A couple blocks from the Fifth Street Public Market, on Mill Street and East Third Alley, a nondescript house blends in with the neighborhood. From the second floor window, a sign sticks out, with the word “Akira.”


“We don’t really advertise ourselves,” Taro Kobayashi, Akira’s owner says. “We are more word of mouth.”


Akira not only has good sushi, but great quality fish, local ingredients, creative menus and, to say the least, a welcoming and fun owner at the counter table.


Being of Jap...

Eugene’s local beer brewing scene was sparked by Cordy Jensen 35 years ago, when he opened the Steelhead Brewery in the Fifth Street Market district. At the time, it ranked locally as a sensational innovation. 


Fast forward to 2024, Jensen closed the Steelhead and retired. But a little-known relic of the Steelhead operation remained in existence: Its large brewery building in west Eugene, where Jensen made the company’s beer. 


But that remnant won’t be around much longer.


The 88-year-ol...

Brian Trapp grew up with his twin brother Danny, who had a disability. Growing up, Danny would remind Brian that he was six minutes older. “He never let me forget it,” Trapp says. Every birthday, Danny liked to count to 10:04, and when 10:10 came, Trapp would finally get to say that he was the same age as his brother. 


“I think a lot of stories about disability may be tragic, sentimental, but this is a comedy,” says Trapp, the author of the Range of Motion. 


Range of Motion is fiction, alt...

Her name itself tells the story — a Japanese first name, and an American first and last name in the post-World War II era. 


Ikuko June Moore was in high school on August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. During wartime, schools and many houses would have a space in the basement, which Japanese people call bou-ku-go, where people would hide during a bombing. 


Moore went down to the basement as she had drilled, not knowing that day’s bomb resulted in approximately 66,000 deaths instantly, with the heat...

Lea Jones makes signs in his Eugene kitchen and sends messages through his Facebook page urging friends near and far to take action against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Avelo Airlines. 


He has been fighting cancer for five years and has physical limitations that keep him from marching in large protests. He says that he would usually be out playing music and doing fun things, but since President Donald Trump was inaugurated Jan. 20, “We are in disastrous situations,” he says. 


Jo...

“It’s like turpentine, oil paints and canvas, it’s the smell that we all like and still here,” says Cindy Achepohl, the daughter-in-law of the late American artist Keith Anden Achepohl (1934-2018), as we walk into the art studio. Keith Achepohl moved from his three-story schoolhouse studio in Iowa to Eugene to be closer to his family for the last years of his life, working in this one-room studio in southwest Eugene.


Achepohl was a painter, multimedia visual artist and also an art collector w...

Marina Herrera mixes compost and soil to replant her tomatoes. The stems look as if they were strands of spaghetti noodles that could fall down anytime — Herrera had been growing them at her apartment, where the sun comes in only in the afternoon. They grew tall but with thin, light green stems.


“I hope they grow stronger with this sun,” Herrera says as she places the tomato branches to the new soil gently with her hands.


Gardening work is perfect when the sun clears out the sky, and the c...