In the year 996, still unmarried at a time when marriage in very young womanhood was expected for the aristocracy, she accompanied her father north to Echizen; he'd been appointed a regional governor, which was considered something of a dishonor, as power diminished with distance from the capital. She returned to Kyoto in her mid-20s to marry a much older relative, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, who is vividly described in The Pillow Book as a flamboyant character with many other wives. He died two years later in an epidemic, leaving her with a young daughter who would eventually become a poet known as Daini no Sanmi. During her widowhood, in the early 1000s, out of grief or boredom, Lady Murasaki began writing The Tale of Genji in Japanese. Because The Tale of Genji described scandalous love affairs, reading it became a craze, something like watching a prestige television series today. Around the same time that its circulating chapters won admirers, Lady Murasaki was summoned to the aesthetically refined court of Emperor Ichijō. There she entered the service of Shōshi, the second empress and the daughter of the most powerful man of the day, Fujiwara no Michinaga, the controlling figure behind the emperor's throne. Shōshi surrounded herself with ladies talented in music, drawing, and poetry, and when she discovered that Lady Murasaki could read and write Chinese, she asked for secret lessons. Lady Murasaki's diary suggests a sort of singing-bird entrapment—a sense of being under immense pressure to add new chapters to her tale; Michinaga would even go into her private space to steal her work in progress. She was lonely at court and reserved among the competitive women. One moment in her diary has always stood out to me, when the careful screen of convention slips and a piece of the too-bright self flares through. She is talking about the ladies of the court and how they see her: 'No one liked her,' she writes, ventriloquizing their views of her. 'They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful.' Sometime after 1013, the year she may have turned 40 and the date of the last mention of her in court records, she died. I discovered an onsen, or a hot collective bath segregated by gender, in the basement of our ryokan, a small traditional inn, in an old part of Kyoto. My husband and I descended from our room in slippers and traditional cotton robes (yukatas), which we'd been instructed to fold left over right before fastening them with the embroidered obi, because right over left is how the Japanese dress their dead. Then we scrubbed ourselves pink with bucketfuls of water before climbing into the pool. It was very late, and the heat drew out the travel weariness from my bones. I floated and dreamed, and I had an inkling that, though my love of Lady Murasaki could be explained only through beautiful abstraction—by meeting her mind in her work—I might begin to understand something tangible about her through the wordless animal body. The Tale of Genji 's early chapters are rooted in fairy-tale monogatari, but the book soon metamorphoses into its own strange thing, a courtly romance that follows Prince Genji over his half century of life, and then, after Genji's death, takes up the lives of the next generation. Genji, called 'The Radiant Prince,' is the son of an emperor and his most beloved wife, who has no powerful family to protect her child. Like Lady Murasaki herself, Genji is both an insider and an outsider. As a young boy, he enters the court with the rank of a commoner, but he becomes by far the most beautiful and talented of men, easily outshining his half brother, the future emperor. He is also wildly, and audaciously, sexy: As a teenager, he seduces and has a son with one of the wives of his father, the current emperor. Though Genji goes on to marry several times, he continues to make a game of seducing as many of the most beautiful women at court as he can, a game as much of spiritual and poetic yearning as it is of bodily lust. When he's about 26 years old, his scandalous behavior leads him to years of exile in Suma, by the seaside. There he begins another relationship, one that produces a child who becomes an empress. When he returns to court, restored from disgrace, he never stops chasing women. My husband and I rise early; even in Japan, we were up with the birds. Nothing opened for hours, so we descended to the onsen again, then went out on a quest for coffee—not easy to find in Japan before 8 a.m., we learned, unless you like cold coffee in cans from the vending machines on every street. This is how we discovered the wonders of the Japanese 7/11, full of tasty fresh foods such as onigiri, seaweed-covered rice pyramids, and the internationally and justly famous egg-salad sandwiches, with their incredibly soft white bread and tangy, smooth egg filling, which became our