Curious about death, three sixth-grade boys decide to spy on an old man waiting for him to die, but they end up becoming his friends.

    Kase is a garden designer hired by her husband to landscape their home. As the garden takes shape, Mizue wakens to a new sensuality and desire. A disturbing tale of seduction, based on Japanese aesthetics and the artistic pursuit of destructive beauty.

    Sentence patterns and important grammatical points are explained without using grammarian's terminology.Three prefaces discuss general features of Japanese, Japanese script, and pronunciation.

    Nineteenth-century Japanese novel concerned with man's loneliness in the modern world.