Born and raised in the now-extinct Shitmachi district of Asakusa, a neighbourhood brimming with Kabuki theatres and geisha, Sadako Sawamura tells of her rise to icon status, including her account of serving a jail sentence for her pro-communist sympathies.
Daughter of the Samurai (Modern Library Torchbearers)
by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics. An Ill-Considered Jest, the first part of Hakkenden, tells the story of the Satomi clan patriarch Yoshizane and his daughter Princess Fuse. An ill-advised comment forces Yoshizane to betroth his daughter to the family dog,...
"The travel writings of Matsuo Basho are of enormous literary importance, and so it is a joy to see them collected in this compact volume, in translations of exemplary elegance, faithfulness, and accessibility. The annotations are especially valuable: they show a solid grasp of the author's life, work, and times, and provide rich and detailed background information about allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics. Along with the high quality of the translations themselves, this thorough commenta...
Spanning 60 years of 20th century Japanese literature, this anthology covers Japan's growth from a more traditional country into a distinctly modern one. Most of these stories had not been previously translated into English, opening up a vast new literary canon to Western readers. Award-winning translation Lane Dunlop introduces a cast of characters that stray beyond stereotypical images of bowing geisha and dark-suited businessmen. The 14 stories include: The Fox by Nagai Kafu Flash Storm by...
Toddler coloring books ages 1-3 travel
by Coloring Book Activity Joyful
Darkness in Summer (Tuttle Classics) (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature)
by Takeshi Kaiko
"This intensely modern novel … provides vivid insights into the alienated condition of a certain type of Japanese whom we may so often glimpse in the streets of Rome or New York—intelligent, perceptive, and desperately lost between two worlds."—Ivan Morris, author of The Nobility of Failure. The original publication of Darkness in Summer marked the first serious work of Japanese fiction to focus on the Japanese experience in the West. A man and a woman, separated for ten years, meet a...
Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for wor...
Revered as one of the great literary classics of Japan, The Tales of Ise is an anonymous tenth-century collection of Japanese poems and prose. First published in 1608 as Ise-monogatari, the work is a product of court life in which the romantic assignations, intrigues, and social standards of aristocratic society in ancient Japan are vividly revealed. Each of the 125 episodes in the book consists of a story plus poetry in the uta form (five lines totalling thirty-one syllables).
Though banned shortly after its publication in 1909, VITA SEXUALIS is far more than a prurient erotic novel. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, wrestles with issues of sexual desire, sex education, and the proper place of sensuality. His story explores his own journey into sexual awareness. Yet, beyond being a poignant account of one boy's coming of age, VITA SEXUALIS is also an important record of Japan's moral struggles during the cultural upheaval of the last years of the Meiji era.
The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where doe...
No other Asian poetic form has so intrigued and beguiled the English-speaking world as the Japanese haiku. Even before World War I such imagist poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were experimenting with the form. At that time, Pound well described the haiku as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Indeed, it is the haiku's sense of immediacy and its precision that continue to appeal to poets and poetry lovers today. In recent decades there has b...
The preeminent Western authority on Japanese literature a presents a collection of personal essays and literary vignettes that offers a fresh and personal insight into his prolific career as a writer and translator, traveler and social observer.
"As an anthologist, Ellery Queen is without peer, his taste unequalled. As a bibliographer and a collector of the detective short story, Queen is, again, a historical personage. Indeed, Ellery Queen clearly is, after Poe, the most important American in mystery fiction." - Otto Penzler, from Detectionary: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Characters in Mystery Fiction The 12 stories in this book will lead you through dramatic twists and unexpected turns-a newspaper receives a letter from a ma...
A novel based on Zen mythology, this story is told with humour and irony, in the tradition of realistic Zen mysticism. It is the tale of Ronin, a masterless 12th-century samurai knight, who slashes his way up from the gutter to a position of wealth, honour, and status.
This collection of contemporary multi-cultural fiction includes stories by: Bessie Head * Charles Mungoshi * Ngugi wa Thiong'o * Wang Anyi * Ding Ling * Wang Meng * Chen Rong * Lu Wenfu * Anita Desai * Mahasweta Devi * Ruth Prawer Jhabvala * R. K. Narayan * Khushwant Singh * Kobo Abe * Sawako Ariyoshi * Yasunari Kawabata * Yukio Mishima * Yuko Tsushima * Carlos Fuentes * Luisa Valenzuela * Nadine Gordimer * Isabel Allende
The first part of this work chronicles Hearn's early years in Japan when he wrote primarily about the appearance of his new home. The second part records the author's later years when he came to terms with the Japanese themselves and includes some striking descriptions of 19th-century Japan.