favorite anytime snack. I had a surreal moment while we sat on the clean-swept Kyoto curb, drinking hot coffee and eating egg-salad sandwiches, when the barely dawn-touched streets were entirely empty of people. I suddenly felt myself living outside time for a brief spell, not within the 21st century or any of the other centuries visible in Kyoto's smooth palimpsest, but within the hovering dual-time that is the experience of reading a great novel. I do think The Tale of Genji is a great novel, and some of its greatness comes from its self-contradictions. Prince Genji is held up as a courtly ideal, yet he's also a renegade; he's an amorous adventurer, yet also deeply attached to one of his beloved wives, Murasaki. The narrative sporadically darts into his consciousness, reflecting a conflicted conscience and a degree of interiority that make the book revolutionary. I believe interiority is necessary to define a novel as a novel, and its absence disqualifies the other books that scholars have proposed as alternative 'first novels' in the history of literature, such as Apuleius's The Golden Ass. Interiority is especially fraught in the evocation of Genji and his young wife Murasaki's relationship. He discovers her as an enchanting child of about 10, kidnaps her, secludes her in a lonely house, molds her into the perfectly accomplished wife he wants, and marries her when she is a teenager, which the narrative presents as something of a romantic coup. But the prose simultaneously makes clear what is happening from Murasaki's point of view: This man, who first presented himself to her as her adoptive father, comes to her bed when she is still a child and violates her painfully, against her will and to her immense distress. None of the people who care for her lifts a finger to help her. Genji pursues many other affairs, then suddenly the narrative reveals that he has died at the age of 52. At this point, The Tale of Genji does a spin in the air: There are 13 more chapters, set primarily in Uji, a city south of Kyoto, which feature two men of the next generation vying for the love of the young princess Ukifune. She is driven to despair by their caddish treatment, and her suffering becomes the focus of the narration. This final section closes the book cryptically and counter-romantically—Ukifune renounces the world and becomes a nun —and delivered a jolt when I first read it, because it goes against any epiphanic or revelatory ending that I've been taught by Western narratives to expect. When I returned to the book with the idea of visiting Kyoto, I began to read the final chapters as the novel's firm renunciation of itself. The tale turns its back savagely on its previous concerns, saying that the things it had taught us all along to think of as so important—the heartache, the rise and fall of fortunes, the attention to aesthetics—in the end actually mean nothing; it is as if the author has lost patience with male callousness, upheld for so many pages as the signature of courtly elegance. The reader of any text provides half of its meaning. To me, an American woman in the early 21st century, prickly and free-spirited Lady Murasaki now appears to have been chafing under conformist pressures in the Heian court. I read her radical evocations of characters' internal states as though they are eruptions of the author's own rebellious soul. Perhaps this subversive interpretation is wish fulfillment on my part. But Kyoto itself seemed to agree with it. The city is a place for people who love history and appreciate ambiguity. Shinto shrines are everywhere, meticulously maintained and restored, robust memento mori of the many generations of humans who have lived and died adoring them. The April cherry trees, with their brief pink opulence, seem infused with the spirit of mono no aware —the Japanese idea of the transience of things, the gentle sadness yet also the beauty of impermanence. This is a place where Lady Murasaki's work has never disappeared, yet also has never ceased to take on new shapes and transform to fit the current moment. By dawn, we were driving along the Kamo River next to runners confettied by the last of the cherry blossoms. We were joined by Takako Kido, our spark plug of a photographer, and her friend (and fellow hip-hop dancer) from college, Masaaki Kaga, who had once been a historical tour guide for schoolchildren, and had been roped into being our driver that day. When I asked them about The Tale of Genji, Takako shrugged. 'Everyone knows Genji,' she said. 