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Learn about Japanese culture while improving your language skills! Japanese Folktales for Language Learners introduces 22 traditional Japanese folktales in bilingual Japanese and English versions, along with detailed notes and exercises aimed at beginners. The book can be used as a reader by Japanese students or by any folktale-lover wishing to learn about Japanese culture. This elegantly illustrated volume is designed to help language learners expand their vocabulary and grammar. The storie...

"Written with precise skill and beautifully controlled power. The translation by Ivan Morris is outstanding." --The New York Times **Winner of the 1952 Yomiuri Prize** This haunting novel explores the complete degradation and isolation of a man by war. Fires on the Plain is set on the island of Leyte in the Philippines during World War II, where the Japanese army is disintegrating under the hammer blows of the American landings. Within this broader disintegration is another, that of a single h...

Alluring, nurturing, dangerous, and vulnerable the yamamba, or Japanese mountain witch, has intrigued audiences for centuries. What is it about the fusion of mountains with the solitary old woman that produces such an enigmatic figure? And why does she still call to us in this modern, scientific era? Co-editors Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich first met the yamamba in the powerful short story "The Smile of the Mountain Witch" by acclaimed woman writer Oba Minako. The story revealed the com...

Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds is a collection of twenty-five medieval Japanese tales of border crossings and the fantastic, featuring demons, samurai, talking animals, amorous plants, and journeys to supernatural realms. The most comprehensive compendium of short medieval Japanese fiction in English, Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds illuminates a rich world of literary, Buddhist, and visual culture largely unknown today outside of Japan. These stories, called otogizōshi, or Muromachi t...

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ogimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu's reti...

Japan's oldest surviving narrative, the eighth-century Kojiki, chronicles the mythical origins of its islands and their ruling dynasty through a diverse array of genealogies, tales, and songs that have helped to shape the modern nation's views of its ancient past. Gustav Heldt's engaging new translation of this revered classic aims to make the Kojiki accessible to contemporary readers while staying true to the distinctively dramatic and evocative appeal of the original's language. It conveys the...

Haruo Shirane and Burton Watson, renowned translators and scholars, introduce English-speaking readers to the vivid tradition of early and medieval Japanese folktales. Taken from seven major anthologies of anecdotal ( setsuwa) literature compiled between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, these dramatic and often amusing stories offer a major view of the foundations of Japanese culture. Out of thousands of setsuwa, Shirane has selected thirty-eight of the most powerful and influential tales,...

Ise monogatari is one of classical Japan's most important texts. It influenced other literary court romances like The Tale of Genji and inspired artists, playwrights, and poets throughout Japanese history and to the present day. In a series of 125 loosely connected episodes, the Ise tells the story of a famous lover, Captain Ariwara no Narihira (825-880), and his romantic encounters with women throughout Japan. Each episode centers on an exchange of love poems designed to demonstrate wit, sens...

In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote the world's first novel. But The Tale of Genji is no mere artifact. It is, rather, a lively and astonishingly nuanced portrait of a refined society where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, a play of characters whose inner lives are as rich and changeable as those imagined by Proust. Chief of these is "the shining Genji," the son of the emperor and a man whose passionate impulses create great turm...