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.

    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.

    Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Natsume Soseki.Introduction: The Heritage --The Frustrated Years (1903-1907) --The Moment of Decision (1907-1908) --The First Trilogy (1908-1910) --The Second Trilogy (1910-1914) --Another Vista: Last Years (1915-1916) --Conclusion: An Assessment --Notes and References --Selected Bibliography --Index