About Japan

“Available recommendation signals cluster around About, Japan, Historical, Fiction, North lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his longmissing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is dr...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Romance, About, Japan, Fiction lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

“Available recommendation signals cluster around About, Japan, NonFiction, China, History lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for big-picture nonfiction and accessible learning. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's mi...

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are traine...

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers....

2016 Travel Book of the Year by the Society of American Travel WritersFinalist for the 2016 IACP Awards: Literary Food WritingNamed one of the Financial Times' "Best Books of 2016"An innovative new take on the travel guide, Rice, Noodle, Fish decodes Japan's extraordinary food culture through a mix of indepth narrative and insider advice, along wi...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around About, Japan, Historical, Fiction lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

With volcanic urgency, Kirino's story erupts onto the page with a searing heat, flowing like lava to a remarkable finish. Facing the daily burdens of slavish work conditions, stale marriages, and a society refusing to show them a proper respect, the women on the nightshift at a suburban Tokyo factory are all looking for one thing a way out. When...

Created specifically for fans of Japanese "cool culture," A Geek in Japan is one of the most iconic, hip, and concise cultural guides available. Reinvented for the internet age, it is packed with personal essays and hundreds of photographs and presents all the touchstones of traditional and contemporary culture in an entirely new way. A Geek in Jap...

A band of savage thirteenyearold boys reject the Adult, world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fa...

A riveting truelife tale of newspaper noir and Japanese organized crime from an American investigative journalist. Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where for twelve years he covered the dark side of Japan: extortion, murder, human trafficking, fiscal corr...

From 1632 until 1854, Japan's rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In her remarkable book, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns' city.An exploration ...

The multimillioncopy bestselling historical novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world.After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenthcentury Japan, a land where the ...

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the beach. Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteenyearold Japanese girl names Nao Yasutani. Rutha writer who finds the lunchboxsuspects tha...

The classic portrayal of court life in tenthcentury Japan Written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own amusement, The Pillow Book offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dom...

This is the true story, as told to the doctor who looked after him just before he died, of the life of one of the last traditional yakuza in Japan. It wasn't a "good" life, in either sense of the word, but it was an adventurous one; and the tale he has to tell presents an honest and oddly attractive picture of an insider in that separate, unofficia...

In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan.Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors?Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsud...

"No woman in the threehundredyear history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story. We have been constrained by unwritten rules not to do so, by the robes of tradition and by the sanctity of our exclusive calling...But I feel it is time to speak out."Celebrated as the most successful geisha of her generation, Mineko Iwasa...

Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeIn this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixtythreeyear reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness....

Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her a sensation in Japan and all over the world, and Kitchen, the dazzling Englishlanguage debut that is still her bestloved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of freespirited young women in cont...

"An enchanting and fascinating insight into Japanese landscape, culture, history and future. Originally written in Japanese, this passionate, vividly personal book draws on the author's experiences in Japan over thirty years. Alex Kerr brings to life the ritualized world of Kabuki, retraces his initiation into Tokyo's boardrooms during the heady Bu...

The Silent Cry follows two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested Western Japan. After decades of separation, the reunited men are each preoccupied by their own personal crises. One brother grapples with the recent suicide of his dearest friend, the birth of his disabled son, and his wife's increasing alcoholism....

The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo's real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another ... and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, ove...

"Arguably the greatest living travel writer" (Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its longterm residents. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, Iyer draws on his years of experiencehis travels, conversations, readings, and reflectionst...

This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priestqueens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two centuries in selfimposed seclusion.First revealed to Westerners in the chronicles of Marco Polo, Japan was a legendary faraway land defende...

A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, Fourth Edition, paints a richly nuanced and strikingly original portrait of the last two centuries of Japanese history. It takes students from the days of the shogunatethe feudal overlordship of the Tokugawa familythrough the modernizing revolution launched by midlevel samurai in th...

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath...

Tsukiko, thirtyeight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei" in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship, traced by Kawakami?s gentle hints at the changing seas...

To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic development, and the use...

Traveling to Japan has never been so much fun! Visit the land of anime, manga, cosplay, hot springs and sushi!This fullcolor graphic novel Japan guidebook is the first of its kind exploring Japanese culture from a cartoonist's perspective. Cool Japan Guide takes you on a fun tour from the highenergy urban streets of Tokyo to the peaceful Zen gard...

Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of uppermiddleclass Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a worldweary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.A classic...

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully ...

One of Japan's greatest classic murder mysteries, introducing their best loved detective, translated into English for the first time.In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worryi...

Completed in the early 11th century, The Tale of Genji is considered the supreme masterpiece of Japanese prose literature, and one of the world's earliest novels. A work of great length, it comprises six parts, the first part of which (also called The Tale of Genji) is reprinted here. The exact origins of this remarkable saga of the nobility of Hei...

From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth?Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation.? ?Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back . . . It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband,...

Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, Kazu?s life is tied by a series of coincidences to Japan?s Imperial family and to one particular spot in Tokyo; the park near Ueno Station ? the same place his unquiet spirit now haunts in death. It is here that Kazu?s life in Tokyo began, as a labourer in the run up to the 1964 Olympics, and...

?Generally regarded as Okinawa's most adventurous and promising writer of fiction today.??Michael S. Molasky, University of MinnesotaIn the Woods of Memory is a powerful, thoughtprovoking novel that focuses on two incidents during the Battle of Okinawa, 1945: the sexual assault on Sayoko, 17, by four US soldiers and her friend Seiji?s attempt at r...

Volume 1: To 1334 Volume 2: 13341615 Volume 3: 16151867...

In Bending Adversity, Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling presents a fresh vision of Japan, drawing on his own deep experience, as well as observations from a cross section of Japanese citizenry, including novelist Haruki Murakami, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, industrialists and bankers, activists and artists, teenagers and octoge...

DK Eyewitness travel guides: awardwinning guidebooksDiscover Japan with this essential travel guide, designed to help you create your own unique trip and to transport you to this fascinating country before you've even packed your case catch the buzz of futuristic Tokyo, step back in time in Kyoto, hike in mountainous Hokkaido or snorkel in Okina...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of ...

In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written in the "haibun" stylea linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho striving to discover a vision of eternity in the t...

It had never been done before. Not in 4000 years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. But, heady on sakura and sake, Will Ferguson bet he could do both. The resulting travelogue is one of the funniest and most illuminating b...

Japanese pubs, called izakaya, are attracting growing attention in Japan and overseas. As a matter of fact, a recent article in The New York Times claimed that the izakaya is starting to shove the sushi bar off its pedestal. While Japan has many guidebooks and cookbooks, this is the first publication in English to delve into every aspect of a uniqu...

In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family?and an entire society?sliding into ...

Gail Tsukiyama's The Street of a Thousand Blossoms is a powerfully moving masterpiece about tradition and change, loss and renewal, and love and family from a glorious storyteller at the height of her powers. It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy,...