In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where, Sisyphus-like, they are pressed into shoveling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village."The Face of Another"The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident–a man who has lost his face and, with it, his connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such a mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self–a self that is capable of anything. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity and the social contract, an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

    Among them arc the ancient Phoenix Hall of the Byodo-in, the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji, the mountain temples of Enryaku-ji, the lavishly decorated Nijo Castle of the Tokugawas, the Silver Pavilion and its remarkable garden, and the "all-time temple," Kiyomizu.The book falls into three parts. Part I is a narrative which devotes a chapter to each location and discusses its background, its place in history, and its noteworthy aspects, offering insights into its essence and bringing it alive for the reader. Taken as a whole, the narrative tells the story of Kyoto. Part II is a comprehensive guide to each of the sixteen sights, plus associated establishments. With this guide the visitor needs no further assistance to learn all that a place has to offer him. It is factual, concise, and complete. Part III, "Getting There and Back," provides complete information on the practical aspects of visiting each place, including public transportation routes.The book is generously illustrated with photographs, maps, route plans, and building plans, as well as a selection of reproductions from old prints and picture scrolls. Three appendices—a chart of Japanese art periods, a glossary, and a list of useful Japanese phrases—further enhance its value.

    A complex book with great substance. An introduction by Walter Gropius, one of the founders of the Bauhaus movement and pioneers of modern architecture, deems the importance of this book as a major contribution of bridging the gap between Western and Eastern approaches to architecture. The author in his preface writes of the alienation and "emotional indifference to the forms created by science and technique." Japanese residential architecture, as a result, holds "instructive comparisons." Mentioned were four important unique and successful ways the architecture served important needs: an "intimate emotional relationship;" aesthetic meaning as a "pure expression of necessity"; "humanization"; and, "established an accord between feeling and thinking." Following are an important introduction by the author. The table of contents is organized in four parts: Structure, Organism, Environment, and Aesthetics. Subsections include such things as: fabric, design, family, space, garden, philosophy, society, taste, order and expression. Illustrations, an epigram, a bibliography and index complete the description of the tome.

    Richard Sorge, whose cover was that of senior German journalist in Tokyo during Worl War II. Ozaki Hotsumi, the second-ranking member of the ring, was also a prominent journalist, a leading authority on China, and a consultant to the Konoye cabinet. When this book was first published in July 1964, the Soviet Union had never acknowledged the existence of Sorge. Two months later, perhaps in response to the book's publication, Sorge was acclaimed as one of the Soviet Union's most illustrious spies and was made a posthumous 'Hero of the Soviet Union'. In an extensive reprise prepared for this new edition, the author analyzes this development in depth, as well as much other significant information that has come to light since the book's original publication.

    Written by one of Japan's major women novelists, Nogami Yaeko (1885-1985), and set in the turbulent atmosphere of late-sixteenth-century Japan, Hideyoshi and Rikyu is a fictional account of the close and tense relations between the great warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his celebrated tea-master Sen no Rikyu.