'It's in our bones.' But neither she nor Masa had read the book in decades. As a millennium-old, omnipresent reference in Japan, like Shakespeare's work in the Anglophone world, the book 'no longer has to be actually read in order to have been 'read,' ' Dennis Washburn, a professor at Dartmouth College, writes in an introduction to his 2015 translation (in my opinion the best one, with its clear and accessible prose). Soon after The Tale of Genji appeared, it inspired fan fiction and painted illustrations, and artists in every century since have used the tale as a prism to refract the aesthetic, political, and spiritual concerns of their times. Its legacy is everywhere you turn—in Noh drama, erotic parodies, Buddhist rituals, advertisements, manga books, games, anime films. At the Tale of Genji Museum, in Uji, we watched one film that featured a teenage girl who turns into a cat and ends up in the arms of Genji with a bizarre expression of ahegao, or 'sexual ecstasy,' on its face. The homage to the novel is eclectic and ever-evolving, both irreverent and faithful. One can find echoes of the work, too, in places frequented long ago by Lady Murasaki and her characters that can be visited today. It was still dawn when Masa brought us to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan, the Shimogamo, the original version of which was built in 678 and would have already been antique by the time Lady Murasaki venerated its deities there. Shintoism is an Indigenous animist belief system that predates Buddhism's arrival in Japan, and Shinto sites of worship now exist comfortably alongside Buddhist temples. The forest that surrounds the shrine itself is a kami, or 'powerful spirit,' and when we watched people, out giving their Shiba Inus an early-morning walk, bowing to individual trees that wore rope belts from which dangled paper lightning bolts, we discovered that the trees were also kamis. Genji visits these woods before his exile to Suma and composes a poem wishing that the forest might one day see the injustice against him reversed. As the sun rose, the vermilion paint that decorates most Shinto shrines to ward off evil and misfortune began to shine dazzlingly. At the main shrine, Masa taught us how to pray: throw a small coin into a slatted wooden trough, bow twice, clap twice, pray, then bow again. We prayed, feeling a great spiritual potency in the place, and because it never hurts to send sparks of gratitude into the world. Kamis can have negative power, too, and shrines are not always portals to peace. In Genji, the Kamigamo shrine—loud and crowded and too bright in the hot mid-afternoon sun when we arrived there—appears often, sometimes as a place of conflict. In a memorable scene, one of Genji's lovers, the intensely jealous Lady Rokujō, and his first wife, Aoi, have both come in ox-drawn carts to Kamigamo to see Genji ride by during the Aoi Matsuri, or wild-ginger festival, and are soon jostling for the best viewing spot. Rokujō's jealous spirit eventually enters and sickens Aoi's body until she dies. Later, young Murasaki is also possessed by that bad spirit. We were too early for the wild-ginger festival, which takes place in mid-May, when celebrants in Heian-era costumes process to the shrine from Kyoto's Imperial Palace. I was happy to be spared the crowds jostling for views. The palace itself, which burned down many times over the centuries and in 1855 was rebuilt in the Heian style, is breathtaking in scale, with astonishing roofs curving up at the corners, constructed of layers of cypress bark lashed into place with bamboo strips. Its surrounding lawns of raked gravel and its park of pruned trees made it appear even bigger. Takako had never visited before— 'this is an entirely new Japan for me,' she murmured. A moment later, a loud alarm went off: She had leaped across the moat surrounding the wall to take a photo, and leaped nimbly back, laughing, after she was scolded by the guards. Inside the palace, the rooms were dark and very large; in the days of the Heian court, they would have been partitioned off by screens and curtains. I thought of Murasaki Shikibu trying to write in this place, separated from the noises and voices and smells of others by thin silk, trying to lose herself and her worries in the composition of her text. I saw that the book she was writing would have been another screen between herself and the world, even as the fame the book brought would have, paradoxically, served to bind her even tighter to that world. Although Lady Murasaki wrote in her diary of her loneliness and alienation at court, one of her childhood homes was only a couple of miles away. Rozan-ji is a dark-wood Tendai Buddhist temple on the grounds where her family house is said to have been. Fire destroyed the original residence centuries ago, but in rooms off the temple's quiet courtyard is a small exhibition of scrolls and gilded clamshells decorated with scenes from the novel. A sign at the front gate lays claim to Lady Murasaki, proudly calling her a Great Woman of The World. Masa brought us to another quiet courtyard just off a busy road, where we found the grave site of Lady Murasaki. Inside were two neatly maintained mounds, with two markers. Her