As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

    In her collection of brief poems, Tawara explores the fleeting emotions and momentary experiences that comprise modern life and love.

    Presents selections by nine leading women writers from Japan, spanning twenty-five years of change and emerging feminist consciousness in that country.

    The description for this book, The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of the Genji, will be forthcoming.

    Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work.The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns—political, social, and religious—are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another.Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition.The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.

    Yet true to the adage, curiosity gets the best of the kitten, and he decides to explore beyond the four walls of his home. When he’s inadvertently whisked into the back of a cargo truck and lands in Tokyo, he befriends Ippai Attena, a seasoned street cat who possesses a crucial and unusual skill that will help him find his way home: the ability to read the human language.

    Set in Vietnam, in the South China Sea, and in the cities and mountains of Japan, the stories introduce a variety of fascinating, obsessive characters strangely different yet immediately familiar. Kaiko is a sensual writer, capturing the smell, taste, sound, and touch of all he describes.

    Asian Studies. Translated by 15 leading scholars and poets. Ooka and Fitzsimmons present a vivid sample of the works of eight of the foremost contemporary Japanese poets born between 1919 and 1939. An invaluable introduction for students and scholars with clear, incisive introductions to each selection. Includes Yoshioka Minoru, Tamura Ryuichi, Iijima Koichi, TadaChimako, Ooka Makoto, Tanikawa Shuntaro, Shiraishi Kazuko and Yoshimasu Gozo, plus a renga sequence by Ooka and Fitzsimmons.