This new English translation reveals it as one of Thailand's most entertaining and enduring modern novels, and one of the few portrayals of the immigrant Chinese experience in urban Thailand.Letters from Thailand is the story of Tan Suang U, a young man who leaves China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II, and ends up marrying, raising a family, and operating a successful business. The novel unfolds through his letters to his beloved mother in China.In Tan Suang U's lively account of his daily life in Bangkok's bustling Chinatown, larger and deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business in this strange new culture; his hopes for his family; his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture at the expense of the Chinese heritage which he holds dear; his inability to understand or adopt Thai ways; and his growing alienation from a society that is changing too fast for him.

    An epic portrait of Japan in crisis, it combines graphic military history and highly readable fiction to depict an aspiring nation modernizing at breakneck speed. Best-selling author Shiba Ryōtarō devoted an entire decade of his life to this extraordinary blockbuster, which features Japan's emerging onto the world stage by the early years of the twentieth century.Volume I describes the growth of Japan s fledgling Meiji state, a major "character" in the novel. We are also introduced to our three heroes, born into obscurity, the brothers Akiyama Yoshifuru and Akiyama Saneyuki, who will go on to play important roles in the Japanese Army and Navy, and the poet Masaoka Shiki, who will spend much of his short life trying to establish the haiku as a respected poetic form.Anyone curious as to how the "tiny, rising nation of Japan" was able to fight so fiercely for its survival should look no further. Clouds above the Hill is an exciting, human portrait of a modernizing nation that goes to war and thereby stakes its very existence on a desperate bid for glory in East Asia.

    Selected photographs and first-person reports on major events of the war as viewed by world leaders, correspondents, historians, etc.

    True story of a couple's quest to adopt a Vietnamese orphan and the hurdles, red-tape and health issues they encountered.

    It is inhabited by many different ethnic groups. Many of its Uralic, Altaic, and Paleosiberian peoples observe shamanistic practices even in modern times. Many classical ethnographic sources of 'shamanism' were recorded among Siberian peoples." (Quote from wikipedia.org)Table of Contents: Publisher's Preface; Shamanism ; The Shaman; A. The Shaman's Vocation.; B. The Shaman's Preparatory Period.; Types Of Shamans; The Accessories Of The Shaman; The Shaman In Action; Shamanism And Sex.; Gods, Spirits, Soul.; Some Ceremonies; EndnotesAbout the Publisher: Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, Esoteric and Mythology. www.forgottenbooks.orgForgotten Books is about sharing information, not about making money. All books are priced at wholesale prices. We are also the only publisher we know of to print in large sans-serif font, which is proven to make the text easier to read and put less strain on your eyes.

    It was in sixteenth-century Japan, as Shakespeare was writing his masterworks half a world away, that the spirit of Kabuki theater was born out of a single woman's passions and dedication to her art. In Kabuki Dancer, the popular Japanese novelist Sawako Ariyoshi (The Doctor's Wife, The River Ki, The Twilight Years) retells the story of Okuni, the legendary temple dancer who first performed among jugglers and freak shows on a stage along the riverbank in the heart of the imperial city of Kyoto. Blending the rhythms and movements of religious festivals with the words of popular love songs, she and her troupe became sensations. Their affairs and rivalries, infatuations and jealousies, were transformed into the very fabric of their performance, as it began its evolution into the classic drama of today. Against a backdrop of civil war, dynastic conflict, and social turmoil, Okuni and her companions and lovers, together with their audience of artisans, merchants, and aristocrats, struggled to survive the birth pangs of a glorious--yet sometimes deadly--new age. Based on fact, transmuted into powerful and moving artistic expression, Kabuki Dancer is at once a turbulent love story, a recreation of an exotic and colorful historical period, and an almost mythic representation of the miraculous moment in which an immortal art form appears.

    One can do anything or nothing. The instructors, who are not expected to instruct, occupy themselves in various ways. Q's room-mate, the crab-shaped theologian, preaches doom and destruction and indulges in a kind of self-flagellation; the literary man is writing an experimental novel which Q, who has never read a novel of any kind, finds shocking; a former electrical engineer has invented a game of pure probability which the instructors are compelled to play daily and which Q has a dread of winning, for the prize is the rector's wife.And then, there is something unusual about what they eat. As a secret member of the Sumiyakist Party, Q is on a mission to incite the inmates of the reformatory into revolution against their oppressors. But who are the oppressors? The overseer? Though he has a lot to say, he has no authority. The rector, so huge that his body seems ready to engulf the world? He spends his time eating, wallowing in a vast bath, or being shaved all over by his unsmiling nurse. Perhaps the one-eyed Doktor, who performs an "operation" on all newcomers?A revolution eventually takes place, but not as the Candide-like Q has planned, nor is the outcome of it what his sumiyakist doctrine had led him to expect. But then, nothing is quite what it seems in this unusual science fiction novel, in which conflicting philosophies and attitudes to life and death, freedom, equality, morality, literature, existence are held up against an eerie, dreamlike background. Fantasy, political satire, burlesque--the novel reflects a bizarre image of the human condition.

    These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry.The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.

    This literature is of the greatest interest and variety, and not excessively 'strange' to readers of European oral literature. It was produced by nomadic peoples with well-developed traditions of narrative heroic poetry. Dr Chadwick paraphrases and analyses the more important epics; and Professor Zhirmunsky adds a study on epic songs and their singers on the processes of oral transmission. This is a fascinating study that will be of particular interest to scholars of comparative literature and of the origins of literature generally; but it should also be read by anthropologists and scholars of folklore.