ancient bones are thought to lie beneath the big mound; under the smaller one are those of Ono no Takamura, a poet who lived two centuries before she did, and who was considered to be a protector of souls sent to languish in hell. No one knows how they were paired up, but legend has it that Lady Murasaki's admirers, fearful that her scandalous book had consigned her to punishment in the afterlife, put them side by side so that he could help her travel out of the underworld. I said a quiet thank-you to her remains for the book I love so much. I was answered by birdsong and traffic on the street beyond the walls. The solemnity was broken by a garbage truck puttering by, singing out in a recorded loop a warning in the voice of a small Japanese child. Perhaps the most important location for the book is an eighth-century temple called Ishiyama-dera, east of Kyoto on a hillside overlooking Lake Biwa, the largest body of fresh water in Japan. The myth is that Lady Murasaki, during a visit there after her husband died, was struck with the inspiration to write her chef d'oeuvre while gazing up at an August moon. Although Ishiyama-dera is the most stunning of the shrines we saw, with hiking paths and high views of the lake, we encountered very few other tourists, perhaps because the trip from Kyoto requires two train transfers. The grounds were dotted with statues of Lady Murasaki, all of which depict a woman with a large forehead and loose hair, her writing brush in hand. As soon as we entered the gates, I felt a strange, holy energy. I believe that places, like people, hold memory, and when place memory announces itself, it does so through the body. A tiny museum on the grounds displayed ancient scrolls on which Heian hands had written, sculptures of ancient Buddhas to which Lady Murasaki might have prayed. The temple of Ishiyama-dera rising up from huge, jagged slabs of wollastonite; the pagodas perched like little hats atop the hill; the dangling purple wisteria; the lake glittering below; the way the cool wind and the April sunshine filtered through the leaves and pressed upon our skin—an ambiguous understanding that I'd been searching for arrived. There, my body recognized something of the long-gone body of Lady Murasaki, who had also once stood, an animal like me, seeing the stones, smelling the woods and the lake, feeling the breeze and the warmth on her flesh. I was gripped by the truth of something I'd known only intellectually: how much courage Lady Murasaki, as a woman in her era, had to summon, how much loneliness and insecurity she must have felt, when she dedicated her life to literature in Heian Japan. We climbed the steps to the great temple, where we found a statue of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of compassion and mercy. We tossed the money, rang the bells, clapped, and prayed to Kannon for the sake of our wounded world. By the end of our trip to Japan, I knew less than ever about the real Murasaki Shikibu. She did not visit me as a ghost in the night. Although I sensed in Kyoto a more rebellious artist than I'd imagined her to be from her work, I didn't hear a clear message from her to blow up the poisonous narratives that have created the tragedies of the current age. I didn't understand much more of the heartache of her life, the person beyond the words. Yet my body understood The Tale of Genji and its marvelous writer far better. First through the sense of taste: At a ryokan near Lake Biwa, famous for its geothermal onsen, we ate a kaiseki dinner, which is a seasonally inspired sequence of courses, their flavors and textures and aromas carefully choreographed. There was no Aristotelian arc in this meal, no central main dish. Every course was equally important, to be savored in its own way. Soup gave way to sashimi so fresh that I could swear it twitched, and this gave way to simmered salted fish, which gave way to a grilled course, and on and on, for three exquisite hours. The meal was episodic, patterned, refusing the very concept of climax in its devotion to the moment. The sense of sight taught me other things when, at the Zen Buddhist Tenryuji Temple, we walked through the most stunning garden I've ever encountered. Japanese gardens aren't subservient to symmetry in the way that many European gardens are. They aren't built around any central focus point. Instead, they are created with keen attention to texture and color and season. The one at Tenryuji is said to remain as it was when it was built in the 14th century, when the designer and head priest, Musō Soseki, integrated the surrounding hills into the garden's pattern, in a tradition called shakkei, or 'borrowed scenery.' As a result, any place in the garden has its own perfect view; every spot holds something new to contemplate. The neat lines of raked gravel around the buildings bring awareness to the present moment and to