Summer is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story--from the point of view of her dead body--of the childrens' attempt to get away with murder. Black Fairy Tale is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, astonishingly what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous deceased owner.

    Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English.Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde.Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the hisotry of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.Tracing the contemporary tanka tradition from Yosana Tekkan in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century poetry of such writers as Taware Machi, Modern Japanese Tankselegantly conveys an authentic sense of Japanese lyric to a Western audience.

    The Genjokoan addresses in terse and poetic language many of the perennial concerns of Zen, focusing particularly on the relationship between practice and realization.

    The poems appear both in skillful English translation, as well as in the original Japanese.

    Abe was also active as a playwright and a director, and from 1969 to 1980 he headed his own theatre company, the Abe Studio. In those years he produced and directed many plays, including such seminal works as Fake Fish, The Ghost is Here and The Little Elephant is Dead. In addition to performing in Tokyo, Abe's troupe toured the United States and Europe, and his plays have been produced by companies around the world.

    Possession of this sacred regalia coud make a man Emperor of Japan. Now, yakuza kingpin Ryuichi Yugao acts to restore what his ancestors lost 600 years ago in a civil war - the throne of Japan. Hiring ex-SAS commando Hugh Scott to steal the regalia, Yugao triggers a chain of events that sends Japan spiralling into chaos. But to reach the regalia, Scott must first break into the most tightly-guarded palace in all of Asia. The Imperial Palace of Japan...

    They explore the theatrical experience from many perspectives--those of theatre, music, dance, art, literature, linguistics, philosophy, religion, history and sociology.

    Superbly written with an eye to detail and to the poignant and resonant moment, this poetic, highly charged narrative presents World War II from the Japanese point of view. Ultimately more than the history of an airplane--though the Zero is presented with the grandeur due it--this book is an extremely astute presentation of the Japanese character and world view.From a North American standpoint, Zero Fighter makes a number of highly interesting points, having been written for the Japanese market. For example, North Americans are generally not aware of the success of the Zero fighter or of its significance in Japanese minds. Both the superiority of the aircraft in the early stages of the Pacific War and the great stature of Jiro Horikoshi as an aircraft designer (he is to Japan what the designer of the Spitfire is to the U.K.) will come as a revelation to most readers here.Also completely unknown to most North American readers is the story of the transport section at the Nagoya Aircraft Works. This information is woven nicely into the book, and has a great deal to say about the startling quality of Japanese wartime industry: rigid in many ways, while producing a plane of brilliant originality. The book is a moving picture of the patience of the Japanese in the face of adversity, but perhaps most important, Zero Fighter>/i> is Japanese. It is not often that a Japanese book is encountered here that divulges intimate knowledge about such a fascinating subject. There is significant value in this as we enter an era in which the Japanese and American people must share and respect the other's cultural point of view.

    As a study of Japanese literature, it aims to define the state of Japanese literary studies in the field of women's writing and to point to directions for future research and inquiry. As a study of women's writing, it presents cross-cultural interpretations of Japanese material of relevance to contemporary work in gender studies and comparative literature. The essays demonstrate various critical approaches to the tradition of Japanese women's writing--from a consideration of theoretical issues of gendered writing in classical and modern literature to a consideration of the themes and styles of a number of important contemporary writers.