the impermanence of all things. As I walked its paths, I became hyperconscious of pattern, repetition, texture, transience, the shifting of viewpoint: koi, pond, stone, azalea, camellia, pine, weeping cherry, hill beyond in its gradients of green. I felt I had been given a three-dimensional map of The Tale of Genji. And then, at a tea-and-meditation ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple, the Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami, in his splendid purple robes, gave voice to the things that my body had been telling me in its wise, oblique way. We sat on cushions in a room that opened out onto a cool garden, and were led through a long meditation, after which the reverend spoke, telling us that of course there is no single definition of enlightenment. The self is a shifting, inconstant phenomenon, brain and body ever transforming in time and space, with no clear delineation between what is self and what is other. Westerners want certainty but we should embrace ambiguity, he told us; ambiguity is part of nature. He said that to taste tea that has been steeped in cold water, first we should taste with the tip of the tongue, then with the back of the tongue. First you taste umami, then you taste the floral. First you taste the bitter, then you taste the sweet. Travel Notes Kurama Onsen The closest one gets to a genuine geothermally heated onsen in Kyoto is 30 minutes outside the city. Canny travelers go straight from checking into their hotels to the electric train up the mountain to watch the sunset while steaming away their jetlag in the outdoor baths. We were too tired to do this our first night and regretted it for the rest of our trip. Learn from our mistake! This onsen is said to be especially gorgeous in winter, when snow is falling. As is true at most onsen, Kurama's baths are separated by gender, and although tattoos are forbidden at many geothermal public baths in Japan, people we know had no problem with their body art here. 520 Kuramahonmachi, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, 601-1111, Japan Tea and Zen Meditation Ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple Shunkō-in means 'Temple of the Ray of Spring Light,' and Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami, in his purple robes, is also a brilliant ray of sunshine, funny and wry and so full of insight that you'll wish this experience were twice as long. He leads tourists—seated on cushions (though chairs are available for the stiff in hip)—through two short Zen meditations; shows them how to taste excellent green tea from Uji; gives a tour of the temple; and delivers a philosophical lecture with so much to chew on that you'll find yourself recalling his words months later. The gardens outside the meditation room are full of flowers and butterflies. The gilded screens inside are decorated with cypress trees and cranes and peonies, the work of the 19th-century painter Kanō Eigaku. This is a calm respite to help you gather your forces before visiting yet more shrines. 42 Hanazonomyoshinjicho, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, 616-8035, Japan Kyoto Handicraft Center One of the lessons from Reverend Takafumi's talk was about how, traditionally in Japan, art and craft are the same; there's no hierarchy of makers. Hold a perfectly balanced, handcrafted knife in your hand, and you'll understand how an everyday object can be as much a work of art as a Picasso painting. Although plenty of stores in Kyoto specialize in specific crafts, the sheer range and diversity of the goods in this quiet, well-lit place—ceramic tea sets, graceful prints of birds and flowers, silk kimonos—will have you buying a bigger suitcase to get all your gifts home. 17 Shogoin Entomicho, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, 606-8323, Japan Late-Blooming Cherry Blossoms at the Ninna-ji Temple The Japanese take the sakura (cherry blossom) so seriously that the Japan Weather Association puts out a nationwide sakura forecast every spring. If you miss the peak in Kyoto, the Ninna-ji Temple, in the northwest of the city, has late-blooming Omuro-zakura varietals beyond mid-April. I found the experience surreal: It was very hard not to be moved by the pink field of cherry blossoms swaying in the wind under Ninna-ji's picturesque five-story Edo-period pagoda, and at the same time, I felt as if I had somehow found myself a three-dimensional postcard picturing the most Japanese experience possible. 33 Omuroouchi, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, 616-8092, Japan Ryō-shō Michelin-starred restaurants abound in Kyoto, but it's hard to find one as intimate (only eight counter seats and a private room) and inexpensive, with food as fresh, as the two-starred Ryō-shō, located down an atmospheric street, lit by red lanterns, in Gionmachi Minamigawa. Chef Makoto Fujiwara creates a beautiful, leisurely, many-course omakase meal right in front of diners; pairs each course with a carefully selected beverage; and personally escorts diners to the door at the end of the meal to thank them. The spirit of hospitality was part of the meal's flavor. I'm pescatarian—I don't believe that fish have souls—but I couldn't resist a bite of my husband's Himegyu beef, which was soft and buttery and so excellent that I didn't feel bad about eating a soulful creature: The chef's extreme care seemingly mitigated the sacrifice. Ryō-shō means 'to eclipse the sky,' and each luscious mouthful is enough to momentarily make you forget about anything other than what you're tasting. 570-166 Gionmachi Minamigawa, Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto, 605-0074, Japan Nijō Castle I focused on the Heian period during our trip to Kyoto and found the Imperial Palace overwhelming, but Nijō Castle, built in the Edo period (1603–1868), the time of the Shōgun rulers, is hard not to be cowed by. This is intentional. The Ninomaro Palace within it was the first shōgun's residence while he was in Kyoto, and it was designed with maximal awe in mind. Each room—I have no idea how many there were, because rooms led onto rooms, and I soon went into a fugue state—had a superabundance of gilded screens and wood carvings. The floors are called 'nightingale' floors, and they sing underfoot in little bird chirps; some say the sound effect is an anti-theft measure, but in reality, it's a result of nails squeaking against floorboard clamps. The twittering noise, the scent of tourists' bodies pressed together, the darkness of the wood, the minimal windows, the elaborateness of the decor—all can make a 21st-century visitor feel as if they're walking through a fold in time. 541 Nijojocho, Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto, 604-8301, Japan Ponto-chō Alley The wildest, most thrilling meals we had in Kyoto were the accidental ones. We loved the experience of wandering into a restaurant, hovering our Google translator over the menu, and pointing to whatever looked interesting, or like something we couldn't possibly get anywhere at home in Florida. I had the best smoky eel of my life in a place with large plastic bins where strange, spiky, unidentifiable (by me) sea creatures sat waiting to be plunked into baskets and fried. This alleyway, right next to Kyoto's main Kamo River, is packed with tiny, pristine bars and yakitori, an excellent place to sit outside and watch people—of all ages and nationalities and levels of tipsiness—flow by.
Business Upturn
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Is ‘The Recruit' returning for season 3? Everything we know so far
By Aman Shukla Published on August 20, 2025, 18:30 IST Last updated August 20, 2025, 10:43 IST The Recruit has fans hooked with its wild spy thrills and Noah Centineo's charm as Owen Hendricks, the rookie CIA lawyer dodging danger at every turn. After Season 2's explosive finale, everyone's dying to know: will there be a Season 3? Here's the full rundown on what's known so far, packed with the latest updates, fan buzz, and a peek at what could've been. A Quick Recap of The Recruit Season 2 Before diving into the big question, let's recap where things stand. The Recruit follows Owen, a young lawyer thrown into the CIA's deep end, juggling deadly missions and shady colleagues. Season 2, which hit Netflix on January 30, 2025, sent Owen to South Korea and Russia to save Nan Hee, the wife of NIS agent Jang Kyun (Teo Yoo). Packed with new characters like the mysterious Nichka (Maddie Hasson) and the scheming Violet (Aarti Mann), the season delivered betrayals, gunfire, and a nail-biting rescue. Those final moments left plenty of threads dangling, sparking hope for more. Has The Recruit Been Renewed for Season 3? Brace for the bad news: Netflix pulled the plug on The Recruit after two seasons. The cancellation dropped in March 2025, just a month after Season 2 premiered. Fans were gutted, and even the show's team seemed blindsided. Despite rave reviews—Season 2 scored an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes—the show didn't pull the massive viewership Netflix craves. Season 2 clocked 15.3 million views in its first three weeks, down from Season 1's 26.4 million, which likely tipped the scales against renewal. Showrunner Alexi Hawley had big plans before the axe fell, teasing a third season that could've taken Owen to places like Latin America or Africa. Noah Centineo hyped up a 'crazier' Season 3, saying Owen needed bigger stakes to match his growth. Sadly, those dreams are on hold, leaving fans wondering what might've been. Ahmedabad Plane Crash Aman Shukla is a post-graduate in mass communication . A media enthusiast who has a strong hold on communication ,content writing and copy writing. Aman is currently working as journalist at
